[HN Gopher] Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderst...
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Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government
reform
Author : rmason
Score : 13 points
Date : 2024-12-14 00:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eatingpolicy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eatingpolicy.com)
| rmason wrote:
| I am cautiously optimistic about what Elon Musk is attempting
| with DOGE. But half my friends are convinced he will fail and
| that his legacy won't be Tesla or sending rockets to Mars but
| failing to reform the government. The other half think two
| trillion is too small a target.
|
| I think two trillion is way too high a target but I am pretty
| certain they will achieve meaningful cuts that will make our
| government more nimble and faster. I just wished that Trump had
| not promised they wouldn't be allowed to touch social security or
| Medicare and Medicaid. I think there are hundreds of millions of
| dollars of Medicare and Medicaid fraud that could be rooted out
| in two and a half years. But I do plead guilty to being an
| optimist.
| Flozzin wrote:
| I want to say it was the NYTimes, "the daily" podcast that did
| a pretty good job of being even handed when talking about this.
| If anyone is interested, it should be the Dec 4th one. They
| brought up the fact that we've tried to do things like this in
| the past, and that they have all mostly failed, for political
| reasons.
|
| Cutting government spending is very hard to do. Everyone has
| special interests they look to protect, and no congress person
| wants to be the one that stopped funding for their
| district/state. I too am hopeful, but I have my doubts.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's funny to see people talking about DOGE as if it was
| actually a thing. Right now it's just a collective term for
| Vivek and Elon saying stuff. It's not actually a department and
| there's no indication that will ever change. These two guys are
| going to say a bunch of stuff, they'll be totally ignored by
| the politicians and bureaucrats alike, and that's all that's
| going to happen with DOGE.
| dang wrote:
| I noticed that Stewart Brand recommended this piece
| (https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1868407292418498605), so I've
| replaced the baity title with the neutral subtitle and re-upped
| it.
|
| If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure
| you're posting thoughtfully, i.e. reflectively* and not reacting
| reflexively to one of the obvious triggers here. That's how the
| article is written (not counting the title), so please respond in
| kind and sail around the obvious icebergs.
|
| * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Can we keep politics out of Hacker News? Otherwise this will very
| quickly degenerate into being like any other shouty social media
| zone instead of the valuable place to exchange ideas relating to
| technology topics. Thanks.
| Kinrany wrote:
| I wonder if there's a better way to phrase this. Keeping
| politics out is neither possible nor desirable, but we all know
| that there's _something_ that 's related to politics that
| should be avoided to keep conversations high quality.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Meanwhile the DOD will continue vaccuuming up taxpayer money and
| doing god knows what with it for god knows what reasons
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Yeah, any talk about "reigning in government spending/waste"
| that doesn't start and end with the military is totally
| unserious. The DOD wastes more money every day than all the
| usual suspects in this kind of talk do in a year.
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(page generated 2024-12-15 23:00 UTC)