Muskaswamy’s Plans To Cut Billions Explained. It’s Not A Job For Amateurs But Amateurs Have the Job

You know the old expression, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And people with simple answers to complex problems also rush into situations that they have no place being in, precisely because they are fools. The biggest fool of all is the American electorate who got fooled again by Donald Trump and now he’s going to show them who he is, good and hard. As H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Trumpdystopia, here we come.

The writer of this piece, a public policy professor, notes: “As an aside, this is a good side of the maturation of Bluesky. A well known figure asks a sincere question, hoping for a reasonable response from some smart people. This is what Twitter used to be great at before Musk.” This is true. Twitter always had its seamy side, but its high side was top journalists or people noted in their fields, posting something of value on the community board for the world and there was frequently good discourse. Color those days gone, although Bluesky may be the place where people now go.

Here is my response to Cuban’s question. It includes some really basic facts about the nature of make-up of the federal workforce and spending. Once you take these facts into account, it suggests a) the size of the cuts promised will not materialize, and b) savings will not be redistributed to reduce poverty, but will do the opposite.

You can’t eliminate the deficit by cutting federal employees

Muskawamy are promising huge savings. Musk says that he can cut spending by $2 trillion every year. Ramaswamy has proposed to cut 75% of employees. These are pie-in-the-sky numbers, but lets assume a genuine appetite for large cuts.

It is possible to cut a lot of federal employees and dramatically cut the spending of the federal government. But it is not possible to dramatically cut the spending of the federal government just by cutting employees.

The federal government spends about $271 billion each year on personnel costs. Lets assume we go with Ramaswamy’s illegal and irresponsible proposal to cut 75% of employees. That saves you $200 billion per year. That would be about 10% of Musk’s proposed $2 trillion cuts, and a much smaller proportion of overall annual federal spending of $6.75 trillion.

Just to give another point of comparison, the 10 year costs of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts will be between $4 to $5 trillion over the next decade, with more than 40% of those tax cuts going to households earning more than $400,000 per year. In other words, the cost of Trump’s tax cuts are significantly higher than federal personnel costs. Just allowing the expiration of tax cuts on the highest earners generates similar savings as cutting 75% of federal employees. And, you still get to have a functional government! Or you can follow Ramaswamy’s goal of dramatically gutting the government, without meaningfully altering the deficit.

The set up here is clear: Trump is going to keep taking care of the rich and gutting the middle class and sticking it to the poor. That is not going to change. What will change is how he explains it and my sense is that he’ll put the Ministry Of Truth in Orwell’s “1984” to absolute shame. It’s going to become evident to the rank and file MAGA at some point that this “golden age” has not dawned. The question is when will that sink in? While they’re living in the Hoover-villes Trump-villes, or after? We tried to warn them before but that didn’t take.

And all this is reminiscent of the UK and the changes they made in recent years and came to regret.

Their austerity project had enormous negative consequences. It gutted basic public services. It reduced life expectancy, and increased poverty and inequality. Far from making Britain great again, it quickened its decline. This piece by Sam Knight is sobering:

The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

The public eventually noticed that schools were falling apart, libraries were closing, and that police were not responding to calls. To achieve the type of savings that Muskawamy are promising would necessarily mean cutting services, including the safety net, on an even larger scale. The Trump administration could cause misery by, for example, cutting Medicaid and SNAP.

And that may be the starting point. Maybe when the school lunches are gone people will begin to wake up. Or, it could be that when polio, smallpox and other dread diseases resurface, that people will realize what they gave away. Nobody knows. Speculation is all that we have and unfortunately the either/ors we’re speculating on are all depressing. The people voted for bread and circus and they will get the circus part alright, but the bread is running out.

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