Elon Musk Decimated the Government and Saved Almost Nothing
jacobin.com
Elon Musk’s cuts may have “saved” the public less than half a percent of the national debt, but they are already making Americans poorer and sicker and forcing them to spend hours waiting on phone help lines.

Summary

$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his DOGE team are “expecting” to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.

In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden.

“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    It doesn’t matter when the loads of idiots think he’s a genius. My dad is one of them. He refuses to believe anything that would call this into question calling it fake news. What am I even supposed to do?

    • johndroid@fedia.io
      0·
      6 days ago

      My mother-in-law thinks he’s an altruistic genius—essentially a super-hero. It seems the maga boomer internet is filled with AI generated sites that spread the Gospel of Musk. The one I saw was ludicrous: it promised that Elon has developed an amazing sci-fi wheelchair that he will soon be making available for under $200 (!). The wheelchairs pictured were obvious Dall-E level AI slop, the text read like it was translated into English by GPT. Nobody with even rudimentary critical thinking would believe these absurd claims.

      But the comment section was littered with desperate old people pleading to knew where they could order these mobile miracles. A Cargo Cult of credulous, desperate fools.

      • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        The generation that warned us all growing up about how we shouldn’t believe anything on the Internet will now swallow anything they read on the Internet (without any critical thinking) as long as it has a like from one of their friends.