News @lemmy.world doug @lemmy.today 1d ago

Musk attacks the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker

Yesterday, we launched the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker. This new tool authoritatively demonstrated that Elon Musk had been grossly overstating the cuts implemented by DOGE. While Musk claimed that DOGE had made $105 billion in cuts, the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker revealed that just $8.6 billion of those cu...

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Musk sucks at logic. You can disapprove of DOGE's goal and also point out that they're lying about how close they are to it. There's no contradiction or hypocrisy there.
- more accurately. you can complain about their method to reach their claimed goal... and about the fact that they aren't reaching it.
  
  IE their claimed goal is to save the government lots of money. Objectively the government spending less is a good thing. However losing things that the government does that help people, is objectively bad.
  
  So yes, it's both too much bad, and not enough good, if the dodge cuts, slash jobs, wreck social security, medicaid, medicare. Harm scientific research in medical and other aspects of life. Wreck the US's soft power by killing goodwill programs that help other countries. Wreck projects that help our own people etc....
  
  and so yes, if we wreck all the projects that help people and save lives... AND barely accomplish any savings in the process. That is an extreme double fail, in which something like DOGE can simultaniously be doing far too little, and far too much at the same time. (because they are making a huge negative impact to the quality of life for millions of americans... and they aren't even close to making a visible scratch in saving money.
  
  Objectively the government spending less is a good thing.
  
  I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Spending more wisely is a good thing. But simply spending less is not.
  
  They love their chainsaw analogy - this is like going to a surgeon to get an abdominal tumor removed, but the surgeon takes a chainsaw to your foot instead. Now you can't walk and you still have a tumor. The doctor took both too much and not enough. It's not hard to understand, but I guess they think it's clever to pretend they don't get it.
I love this idea that somehow we are saving money when making cuts to many life saving and necessary services. Like OK, so we cut funding to NOAA, NASA, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the post office, the department of education, the IRS, the EPA the CDC and some how there's not going to be a big oh shit moment when we realize that those things were required for general maintenance of the country.

Like, I'm gunna cut a lot of cost by no longer changing my tires on my car and just driving in the rain with bald tires. There's simply no way that would end bad for me or anyone else in the vicinity of my automobile.
- I just saved a ton of money each month by cancelling all of my health insurance!
  
  To be fair insurance providers shirk obligations to pay for your treatment anyway. It's why Luigi is so damn popular.
- Yeah, his blow-up with Rubio 100% confirms that he genuinely thinks that layoffs - not retirements, but actual firing someone - are a metric for success, and that every government contract can be canceled and the whole value of the contract is somehow recovered, which is amazingly idiotic.
- They just need to make it down the block though.
- There's gonna be an oh shit moment for a lot of the supporters hopefully, but the actual people in power want the government to collapse. Their goal is to remake all aspects of the government as a private for profit business. The first steps in such a plan is obviously the destruction of public services like the Mail.
  
  The goal here is not actually to save money for the US government, it's to make money from replacing the government with your own private businesses
- No one is even benefiting from this alleged saving money. My taxes are higher than ever.
Oh, Ms. Streisand! Yoo-hoo!
- For real. Thank you Musk for bringing attention to the tracker.
  
  Also even if it was the claimed $109 billion, that's still only 1.5% of the $7 trillion budget.
"The dems can't decide if Musk is cutting too much or not enough!!!" No. He is cutting vital programs that support many citizens of our nation and then overstating how much is actually saved doing so.
Heh the choice of colors for the bars really fits this administration.
- You're just russian to conclusions here!
Musk literally said "Yup"..?

This isn't an attack. Y'all need to stop turning every little thing into a big deal (unless you like burying the real corruption, in which case idk go ahead)
- How are we all in charge of journalism?
  
  15 people on Lemmy upvoted it causing us to see this

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