The “funny” thing is that trump/musk/doge could have had SO many “easy wins”. Because… the US government is ridiculously bloated and inefficient. Even just “Development of Military Weapon X has been terminated due to being over budget and no longer fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Boeing or whatever the fuck has been instructed to terminate all R&D into Weapon X and to instead focus on continued maintenance and optimization of Weapon Y for the next N fiscal years”
Same with government oversight. SO many policies are basically built around covering their asses ten times over (coughcough Challenger cough). And while there are very good reasons to do that (again, see the fucking Challenger), there is also a lot of room to reevaluate that and make things kind of worse but a lot cheaper in a way that most of the actual employees would love.
Instead? It was just “let’s immediately gut everything while we decide if we want to just become a full president for life dictatorship”.
There’s also things that conservatives would never do, but would net money.
Fund the IRS to go after rich tax cheats. That brings in a lot of money without changing any laws, and it would be good publicity. A lot of people would enjoy seeing a rich guy nailed to the wall for cheating on taxes.
I think you could probably simplify a lot of government aid if we went for universal basic income instead of a bunch of programs that need to be maintained and staffed and all that.
The “funny” thing is that trump/musk/doge could have had SO many “easy wins”. Because… the US government is ridiculously bloated and inefficient. Even just “Development of Military Weapon X has been terminated due to being over budget and no longer fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Boeing or whatever the fuck has been instructed to terminate all R&D into Weapon X and to instead focus on continued maintenance and optimization of Weapon Y for the next N fiscal years”
Same with government oversight. SO many policies are basically built around covering their asses ten times over (cough cough Challenger cough). And while there are very good reasons to do that (again, see the fucking Challenger), there is also a lot of room to reevaluate that and make things kind of worse but a lot cheaper in a way that most of the actual employees would love.
Instead? It was just “let’s immediately gut everything while we decide if we want to just become a full president for life dictatorship”.
There’s also things that conservatives would never do, but would net money.
Fund the IRS to go after rich tax cheats. That brings in a lot of money without changing any laws, and it would be good publicity. A lot of people would enjoy seeing a rich guy nailed to the wall for cheating on taxes.
I think you could probably simplify a lot of government aid if we went for universal basic income instead of a bunch of programs that need to be maintained and staffed and all that.