Donald Trump ally and probable future cabinet member Elon Musk went out on a limb during the Madison Square Garden rally, claiming he could cut $2 trillion from the budget.
“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk.
Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” could be cut. It’s a nice round number, but how realistic is it?
If we’re asking if the fat is there to achieve $2 trillion in cuts, the answer is obviously “yes.” If you’re asking if it can realistically be done, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Most of the thousands and thousands of federal programs and departments have a constituency in Congress. Each of those line items in the budget represents human beings: sick people, poor people, old people, babies, and tens of millions of other human beings that would die without federal assistance. That’s the reality for anyone who wants to cut the budget.
That doesn’t mean we can’t cut $2 trillion from the budget. It means we have to get our priorities straight and think rationally about where to cut that $2 trillion. That’s because the very first place Congress wants to cut is programs that benefit the old, the sick, and the weak.
Musk might have pulled that $2 trillion number off the top of his head, but leave it to the brilliant Veronique de Rugy, writing in Reason.com, to put flesh on the bare bones number of $2 trillion.
The best way to cut $2 trillion out of the budget is to ax everything the federal government does that it shouldn’t be doing in the first place. It’s time we rediscovered the exercise of thinking critically about government and the role it should or shouldn’t play in our lives. Questions like, “Is that the role of government?” or “Should the federal government pay for that?” haven’t been seriously considered in years. The muscle of fighting for first principles has atrophied among Republicans as it’s no longer in style to call for small government.
The fact that we’ve “forgotten” how to think critically about government spending only shows that our road to ruin has been paved with fools’ gold. It will take a generation to change the mindset that the federal government needs to do everything and make all of our lives easy.
Hellbound and Down 