DOGE did not find $2T in fraud, but that doesn’t matter, Musk allies say
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The true purpose was always to take the power of the purse away from congress and give it to Trump. The constitution grants congress the power to decide what to tax and the power to decide what to spend on. Trump wants that power for himself.
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Yeah, that's the thing that bothers me about focusing this whole conversation around "how much did it actually generate in cost savings/cuts".
By letting ourselves get sucked into any side of the narrative that Elon is spinning, we avoid talking about the uncomfortable reality of what we allowed this person to cut without any real consequence: the lives of innocent children.
I hope we can find a legal mechanism to make him answer for this some day, but I am not hopeful about it.
If he killed innocent children to serve his own ends, or he did it out of pure atavistic ennui.. I'm not sure the motivation is so much worse then the act.
I would love to see an ars article that focuses on this fact instead of leading us all into Elon's narrative, regardless of which angle we take on the narrative.
More documentation:
https://www.science.org/content/art...epal-s-malnourished-children-are-paying-price
https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-food-program-starvation-children-deaths
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And the first two things to cut are:
1) Welfare for corporations
2) Welfare for billionaires
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I get where this response is coming from, but it always feels like pathetic cope. Especially when the people you say this about idolize monsters like Hitler. Musk has openly been a piece of shit his whole public life, but it took him turning twitter into 4chan for people to stop praising him for making flying dicks and shitty cars.
Who gives a fuck about history when they are actively killing people now? Like, what fucking good is it to say “people will think we are wrong”. Great, telling that to the people hurt, those whose lives are ruined, and those who will die in the future from preventable diseases spreading out of control.
Tldr: quit saying this shit because you are minimizing the suffering being inflicted
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find proof of them finding one fucking cent of fraud. I fucking dare you
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"DOGE did not find $2T in fraud, but that doesn’t matter, Musk allies say" Cultists always exhibit a rather high skill level in being able to rationalize their terminal wrongness, while simultaneously showing the opposite in their ability to reason in a logical manner. Two MAGA were interviewed by Jordan Klepper, who insisted that the January 6th insurrection was caused by left leaning democrats and "Antifa" dressed up like, and pretending to be, MAGA. When asked why the "leftward" democrats and "Antifa" wanted to stop the certification of their own candidate, both were clearly stunned for a few seconds, since they had never even considered that obvious question. Then they "recovered" by claiming that the left always wants to just cause problems. It currently remains impossible to fix that level of stupid.
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Their goal posts are ALWAYS mounted on roller skates. It save a lot of their time and effort.
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At least they all know that Ars isn't an acronym. But welcome to Ars, you have certainly seen the decline in your month here and using goofy terms like "TDS" will definitely not have people write you off as some unserious doofus.
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Actually, many of them are at least aware of that publication, but they approve of the solution!
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Of course, they never "get it". And they will never be able to connect the dots, even if you were to number them.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVPdyYeaQU
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Every time I see his bulbous cube of a head, an image comes into my mind of a baseball bat.
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Just ignore the fact that everything Maduro is being accused of doing by the Trump administration (regardless of what proportion is true), Trump and his cronies are LITERALLY doing all the same things and worse. And if that was sufficient justification to launch military strikes against Venezuela and its citizens, surely that's sufficient reason for the US Military to invade Florida to bomb Magalardo before demolishing Trump's Whitetrashouse...preferably with him trapped inside it.
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I am sure there is tons of fraud but the way they were "looking for it" was also a fraud. fraud is detective work done by the IRS agents every day, Fraud is technical work done by professionals at the FBI. It was a fraud to think you could run a search query and the fraud would just fall in your lap.
We need real professionals with meaningful budgets investigating fraud and corruption at all levels and not just some frat boys, Maga creeps with agendas, and a billionaire with a chain saw putting on a freak show.
We need real professionals with meaningful budgets investigating fraud and corruption at all levels and not just some frat boys, Maga creeps with agendas, and a billionaire with a chain saw putting on a freak show.
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Well, it WAS those things before the firings at those agencies.
But when that happens they find fraud being committed by Trump's charities, businesses, and political campaigns!
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There is no mass weapons in Iraq, but who cares ? USA had a "higher goal" (to fuck everyone and takes oil)
see ? nothing change. You are still WHO YOU ARE !
see ? nothing change. You are still WHO YOU ARE !
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One hilarious bit from this is that DOGE cut the DOJ's $4 million / yr for Adobe Acrobat Pro. Which you need to do redactions properly if you're just a paper pusher. And this is why the released Epstein Files were so quickly and trivially un-redacted. The text was still there, just had a black bar drawn over it.
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"Now, the federal government can operate more like a company, Musk’s allies said."
GREAT !
So BIG CEO can be dele..fired if the stakeholders are not satisfied ? at any time !
UE and China can create a private fund to do a HOSTILE PURCHASE of USA and sell its useless assets to whoever and keep the profitable part ?
I guess not...
"government as a company", it's the talk of TRAITORS and THIEFS !
GREAT !
So BIG CEO can be dele..fired if the stakeholders are not satisfied ? at any time !
UE and China can create a private fund to do a HOSTILE PURCHASE of USA and sell its useless assets to whoever and keep the profitable part ?
I guess not...
"government as a company", it's the talk of TRAITORS and THIEFS !
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See, it's quotes like that, which make me firmly think that the CATO institute are a bunch of damn fools.
"We actually increased the federal budget substantially but thank God we fired a bunch of people who were providing useful services to the citizens, residents, and businesses, and State and Local governments, of the United States of America!!!"
Meanwhile, for every person Trump and DOGE fired, they are hiring or trying to hire a bunch of other people. It's almost like it has nothing to do with how many people are employed by the Federal Govt, but instead what they are doing.
Because CATO doesn't seem to care about all the ICE and CBP thugs that Trump is hiring?
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Well, Trump is going to make sure the military aren't loitering on bases, when he starts using them to annex nations with resources he wants, like Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada. . .
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“I am become meme,” he said once, with neither irony nor self-awareness
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As an Australian, I can't say that Musk and DOGE didn't do any good. Over here we had an election earlier this year, when DOGE was at peak activity. The leader of the more right-wing major party (as with the US, our major parties are both right-wing to some degree) was all gung-ho about the amazing job that DOGE was doing and how we should do the same thing in Australia.
His party... didn't do well. He didn't do well either. His electorate voted him out in a landslide.
So some good came of the whole tragic farce. Sorry that it didn't work out all that well for the US and Africans though. That part is a shame.
His party... didn't do well. He didn't do well either. His electorate voted him out in a landslide.
So some good came of the whole tragic farce. Sorry that it didn't work out all that well for the US and Africans though. That part is a shame.
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I'm surprised that no one has yet modified the WWI recruitment poster "Destroy this mad brute" using Trump's and Musk's faces.
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Of course the Cato Institute considers DOGE to be an unqualified success. The Cato Institute's entire purpose is to push for the abolition of government. Government is big enough to restrict the freedom of the ultra-rich to do as they desire, which the ultra-rich consider to be an unconscionable burden.
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Or that he had a personal grudge against, like USAID and USIP
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Defense does not get trillions per year. Its not even a trillion (840 billion for 2024)
Not to say that wiser defense spending would not be a good idea. But at this point defense is the #4 cost for the federal government. #1 is Social Security, #2 is paying interest on the national debt and #3 is Medicare.
The amount of money that actually goes to Federal employees (DOD included) is a drop in the bucket compared to the money that flows out for payment to citizens in the form of benefits.
At this point neither political side of the isle is actually doing anything about this problem. Actually trying to fix the problem would be political suicide because it means either raising taxes significantly (while keeping spending flat) or cutting benefits significantly while keeping taxes flat.
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You have to raise taxes and cut benefits at this point, The boomers mortgaged their kids' futures and we are going to pay. Best thing we can do at this point it inheritance taxes so they pay their own debt back and needs requirements for SS so they don't just spend it on casinos and vacations.
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in whatever little fairness musk is due for the doge disaster, he used the wrong term and went after the wrong targets.
it's waste, not fraud. if it was fraud there would be indictments and there aren't any.
we all know there's massive waste in the federal budget and he's railed against it for years. sls is pure waste. oil & gas subsidies are pure waste. defense department...considering how the war in ukraine is reshaping warfare there's now even more massive waste than there was before. if he'd gone after those, we might see doge in a different light, but the howls of "self interest!" would have been even more deafening.
instead he went after the project 2025 whipping boys & massive failure across the board.
it's waste, not fraud. if it was fraud there would be indictments and there aren't any.
we all know there's massive waste in the federal budget and he's railed against it for years. sls is pure waste. oil & gas subsidies are pure waste. defense department...considering how the war in ukraine is reshaping warfare there's now even more massive waste than there was before. if he'd gone after those, we might see doge in a different light, but the howls of "self interest!" would have been even more deafening.
instead he went after the project 2025 whipping boys & massive failure across the board.
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Oh, come on! There was great political theater to be had, and at the expense of others!!!
That's got to be worth something in MAGA land.
That's got to be worth something in MAGA land.
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You really don't. The historic norm for federal spending is 20% of GDP. Putting taxes back and normal historic rates and making common sense increases to payroll tax max cutoffs would stop the bleeding and inflation would take care of the rest over time.
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