DOGE tries to do math again and makes $86B mistake
DOGE tries to do math again and makes $86B mistake
Elon Musk’s team can’t seem to add up their own numbers correctly.
Summary
Elon Musk claims to have saved taxpayers $105 billion, but its own figures add up to just $19 billion.
A New York Times report found DOGE falsely credited itself for long-canceled contracts, including a 2005 Coast Guard contract.
DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs. Mistakes could be deadly, with one former USAID staffer warning tens of thousands of lives may be lost.
The Times alleged DOGE has been removing erroneous “savings” from its wall of receipts just to replace the mess-ups with new errors.
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its own figures add up to just $19 billion
Even this is lying. It's the equivalent of saying you lost weight after you chainsawed your arm off.
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Fun fact. If they go ahead with that plan that was floated to send every American 20% of the DOGE "savings", based on that $19bn figure (which as you correctly point out, is a total falsehood; nothing is saved by cancelling completed contracts or downsizing revenue producing departments), the result would be that every American would get a one time payment of $10.
That's it. That's what Musk is claiming to have saved the country; a McDonald's happy meal. And for that he's burning down departments like the consumer protection bureau that protects Americans from scams and exploitative business practices.
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The fastest way to lose weight is in fact amputation.
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Or the old joke "I lost 200 pounds of useless flab.... I killed my husband."
There's of course no reason for me to mention this in the context of Elon (and Trump)
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Or saved money buy not buying food.
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Or as I like to call it: The majority of my adult life
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But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
-1984
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He reduced spending. We need to know the societal cost of those reductions before we can talk about savings. I suspect he has impoverished a generation.
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In the financial crisis in 2008, many countries deployed austerity programs to cut debts and costs. Their economies shrank and some still haven't recovered from that experiment. And DOGE is austerity with a chainsaw, not with a scalpel. It's going to hurt, a lot.
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Just one? You are far more optimistic than I am, clearly
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So far. It's only March and it's only the first year
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We were already on that trajectory though. He just made it faster. If it sparks a meaningful backlash, it might turn out to have been a good thing.
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Even if it adds up to 19 billion, it will never be that number. There are costs to terminating a contract, usually requiring compensation for all materials bought or produced, as well as overhead costs related to the contract. There is a reason that contracts exist and it's to disincentivize the dissolution of an agreement... Termination for convenience is not cheap.
That's not even getting into lawsuits related to direct employee terminations.
And at the end, this is for what? What benefit do we get from tearing up contracts that are half completed and half paid for? What benefit is there in laying off people that wanted to serve and in many cases took a pay cut to do it, knowing that the trafeoff is stability of their employer and the knowledge that they are helping the country.
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knowing that the tradeoff is stability of their employer
This shit will haunt us after I die. Trust has been shattered. Good luck calculating the cost of that.
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DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs.
Yes AND they are doing this on purpose. Evil fucks are trying to lie to their followers who will most likely eat that shit up.
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Cmon guys. The math adds up.
19 billion saved for the plebians, 86 billion saved for himself.
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Measuring the savings is pointless as they were not cut for the money but for the perceived merit to musk and trump. Parroting their stated motivations seems harmful.
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The point is to undermine their authority in the eyes of those who believe the propaganda. If they are continuously fucking up and costing money then you may get say a state level clerk telling them to fuck off when they inevitably try to fuck with the states, a clerk who may have allowed them to do some very damaging shit
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It's like he's writing a performance report and desperately trying to pad the bullet points because he doesn't have enough to fill the required "what have you accomplished" area.
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Musk describing something as bigger than it really is? Color me surprised.
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Makes sense based on that article about his wang.
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I get that math is hard to some people, but every computer I've used has had a calculator of some sort.
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Unless you let AI do the math...
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Are these tools using LLMs for their math?
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Like they gave Ukraine 300 billion where in reality it's some 50B and the rest they "pledged" the same way Amber Heard pledged to help poor children...
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Damn, the ketamine really is freeing his mind! Freeing it to be worse in every way, that is.
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ketamine is like rocket fuel for the brain. unfortunately his brain is less of a rocket and more of a 3-cylinder Lada.
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DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs. Mistakes could be deadly, with one former USAID staffer warning tens of thousands of lives may be lost.
Yeah, but are any of those lives billionaires? Then who cares? -Dogebags, probably.
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After the first thousand, yes.
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DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs.
😲 the hell you say!
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The fact they actually put "may" in there is insulting to readers. We KNOW They are totally and completly unqualified for 99.99% of the work they are doing.
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Is our reality part of a failed Austin Powers script?
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I am sorely disappointed in the lack of machine gun jubblies if so.
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Maybe that's why it failed
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Staff from musks companies, that are used to just spaffing their handout money up the wall, can't figure out real budgets and contacts?
What a fucking suprise.
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Whatever happened to Andrew Yang? That guy could math so much harder than these guys
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Elon Musk claims to have saved taxpayers $105 billion
So we're gonna be getting all of the money he saved us back as a tax rebate, right?
....right?
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Yea, the whole.ten.dollars.
You're welcome!
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Meh, close enough! Drinks for everyone!