Tag: Elon Musk

We’re all living inside Elon Musk’s misinformation machine now

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year.”

https://www.vox.com/technology/383336/trump-election-elon-musk-misinformation

Elon Musk assures voters that Trump’s victory would deliver “temporary hardship”

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Were Trump to implement Musk’s vision while simultaneously honoring his promise to avoid cutting entitlements and the GOP’s commitment to avoiding defense spending cuts, then he would need to slash all other government programs by 80 percent. That would involve gutting all social services for low-income Americans, food inspections, air safety, health insurance subsidies, and infrastructure investments, among countless other things.
This would abruptly and massively reduce demand in the US economy, potentially triggering a recession.

There is little reason to expect such severe and haphazard spending cuts to benefit the economy in the long term. After all, government investments in education and infrastructure often increase the economy’s growth potential — slashing funding for such programs could impair America’s economic performance in the coming decades.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/381637/elon-musk-donald-trump-2024-election-temporary-hardship

DOGE Can Succeed by Scaling Back Its Ambitions

Posted on by Lone Candle

“is DOGE doomed to fail? Not if its architects take a more realistic approach to cutting government. Fundamental reform of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will require delicate, bipartisan negotiations that are already taking place within parts of Congress. Senate Democrats will not back down from filibustering a partisan GOP Social Security plan just because Musk and Ramaswamy recommended it in a report. Nor will Congress suddenly drop its longstanding opposition to eliminating entire federal departments.

Republicans need to stop overpromising and underdelivering on federal budget policy. Congressional Republicans unrealistically promise to balance the budget within a decade while not even attempting to pass any actual legislation slowing the growth of spending. Musk promises to zero out one-third of federal spending, and Ramaswamy pledges to fire three-quarters of federal employees. It’s all bluster to compensate for ultimately doing nothing.”

https://reason.com/2024/11/21/doge-can-succeed-by-scaling-back-its-ambitions/

To Succeed at Cutting Government, Musk and Ramaswamy Must Take on Entitlements

Posted on by Lone Candle

“First, it’s not as if there is some secret knowledge to be uncovered by the DOGE when it comes to fixing the rampant inefficiencies of the federal government. Those Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are documented annually, for example. The Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general file regular reports. The Congressional Budget Office maintains a list of things that could be cut to reduce the deficit. Various members of Congress—most prominently, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.)—periodically publish lists of silly, wasteful, or dubious government spending.
What’s lacking, in short, is not ideas but the political will to act on them.

The amount of political will is going to matter, because that is very relevant to the second point: Unless Trump is willing to set aside his promise not to touch America’s entitlement programs, the DOGE will be unable to follow through on its mandate.

Again, look at those improper payments made by Medicare and Medicaid. The $101.4 billion of improper payments the two entitlements made in 2023 accounted for 40 percent of all improper payments across the entire government that year, according to the GAO. That same GAO report suggested a simple change in how Medicaid bills some of its services that, if implemented, could save $141 billion over 10 years.”

…

“The same problem pops up when you start looking at other big swings that the DOGE could take. Seven of the top nine suggestions made by the Congressional Budget Office’s annual report on “options for reducing the deficit” involve changing elements of America’s three federal entitlement programs. Capping Medicaid spending, increasing premiums for Medicare Part B, or reconfiguring how Social Security benefits are paid to wealthier Americans each could save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. None will be possible as long as entitlement reform is off the table.

All of this is a function of the federal government’s fiscal reality: Entitlements are the biggest and fastest-growing segment of the budget. This year, so-called “mandatory spending”—primarily Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other government-funded health care programs—will cost nearly $4 trillion, while all discretionary spending will total less than $1.8 trillion.

Musk has promised $2 trillion in spending cuts, but he could propose eliminating all discretionary spending—good luck zeroing out the Pentagon—and would still fall short of that goal. It is impossible to be serious about fiscal reform while promising not to touch the entitlement programs.”

https://reason.com/2024/11/13/to-succeed-at-cutting-government-musk-and-ramaswamy-must-take-on-entitlements/

Elon Musk’s nonsensical lies about immigrant voting, briefly explained

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Unauthorized immigrants aren’t broadly eligible for naturalization — and have few paths to citizenship. To qualify for naturalization, someone generally has to have been a lawful permanent resident for five years, married to a US citizen and a lawful permanent resident for three years, or a member of the military.
Additionally, the US is approving citizenship applications at its swiftest pace in years, but it’s not because regulators are trying to skew the election in Democrats’ favor. The government is doing so because there was already a backlog that got worse during the pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reports. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is effectively doing catch-up.

The US naturalized 878,500 people in 2023 and is now processing applications in roughly 4.9 months – a pace that’s comparable to how quickly the government was approving applications in 2013. According to the New York Times, processing time for naturalization applications spiked during the Trump administration as the White House sought to reduce legal and unauthorized immigration.

These new citizens also aren’t guaranteed Democratic voters. Polling has indicated that naturalized citizens lean Democrat, but both parties are likely to pick up some new voters as people undergo this process. According to a survey from the National Partnership for New Americans, 54 percent of naturalized citizens said they’d vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, while 38 percent said they’d back former President Donald Trump.

It’s worth reiterating that naturalized citizens aren’t unauthorized immigrants, and that the bulk of them — roughly 83 percent, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — have been lawful permanent residents for five years. Unauthorized immigrants have limited pathways to citizenship, and many aren’t eligible for naturalization.”

…

“This Republican talking point appears to refer to a “parole” program the Biden administration has approved for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans amid instability in their home countries. Under the program, people can temporarily enter the US for two years, pay for their own travel, and fly into the country. There is no evidence that people are being flown specifically to swing states, and as a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesperson told Vox, DHS does not choose the airports that parolees fly into, and it also doesn’t control or choose where parolees settle down.

Additionally, parolees do not have a path to citizenship and as a result would be unable to vote in future elections.

As legal immigrants, asylum seekers do have a path to citizenship; according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), 3.3 percent of those naturalized in 2023 came to the US as asylum seekers — roughly 29,000 people. While that might be enough to swing a state as close as Georgia was in 2020, it’s not enough to affect the outcomes in all the states Musk listed, even if Democrats were flying people there. Which, again, they aren’t.

In addition, most naturalized citizens have settled in states that are not swing states, with California, Texas, Florida, New York, and New Jersey topping the list, per USCIS.”

…

“It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and noncitizens have very rarely been found to be illegally voting. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit that focuses on voting rights, election officials responsible for the counting of nearly 23.5 million votes in 2016 identified just 30 possible cases of noncitizen voting for investigation.

Noncitizens are able to vote in some local elections for positions like City Council and school board in some jurisdictions in Vermont and California, but they aren’t able to vote anywhere in federal elections.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/375253/elon-musks-nonsensical-lies-about-immigrant-voting-briefly-explained

The banality of Elon

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Musk’s claim that the undocumented population in swing states is surging, sourced to unspecified “government data,” appears false: Data from both Homeland Security and Pew Research Center debunks Musk’s claim of a Biden-era surge in undocumented immigrants to swing states. (In a few swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, whereas in others, they’ve increased slightly or been stagnant.) Migrants aren’t being “put” in those states by anyone, let alone Democrats — that’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor is there any evidence Harris has a viable plan to grant them all citizenship in four years or proof they’d all vote for Democrats forever once given the franchise.
Really, what Musk is doing is taking a hoary old white nationalist trope — the “Great Replacement” mainstreamed by X’s most prominent talk show host, Tucker Carlson — and reiterating it with dubious swing-state demographic data.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/379185/elon-musk-trump-pennsylvania-ideas-boring

Elon Musk says he’s giving away $1 million a day to voters. Is that legal?

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The program works like this: Registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin — all swing states that could go for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump come Election Day — can sign the petition, which claims to be a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” until Monday, October 21, which happens to be the voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania.

The petition is being circulated by Musk’s America PAC, which has taken over much of Trump’s ground operation in key swing states. Musk has made Pennsylvania a particular focus of his personal outreach, hosting events there, including one on Sunday where he handed a woman in a Trump-Vance shirt a giant $1 million check.

Though the petition does not require signers to be registered Republicans, the focus on the First and Second Amendments does seem to appeal to potential Trump voters who fear Democrats will take away their gun rights and who subscribe to Musk’s idea of “free speech.” The net effect, then, is that Musk is promising $1 million a day to a program aimed at getting pro-Trump voters registered in swing states.

Because his contest is only open to registered voters, there may be a case for it to be understood as an illegal financial incentive to get people to register to vote, as Public Citizen’s complaint alleges. One issue Musk faces, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, is that what constitutes payment for voting-related activity has been broadly interpreted in the past.

“This could involve anything of value,” Becker said. The law “has been applied to things like Ben & Jerry’s offering everyone who has an ‘I Voted’ sticker an ice cream cone on Election Day. They received a cease-and-desist letter and changed [the promotion to give] everyone a free ice cream cone on Election Day.”

There is some ambiguity in Musk’s promotion, compared to what Ben & Jerry’s offered, however. The uncertainty arises from the fact that Musk’s PAC is asking people to sign a petition for the chance to win $1 million, not explicitly rewarding them for registering to vote.

Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, told Vox that the issue at hand really comes down to whether entering a specific group of people in a lottery if they sign a petition counts as paying people to register to vote.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/378912/musk-trump-voting-contest-million-dollars-swing-state-lottery-pennsylvania