Can Elon Musk Cut Two Trillion Dollars From the US Budget?



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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency which plans to take aim at wasteful government spending. On the campaign Elon Musk claimed that he could cut two trillion dollars in government spending. What would those cuts look like and how likely is Elon Musk to succeed? Does Elon Musk have too many conflicts of interest to do this job?

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26 thoughts on “Can Elon Musk Cut Two Trillion Dollars From the US Budget?”

  1. Usually love your videos, but I think you dropped the ball on this one.

    Your Musk comments were extremely biased. Cherry-picked, focused on semantics, and outright misleading.

    e.g.
    – Focused on a failed SpaceX launch, with no mention of the the hugely successful ones or how far ahead they are to alternatives.
    – You know what he means when he says 'sending men to Mars'. Moot point.
    – Describing Reid Hoffman as "his former business partner", while technically true, is extremely misleading. That was over 20 years ago at Paypal, and since then, Reid has been diagnosed with a terminal case of TDS.

    Reply
  2. Patrick gets so close to the answer. So close. Rich people paying 90%, you say? The government collects the same percentage over all you say. Then he misses the boat. Is it because the poor are paying a smaller percentage? No, you say because they are lazier. Well, that tracks with your last video claiming the middle class and poor are not poorer than they have ever been.

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  3. I am at 5:00, roughly, and i am not convinced about the parallel between the 90% marginal rate and the overall pressure of taxes on GDP. I think it is misleading, or miss the point. What would be more interesting, and poignant, is to learn what happened to low earner when the top rate was 90%. If the overall tax pressure was the same, it is easy to assume then that the taxes on lower earners were, well, lower. Also, in the early 50s, wealth inequality was lower, too. So…..?

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  4. While it’s interesting to hear that tax revenue to GDP stays constant it doesn’t say anything about who pays for it. This argument is actually not against what left leaning people believe.

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  5. 28:00 your comments about hiring better lawyers yielding a better outcome can be applied to teachers as well. Better teachers would lead to more effective education and higher grades … but we are going in the opposite direction

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  6. Hey, if the form is so easy, who's ready to file a collective fraud claim against Elon for conflict of interest? Spending 15 billion on SpaceX from the budget… let's return this money and take our percentage 🙂

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  7. @PBoyle The Alzheimer-ridden Regan reduced spending to the point that he was forced to restore some of that. He also opened the door for health insurance scams to charge people whatever hell they liked!
    2. 09:17 Even according to your own chart, it's the Pentagon that takes the lion's share of the Federal Budget…

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  8. Having worked in the civil service for a long time, the conclusion that can readily be reached is that the 80:20 rule is quite applicable.
    20% of the people are actually doing most of the work, the other 80% just make up the numbers, the discussions, and the endless meetings.
    Cutting $2 trillion is entirely possible with hardly any impact on functionality.

    Reply

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