by xnx on 4/25/25, 6:01 PM
This page is very long-winded at getting to the main point which is at the bottom of the page, in small type, in gray text on a gray background: "DOGE cuts represent 0.95% of federal spending"
That should be the headline, and then an explanation of why those probably aren't even real savings (e.g. cost of payouts to fired workers).
by darth_avocado on 4/25/25, 6:13 PM
Towards the end, the solution offered is supposed to be a bigger multiplier of the DOGE cuts, but then they sneakily include “over 10 years”. I was bought in into the narrative until then. Please don’t do that.
by hidingfearful on 4/25/25, 5:58 PM
I'm curious who is tracking the costs which have been incurred by DOGE. Say, for example, they claim a savings of X from firing a bunch of people, what is the cost Y from the hiring of contractors to fulfill the obligations those X people filled?
How much are they costing us?
by etchalon on 4/25/25, 5:58 PM
Any savings with just be eaten by a tax cut, which will predominantly benefit the upper 2% of Americans, while the services cut will hurt the rest of the 98% both in the short-term and long-term.
These people are idiots.
by yowlingcat on 4/25/25, 6:30 PM
Putting aside the conclusions about alternatives (which I can't say are necessarily persuasive given externalities they would cause), I think the methodology could be improved here. In particular, why choose 36 million as the divisor? A more reasonable divisor would be 340M, or the total US population. At least that way, you could get to tax burden per resident, which feels like a far more useful unit quantity.
To take it even further, you could group current annual revenue sources by individual/business/transaction based revenue/taxes and then determine unit burden for the different kinds of units. I think that would lead to a more illuminating analysis and set a framework for a potentially more revelatory discovery process.
by thecabinet on 4/25/25, 7:59 PM
Someone on Twitter made the excellent quip, “Every government program is either too big to change or too small to matter.”
by adiabatichottub on 4/25/25, 7:04 PM
I really enjoyed the deficit reduction game ("Deficit Reduction Options")
With only some moderate rate increases to taxes on business and top earners along with moderate spending cuts I was able to create a plan that reduced the deficit by 25% over 10 years without screwing over the poor and middle class.
When will a total Federal Government Simulator game be released?
by bananatron on 4/25/25, 5:58 PM
Really awesome project! Scaling this down to household scale is so helpful.
by cameldrv on 4/25/25, 9:59 PM
The problem with all of this is that the majority of spending is in three areas:
1. Health care services (About 33%)
2. Social Security and other transfer payments (About 25%) (EITC, SNAP, housing subsidies, etc)
3. Defense (About 15%)
4. Interest on the debt (About 11%).
There's simply not all that much to cut from everything else. Each of those areas also has a giant constituency that will fight cuts.
If I had to give an area where you could probably cut the most, it would be health care, but that has proven to be a very thorny problem.
by api on 4/25/25, 5:20 PM
I don't think DOGE is about saving money. It's about some kind of ideological purge, intimidation, and possibly gathering data.
I expect that Trump's second term is going to massively balloon the deficit just like most Republican presents have since Reagan.
by Negitivefrags on 4/25/25, 6:37 PM
The notion that there is no point saving money because the total amount of debt is high is effectively saying that the problem can never be solved.
A billion dollars is still a billion freaking dollars.
I encounter the same attitude sometimes with program optimization too. Sometimes it’s death by a thousand cuts and you just need to shave off 0.1% at a time until your program is fast.
by mnahkies on 4/25/25, 7:25 PM
I like the premise, but why scale by 36m - wouldn't per capita/~350m make more sense?
by llIIllIIllIIl on 4/25/25, 7:18 PM
The article shows the DOGE miserable savings and gives the alternative for government to earn more by taxing stuff. Government capitalism makes socialism i guess.
by littlecorner on 4/25/25, 5:43 PM
It's a tool, along with the tariffs and other stuff Trump is doing, to dismantle the post-WW2, America-as-global-leader/policer government