One of the more humorous parts of Donald Trump\u2019s hours-long conversation with Elon Musk last month was the way in which the two ideological and stylistic allies disagreed on inflation.<\/p>\n
\u201cInflation was caused by oil,\u201d the former president said at one point in the rambling discussion. This is a reiteration of a point Trump makes regularly on the campaign trail, one suggesting that higher oil prices a few years ago were fundamentally President Joe Biden\u2019s fault to suggest that the country needs more oil production. (Energy prices did push other prices higher, but oil production in the United States has hit new highs under Biden and is not tightly correlated to gas prices.)<\/p>\n
The business leader, though, had different desired outcomes. And, so, he offered a different root cause.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people just don\u2019t understand where inflation comes from,\u201d Musk said \u2014 after Trump had offered his assessment of where inflation comes from. \u201cInflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it\u2019s written by the government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump didn\u2019t cede the point but he didn\u2019t debate it. And, later, when Musk again insisted that spending was the cause of inflation, Trump agreed to the executive\u2019s proposal for the creation of \u201ca government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible.\u201d<\/p>\n
And why not? Musk had already endorsed Trump, and news reports indicated that he planned to spend millions to boost his candidacy. Trump had already flipped his view of electric vehicles in a nod to the Tesla CEO; why not acquiesce here, too?<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump indicated that this whole commission idea wasn\u2019t simply one of dozens of similar riffs during his chat with Musk.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the suggestion of Elon Musk,\u201d he began, then hopping into a little aside about how smart Musk was for endorsing him, \u201cI will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, he said, Musk would be in charge of the thing. And \u201cas the first order of business,\u201d Trump said, \u201cthis commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTrillions,\u201d he reiterated. \u201cIt\u2019s massive. For the same service that you have right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Washington Post\u2019s Jeff Stein notes a few problems with this idea, including the alleged scale (in a federal budget that included $6 trillion in total spending last fiscal year) and the idea that nothing would be affected as a result. But there\u2019s another thing worth considering here: Is Musk really the guy you want to put in charge of overhauling the government?<\/p>\n
After all, we do have some recent evidence about what it looks like when Musk is given sweeping power to overhaul an institution not of his making. His purchase of Twitter in 2022 (after an abandoned attempt to renege on the idea) offers several hints that this is perhaps not Musk\u2019s forte.<\/p>\n
One thing that Musk did in his efforts to restore the profitability of Twitter was to cut a significant source of cost: employees. The company went from about 8,000 employees at the time he bought it to fewer than 2,000. Apply that math to the federal government, and you end up with more than 2.4 million people out of work. That\u2019s an eighth of the job losses recorded between March and April 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic kicked in. The result would probably not be \u201cthe same service that you have right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk achieved that cut in workforce by overhauling how Twitter worked. Moderation teams were slashed as Musk welcomed back people banned for abuse and hate speech. Internal critics of Musk\u2019s plan found themselves newly unemployed. Asked to apply the same approach to the government, perhaps Musk could push for the ouster of public safety teams \u2014 farewell TSA and Border Patrol! \u2014 and the firing of any employees critical of Trump\u2019s presidency. (Trump would not balk at that latter idea.)<\/p>\n
One result of those changes is that advertisers were less enthusiastic about paying Twitter to run their ads. Luckily for the government (and for Trump), taxpayers wouldn\u2019t have an opportunity to voluntarily stop paying their income taxes. But perhaps Musk would seek to increase revenue by suddenly deciding on new monthly fees for basic services, the way he did at his social media company.<\/p>\n
Twitter, of course, is no longer Twitter but \u201cX.\u201d One could ostensibly make the argument that changing the name of the U.S. to something punchier \u2014 perhaps a James David Vance-ian \u201cUSA\u201d? \u2014 could cut costs. (Less ink on print jobs, for example.) But we can assume that even in Musk\u2019s hands, the country\u2019s name would be safe.<\/p>\n
But perhaps not its center of operations. Musk recently announced that he was moving Twitter\/X out of its headquarters in San Francisco and to Texas, partly a melodramatic response to new state laws he presents as unacceptably liberal. It\u2019s also clearly in part because he wants to pay lower corporate tax rates. To save money.<\/p>\n
Perhaps his commission would propose something similar. Why stay in D.C., where all the elites live? Why not decamp for somewhere cheaper like, say, Kansas? It\u2019s easy to see how this overlaps nicely with an effort to reduce the number of people working for the federal government. (Trump tried something like this, too, which went over about as you would expect.)<\/p>\n
And, while he\u2019s at it, why not mirror his rash decision to pack up then-Twitter\u2019s servers into trucks and move them from California to Oregon? If you\u2019re suddenly relocating the nation\u2019s capital to the outskirts of Lawrence, why not do it on the cheap, throwing stuff into a fleet of Cybertrucks \u2014 each of which could presumably fit at least two filing cabinets \u2014 and moving it yourself? It\u2019s certainly cheaper.<\/p>\n
This is all admittedly hyperbolic, but it\u2019s also premature. We should not assume that, if reelected, Trump will actually create any such commission nor that it would work as constituted. (Remember his abandoned \u201cvoter fraud\u201d commission?) And if he does, there\u2019s no reason to think that Musk\u2019s approach would exactly mirror his handling of the social media company.<\/p>\n
There is one thing we can confidently predict (besides that there are not trillions in waste to be sliced without downstream effects). It\u2019s that programs that put money in Musk\u2019s pocket \u2014 the Pentagon\u2019s support for Starlink, for example \u2014 will probably not be found to be ones that involve wasteful spending.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One of the more humorous parts of Donald Trump\u2019s hours-long conversation with Elon Musk last month was the way in which the two ideological and stylistic allies disagreed on inflation. \u201cInflation was caused by oil,\u201d the former president said at one point in the rambling discussion. This is a reiteration of a point Trump makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}