> They could just go after Medicare fraud (committed largely by extremely wealthy corporations in extremely detectable ways), get an easy $100B or so under their belt
My impression of the 2025 feud between Musk and Trump is that Musk actually wanted to do stuff like that and Trump wouldn't do it.
And they should do it, but this year's deficit is ~$1.8T despite federal receipts pushing the record high in real dollars per capita (as usual) and consistent with historical norms as a percent of GDP.
So what about the other $1.7T?
> We have a process for this. It's called appropriations. It happens in Congress.
We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.
But we were set to pay off the nation debt by 2013 before Bush tax cuts. Bush’s tarp, Trump tax cuts plus Covid were the other nails in the coffin of debt reduction.
Starve the beast has been an official Republican strategy for 40 years.
It went way, way up during WWII and hasn't changed much since. And that's relative to GDP over a period that real GDP per capita increased significantly, i.e. government revenue in real dollars per capita is through the roof.
The US tax system has an evolved defect where the tax brackets are set in nominal dollars and then as inflation pushes everyone into the next highest bracket Congress periodically gets to claim credit for passing a "tax cut" without actually reducing the level of real government revenue -- indeed it has been going up enough to keep up with real GDP growth. And if you confuse that with an actual tax cut then you can write articles where "without the tax cut" there would be more revenue, but only because there is an implicit continuous tax increase baked into the tax code to allow Congress to repeatedly tell everyone that up is down.
It's not a revenue problem. Revenue is up. It's a spending problem.
> We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.
Get on the barricades and start the revolution then.
> He said "Entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid need to be eliminated."
The only thing on the internet that search engines turn up for that exact quote is your post. Here's the actual quote:
> “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe six, 700 billion,” Musk said on Monday in an interview with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow. Musk’s comments came in response to a question from Kudlow about whether there would be a report on targeting waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.
Medicare is around a trillion dollars by itself, so those numbers don't make any sense as the removal of entire programs, but total entitlement spending is several trillion in total and a reduction in those amounts would make sense in the context of targeting waste, fraud and abuse in entitlement spending, which is the thing he was being asked about.
My impression of the 2025 feud between Musk and Trump is that Musk actually wanted to do stuff like that and Trump wouldn't do it.
And they should do it, but this year's deficit is ~$1.8T despite federal receipts pushing the record high in real dollars per capita (as usual) and consistent with historical norms as a percent of GDP.
So what about the other $1.7T?
> We have a process for this. It's called appropriations. It happens in Congress.
We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.