Posted on 06/08/2025 4:35:10 PM PDT by karpov
Elon Musk and House Republicans both promised to tackle federal spending. It turns out only one of them was serious, and it wasn’t Musk.
Musk, who broke with President Trump this week after labeling Republicans’ reconciliation bill a “disgusting abomination,” might claim some authority. As leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, he was the public face of Trump’s assault on government.
Remember him feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development into the wood chipper? Encouraging civil servants to quit or be fired? The chain saw?
Musk loves the theatrical: He helped scuttle an omnibus spending bill last year mainly because of its page length. The DOGE cuts thrilled Trump’s base, horrified Democrats and traumatized civil servants.
But theatrical didn’t mean substantive. Fire every civil servant and cut foreign aid to zero and you save about $300 billion. The deficit last year was $1.8 trillion.
DOGE claims to have cut spending by $175 billion. But The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and others found DOGE routinely overstated savings. Federal spending in the current fiscal year is actually up 9% from a year earlier. (Trump sent a slimmed-down budget to Congress last month that seeks to entrench some of DOGE’s cuts.)
The big money, as everyone except Musk and Trump seem to acknowledge, is in entitlements. Not fraud, waste and abuse, but checks correctly issued to eligible recipients. Such programs, including Social Security, health programs, food stamps and welfare, plus interest on the national debt, equal 73% of spending.
Entitlements are infamously difficult to cut. Yet that’s what House Republicans propose. Far from being full of “crazy spending increases,” as Musk claims, the bill would reduce spending over the coming decade by $1.3 trillion, relative to current law, and that would be predominantly from entitlements
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
It’s the WSJ, proceed with extreme caution with anything they publish.
Is this indirectly sourced from the Bee???
The article says the bill would reduce federal spending by 1.3 Trillion OVER 10 YEARS. Why not now? 10 years is three administrations and no one can be sure those new administrations won’t enact different policies and negate those cuts.
It also says the problem is tax cuts not spending, which is a bunch of bunk.
There is so much obfuscation with facts and figures that no one really knows what is the truth.
One thing is for certain, the country is on the road to bankruptcy and we will never repay the $36 trillion debt by adding more.
“he was the public face of Trump’s assault on government”
That spells what kind of liar Greg Ip is. It was not an assault on “government” per se, and Ip knows it.
To Ip and anyone on the Left, every ounce of the federal government is equal in importance to any other ounce and any cutbacks on one is a cutback on all.
Notice that Ip says the biggest culprit on federal spending is entitlements and the debt, which he has zero answers which to remedy.
WSJ is a totally globalist, RINO operation, so if they say GOP is good and Musk is bad, then you can guarantee that the GOP is swimming in pork and fraudulent spending, while Musk and his DOGE accountants HAD been sinning their souls to halt unaccountable trillions being spent on waste and fraud in an attempt to slow the end game, namely the US dollar becoming nearly worthless worldwide due to uncontrolled money “printing” by the FedGov’s totally out-of-control deficit spending ....
Does the Swamp serve Kool-Aid?
If so some clown last named Ip has been drinking it, I mean a lot of it.
Let me guess: exactly zero of it is in the first five years and most is in year ten?
“One thing is for certain, the country is on the road to bankruptcy and we will never repay the $36 trillion debt by adding more.” Very true, yet we have another budget bill with yet more deficit spending.
If the BBB is passed we’ll end up have a national debt of about $60 trillion over the next 10 years. I think right now the percentage of the money going to re-pay the debt has about 25% of it going to pay the interest alone. Who knows what it’ll be in 10 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 75% or more.
Both parties have been spending like drunken sailors for the last 60 or so years. I’m not sure how much longer this can go on, but at some point soon it will end.
“It’s the WSJ, proceed with extreme caution with anything they publish.”
I have to agree with you on that. IMHO The Wall Street Journal has jumped the shark.
“10 years is three administrations and no one can be sure those new administrations won’t enact different policies and negate those cuts.”
BET ON IT!
Far from being full of “crazy spending increases,” as Musk claims, the bill would reduce spending over the coming decade by $1.3 trillion, relative to current law, and that would be predominantly from entitlements
If spending is being reduced by $1.3T, why does the projected debt increase such that the administration wants the debt limit to be removed?
WSJ lost me when they decided to lurch left in those early Obama years. Stopped getting the paper then, and I haven’t looked back. They’ve never met an illegal they didn’t love (including Obama).
They’ve become the NYT with ticker tape.
Freaking joke to even suggest that. The Republikans are co-opting and trying to manage Trump for 18 more months.
Musk has a meat cleaver track record from when he took over Twitter and fired 80% of the workers.
Republikans are trying to protect sacred cows, earmarks, they want the AI bribery money and Golden Dome that will be another 2 trillion if it’s a penny.
There is zero evidence that the leadership of the Republican party is serious about cutting spending.
That's $130B a year. The Pentagon spends that on inside the Beltway consultants to write Power point briefing packages.
There's lots of evidence of the yeah haw, boys, have we got some fat juicy one's to round up. Drinks are on my lobbyist tonight.
Bovine excrement.
“Fire every civil servant and cut foreign aid to zero and you save about $300 billion.”
Horsecrap...DOGE found 2.7 Trillion in improper payments. He found that 40% of SS inquiries were coming from fraudsters.
This article is arguing that there really isn’t that much waste, and what there is....the GOP is serious about going after.
What a joke.
I’m so old I remember when the WSJ was capitalist!
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