Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it’s the president’s job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it’s the president’s job to spend.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/03/what-if-the-president-doesnt-want-to-spend-money/
“President Donald Trump stood before a joint session of Congress less than six weeks ago and vowed to do something that has not been done in nearly a quarter century: balance the federal budget.
New numbers from the Treasury and recent developments in Congress suggest that’s not going to happen. Indeed, all indications are pointing in the opposite direction.
The federal government borrowed $1.3 trillion during the first six months of the current fiscal year, the Treasury Department reported last week. That’s the second-highest six-month total in history, bested only by the record set in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/14/feds-borrowed-1-3-trillion-in-the-first-6-months-of-this-fiscal-year/
Examples and studies show that sometimes firing lots of government workers actually makes the government less efficient because those agencies and departments are understaffed. DOGE is firing any workers it can, not searching for actually unnecessary or bad workers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MycHGpcybB8
“Social Security is the biggest federal expense. The next priciest items are other entitlements including Medicare and Medicaid, and Americans want to spend more on them, too. Defense is next, and while there’s room for cutting there, it’s nowhere near enough to close the deficit and save Social Security.
Some politicians claim that we can grow our economy enough to make up for Social Security’s shortfalls. But that won’t work. “Because Social Security benefits are indexed to wage growth, as wages increase, so do benefits,” explains the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett. “Therefore, while higher wage growth boosts revenues, it simultaneously raises the future benefits owed to retirees.”
Complicating the issue, add Boccia and Lett, is that “improvements in life expectancy and a declining birth rate mean that a shrinking group of workers is supporting an increasing number of retirees even if macroeconomic conditions are sound.”
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Boccia also points out that retirees over the age of 65 have on average triple the net worth of workers between the ages of 35–44. It’s perverse to tax hard-working younger Americans for the benefit of wealthier older ones. She suggests that “Congress should means-test Social Security, returning to the program’s stated purpose of antipoverty protection in old age.”
Some more savings could be found by linking cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits to the chained CPI, which is more accurate than other measures in reflecting how consumers respond to changing prices.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/03/doge-and-congress-should-look-hard-at-reforming-social-security/
“Maintaining current productivity rates would bring a continuation of the 2 percent economic growth rates that have prevailed over the past 25 years. As explained in the next section, pushing sustained economic growth rates up to 3 percent—which is a much greater jump than it may seem—would require nearly doubling long-term productivity growth rates. Nevertheless, such bold assumptions have long been a staple of GOP budgets. Major Republican tax cuts in 1981, 2001, and 2017 were each accompanied by assurances of colossal economic booms that would bring enough tax revenue to pay for the policies.”
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“In reality, these politician promises of aggressively accelerated economic growth are a lazy, longstanding gimmick meant to avoid the hard choices of restraining deficits and paying for their expensive proposals. They are based on little more than politicians’ wishful thinking and over-exuberant faith in the brilliance of their own policy agendas.
No magical economic growth lever exists in Congress or the White House. Economists can analyze which economic systems produce long-term prosperity, including whether or not certain policies are generally pro-growth. However, short- and medium-term economic growth rarely behaves according to forecasting models.”
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“There is little economic basis to expect permanent, sustained 3 percent growth rates to result from extending the 2017 tax cuts, repealing taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits, providing some regulatory relief, and imposing steep tariffs. Sure, policymakers should aspire to such growth, yet basing the federal budget on that assumption is reckless.”
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“Perhaps my economic analysis is too pessimistic. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine a world where Trump’s economic policies or an AI revolution nearly double productivity growth rates and thus produce sustained 3 percent economic growth despite the labor force headwinds. Would such growth provide enough budget savings to finance the Trump agenda and prevent deficits from escalating?
Unfortunately, the answer is still no. Calculations from the OMB show that permanently elevating annual economic growth rates from 2 percent to 3 percent would produce annual new tax revenues of $100 billion to $200 billion during Trump’s current presidential term, swelling to roughly $700 billion a decade from now. However, while revenues would grow quickly over time, so would the offsetting budgetary costs. Long-term Social Security expenses would climb because benefits are based on wage growth that also rises with faster economic growth (which is why improved economic growth would not significantly improve Social Security finances). Medicare and broader healthcare consumption also typically grow with rising incomes. Most importantly, faster economic growth tends to increase the demand for capital, which in turn raises interest rates. A corresponding 1 percent jump in interest rates would produce enough new national debt interest costs to consume the vast majority of first-decade growth revenues.”
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“Economic growth can solve a lot of problems, but entitlement-and-interest-driven budget deficits leaping towards $4 trillion within the decade is not one of them.”
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“even strong growth revenues would finance only a small fraction of the Trump/GOP policy agenda and none of the underlying baseline deficits that are growing so quickly.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/07/washingtons-debt-delusion-economic-growth-cannot-fix-the-deficit/
“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the federal government loses hundreds of billions of dollars each year due to fraud. Medicare-related fraud has permitted health care insurers to pocket $50 billion in reimbursements for diseases that doctors never treated. Fraudsters collected an estimated $135 billion in fraudulent COVID-19 unemployment payments, and unless Congress acts to extend the statute of limitations, this money will never be recouped by the government.
National security funds are routinely misspent or disappeared. The Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row and often can’t account for missing money; last year, the Defense Department admitted that it lost $8.2 billion in Ukraine. The federal government spent $61 billion rebuilding Iraq: 15 percent of the funds were misspent, and another 10 percent simply disappeared, according to government auditors. In Afghanistan, it’s much the same: The Taliban-controlled central bank is a recipient of U.S. funds.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/13/elon-musks-proof-of-government-waste-is-in-the-pudding/
DOGE greatly scaling back its claims of money saved, and overall spending is actually up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0pKOFSikw
“The senators made clear that spending bills approved by Congress and signed into law by the president must be regarded as law, not an optional recommendation to the executive branch: “Just as the President does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate.”
They said they are “concerned” about “sudden changes to OMB’s interpretation of long-standing statutory provisions,” adding it could be “disruptive to the appropriations process and make it more difficult for the Appropriations Committee to work in a collaborative fashion with the Administration.”
They also scolded Vought for not bringing this issue to them directly: “Collaboration will become even more challenging when the Committee is first informed of such developments through the press, rather than notified through official channels, as was the case here.””
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/03/27/congress/senate-appropriators-raise-alarm-over-trump-administration-not-adhering-to-stopgap-spending-bill-00254259
DOGE is not significantly cutting the deficit. To do that, you need to go through Congress. They are not creating government efficiency, they are just firing whoever they can, whether they are useful workers or not.
In Elon’s businesses, he gets quick feedback. So he can cut cut cut, and then see what’s broken and add back in. If a car doesn’t work or sell, something is broken, so let’s fix it. The variety of functions of the government don’t work that way. The government isn’t an engineering business building an actual car or rocket.
Some excuses for destroying government and using it to be self-serving are that the Democrats were doing it. But this isn’t really true. The largest change passed by Democrats in the last few decades is the Affordable Care Act…it was a transfer of money from blue states to red states.
Elon either holds several false beliefs, or he regularly lies and misleads about political issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vv6AvLsx4g
The 10 Worst Republican Budget Gimmicks
https://reason.com/2025/03/13/the-10-worst-republican-budget-gimmicks/