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DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…
> you could also expect better tech/productivity A lot of government service does not scale that way. When a veteran needs help getting groceries, or getting to the VA, or has to go into long-term care, for example, there isn't technology to scale up a human being helping them with the groceries, or the transportation, or the nursing. The government mostly serves human beings and the options for scaling that problem…
There kind of is though. There are now grocery delivery services that amortize the cost of the trip by delivering groceries to multiple people, and self-driving cars.
Moreover, a major role of the government is record keeping, which computers have made dramatically more efficient. Many of those roles have in fact been replaced in the government, with the savings being reallocated to new spending rather than returned to the public. And many of them haven't been but could be; take any instance of something that could reasonably be done via a government website only the website doesn't support it or is broken so instead the government is still paying a large staff to do it manually.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison.…
You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk…
100%
And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”. I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired. I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more success…
absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.
Those sound like contractors, so a private company that's failing here? Or am I misreading?
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?
Next year, the highest federal tax rate will be around 40%. The highest state income tax is 13%. I guess if you factor in sales tax, and various soft taxes, you could get pretty close, but yeah. Seems exaggerated.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you could also expect better tech/productivity A lot of government service does not scale that way. When a veteran needs help getting groceries, or getting to the VA, or has to go into long-term care, for example, there isn't technology to scale up a human being helping them with the groceries, or the transportation, or the nursing. The government mostly serves human beings and the options for scaling that problem…
There kind of is though. There are now grocery delivery services that amortize the cost of the trip by delivering groceries to multiple people, and self-driving cars. Moreover, a major role of the government is record keeping, which computers have made dramatically more efficient. Many of those roles have in fact been replaced in the government, with the savings being reallocated to new spending rather than returned…
Self-driving cars aren't nearly ready to solve this problem.
Besides the fact that they don't work yet (source: I'm working on it ;), a self-driving car can't bring the food to the door because the veteran is in a wheelchair. It can't knock on the door, have short chat, ask about the wife (who is deceased five years), and when necessary... Call elder care services when the veteran says he just talked to her yesterday.
None of this is part of the formal job description; it's the stuff that keeps real human beings from "falling through the holes" of the social safety net.
There's a lot of the web of government support of people that doesn't scale because the human-to-human contact is part of the point.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big co…
> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. Provide proof of this claim please.
GAO, OMB, CBO, GSA, OIGs (civil agency-specific, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG)
People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…
>> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? > Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. Over time it _can't_ scale linearl…
> Don't forget, a percentage of that GDP increase is just inflation.
By design, GDP measurements are adjusted for inflation, unless you're looking at 'nominal GDP' (which nobody does because it's pointless).
> Most people, as they get richer, want to have services increase, as they can afford to pay more
This makes sense. But I'm not sure how many people believe that they're getting what they pay for, esp when it's not actually paid for, but financed
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> given partisan polarization… Democrats do a lot of things deeply wrong, but they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts. Republicans pay a lot of lip service to veterans but actual GOP legislation in favor of them is sparse at best
> they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts It's not about being punitive. It's about finding resources to deliver goodies to your voters. Democrats have plenty of spending priorities. They're also, at least now, cognisant of the electoral impact of inflation. That means no more trillion-dollar deficit packages, but finding places to cut. Republicans have the poor.…
R's are much more likely to cut veteran benefits/services and the VA. Some of that is happening now through DOGE, in fact. I don't see this as a likely path for the D's at all.
I think they have plenty of appetite to tax the wealthy and corpos... and we're possibly seeing the first stirrings of a new populist backlash to the billionaire bros. If D's can ride that wave back to power, they'll have a mandate to stick it to the uber rich.
B/c honestly, Musk, Theil, Adreessen, et al, through their recent actions, are making the argument that billionaires shouldn't exist much more effectively than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ever could.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#630Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's company modus operandi. Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses. He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will realize that the 5000$ DOGE…
> but if you look under the hood .. there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses. There are many valid criticisms of Musk. Saying that he has not added any real value in his ventures, or that he doesn't really know how to make money, just destroys your credibility.
How so ?
Which company is making money ? Especially if you exclude government subsides and contracts ?
Tesla lost tons of money, and only recently (and probably for a very brief period of time) was profitable - mostly from various government subsides and help (through carbon credits, IRA for Tesla buyers etc). SpaceX so far did not make any profit (or more specifically they said they achieved profitability last year, but you would need to trust Musk with his word on that...) and is 90% dependent on government contracts. Twitter is a money furnace, so is Neuralink, Boring Company and xAI.
I didn't say he did not add 'real value'. Obviously these companies would not exist without him. I'm just saying that profitability wise, so far (and it's been a long time for most of them) they are not or barely profitable.