So I've listened to Vivek in interviews, and its clear to me at least that he
1) Doesn't like poor immigrants, considers them a net drain on national resources.
2) Believes that the profile of a desirable immigrant is Educated, English Speaking, Westernized (As far as American civics/ideals are concerned).
3) Doesn't think Americans are culturally capable of upskilling and retooling to bring back the semiconductor industry.
So given the above. What does his appointment spell for the tech industry. Do we expect an uptick in H1b-visa workers? Are we onshoring the semiconductor industry in the US?
if the focus is actually eliminating “fraud and improper payments” then i’m all for it. but i don’t expect they’ll try to or be able to accomplish anything that practical.
It's a nice idea because there's certainly a lot of inefficiency in the federal government, however I'm skeptical a separate external commission of outsiders (no matter how smart and motivated) will be able to accomplish much in the ~6 months it will exist. Senior career bureaucrats inside large federal agencies are apex grand masters of manipulation, camouflage and political hostage-taking. They'll deploy malicious compliance, weaponized policy farming and media leaks in ways so viciously devious it'll make Alien Xenomorphs look like Care Bears.
This feels like the proverbial "Heading the FBI Office out of Rural Alaska". A new Extra-governmental agency?
"As the first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months."
Could be legit, or could just be a report that is filed away.
I suspect that is the reason for an extra-governmental agency. If they do something good, great, if not, easy to fire them.
It seems inefficient to have two people in charge of an agency. Wouldn't it be more efficient to not even create a new agency and just have Trump make these determinations? Otherwise you're creating more bureaucracy to eliminate other bureaucracy which is... inefficient.
"The announcement of Ramaswamy and particularly Musk, who leads companies with existing, lucrative government contracts, raises immediate questions about potential conflicts of interest"
Absolutely no conflict of interest, between this and SpaceX. You can bet that he will try to cut grants and any programs designed to boost competition in rockets & space.
> But after a year, inflation is back to the levels of when he got in power
Is that so? You mean this AP release from today is fake [1]?
>BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina’s inflation slowed to 2.7% in October, the lowest level in three years in a win for the libertarian government of President Javier Milei who came to power almost a year ago promising to pull Argentina out of a dire economic crisis.
> Here's another interesting fact from Argentina's rent controls, per the Journal: "In Buenos Aires—a city dubbed the Paris of the South for its broad avenues and cafe culture—many apartments long sat empty, with landlords preferring to keep them vacant, or lease them as vacation rentals, rather than comply with the government's rent law." The newspaper said that owners of many of those 200,000 units are now putting them on the market.
> I've reported on a similar situation in San Francisco, which has more than 52,000 vacant units. Many owners would rather keep them empty than rent them out under the city's rent-control terms
So it's just a bunch of oligarchs owning far more land and buildings than they should withholding supply artificially. Then they can artifically ease off of it to make things look better for their preferred candidate even though rent prices aren't that much better. Even the article admits rent prices are still going up year over year, it's only when adjusted for inflation that it looks slightly better (which, also ironic given that his policies seem to have sharply raised inflation). So your average person still gets fucked.
I don't know what "artificial" is supposed to mean here. Landlords respond to incentives; if letting out a unit means they'll be stuck with a rent controlled tenant (or in the US, stuck with a tenant-favorable legal environment that will leave them on the hook for damages and missed rent) then the smart thing to do is STR or use the apartment as your own guest home etc.
The smart thing for the government to do would be to make sitting on rental property illegal.
Without rent control, my friends and I could not afford to live in SF. It’s one of the only things keeping the city from being completely captured by the wealthy.
sure, just wanted to point that out since someone who didn't read the article could have easily assumed that was an annual number, as in the US we are used to 2ish percent annual inflation being the target.
>How is it going so far? If we were giving out report cards, Milei’s tenure would get a B+ to A- grade. Unusually for Argentina, the country has been running a fiscal surplus since the beginning of the year, inflation is down substantially, but the economy is not yet displaying clear signs of a recovery. However, inflation has come down not just because the fiscal accounts have been turned to a surplus, but also because the economy is in recession and the currency is appreciating in real terms. https://globalamericans.org/explainer-mileis-economic-progra...
I'd say reasonably well given the problems in the country. The US is a very different situation.
If any entity needs some effort put into process streamlining and efficiency, it's the US government. But, seriously... Why, oh why, did it have to be called "DOGE"?
Once, I mentioned to a friend that if you were to list all US counties by average income, the two northern Virginia counties would be in the top 5. He said 'that's because the government has never had a recession.' I guess that might finally happen soon, and if it does, a lot of resentful people are going to have schadenfreude at rich bureaucrats losing their jobs.
Given that this "government agency" apparently is going to "provide advice and guidance from outside of Government" it wouldn't hit that divesting rule. Only if you're on government payroll does that apply AFAIK. But IANAL.
Of course not. He made an illegal lottery to buy votes and got away with it. Love to see US corruption in the face of everybody so the US stop attacking other countries using allegedly corruption.
What I love about this is that it has a defined mission and an expiration date. Everything should have this. Instead once they accomplish their original mission their only goal is to survive and the best way to do that is to grow and manage more things unrelated to the original goal.
I’m not sure DOGE is successful but the concept of creating a program where the goal is to delete itself by accomplishing a specific mission by a specific time is great.
Elon runs an efficient and innovative business off of government contracts. He is probably the right person to define what those contracts should look like.
I can't remember the GAO ever doing investigations on government inefficiency. Mostly I see reports from them on where projects are blowing out budgets or instances where the government isn't properly reporting to the public. They don't identify solutions to problems usually, just point out the problems.
This will simply be an opportunity to further their political aims by de-funding things they don’t like:
FBI investigated trump for illegally retaining secret records. I guarantee there will be a review of their funding.
EPA gets in elons way by requiring that he not poison wildlife and people. That agency will be axed or gutted or beheaded.
Starve the beast has been a republican strategy for decades. It doesn’t mean lower spending or financial prudence. It means starve the government programs you don’t like because they conflict with your ideology.
Note that trillions of dollars of spending on weapon systems is off the table.
Things like the Abrams tanks the army doesn’t want or need.
The trillion dollar boondoggle of the f35
1.7 trillion to upgrade nuclear weapon systems (the only purpose of which is to eliminate all human life)
This will be the biggest shit-show our country has ever seen. It’ll be an austerity program run by insane ideologues. We’ll be luck if it’s just a joke. But it’ll probably lead to a recession by July of 2025.
53 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 80.3 ms ] thread1) Doesn't like poor immigrants, considers them a net drain on national resources. 2) Believes that the profile of a desirable immigrant is Educated, English Speaking, Westernized (As far as American civics/ideals are concerned). 3) Doesn't think Americans are culturally capable of upskilling and retooling to bring back the semiconductor industry.
So given the above. What does his appointment spell for the tech industry. Do we expect an uptick in H1b-visa workers? Are we onshoring the semiconductor industry in the US?
Also primary source (interview): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
"As the first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months."
Could be legit, or could just be a report that is filed away. I suspect that is the reason for an extra-governmental agency. If they do something good, great, if not, easy to fire them.
Absolutely no conflict of interest, between this and SpaceX. You can bet that he will try to cut grants and any programs designed to boost competition in rockets & space.
Is that so? You mean this AP release from today is fake [1]?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-milei-economy...https://reason.com/2024/10/11/argentina-ended-rent-control-g...
Afuera!
> I've reported on a similar situation in San Francisco, which has more than 52,000 vacant units. Many owners would rather keep them empty than rent them out under the city's rent-control terms
So it's just a bunch of oligarchs owning far more land and buildings than they should withholding supply artificially. Then they can artifically ease off of it to make things look better for their preferred candidate even though rent prices aren't that much better. Even the article admits rent prices are still going up year over year, it's only when adjusted for inflation that it looks slightly better (which, also ironic given that his policies seem to have sharply raised inflation). So your average person still gets fucked.
Without rent control, my friends and I could not afford to live in SF. It’s one of the only things keeping the city from being completely captured by the wealthy.
"When he was elected" (December 2023) he came in on the November 2023 annual inflation rate of 160.9%.
At the end of December 2023 the annual inflation rate was 211.4%
From the AP News link:
As a chart, see: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-cpiand select time frame of interest, 1YR is tight, 3YR shows the rise and fall.
The inflation rate is headed toward the 'low' of November 2023 but hasn't quite yet descended there yet.
as pgdozin and defrost explained, annual inflation was around 160% 1 year ago and now is 193%.
>How is it going so far? If we were giving out report cards, Milei’s tenure would get a B+ to A- grade. Unusually for Argentina, the country has been running a fiscal surplus since the beginning of the year, inflation is down substantially, but the economy is not yet displaying clear signs of a recovery. However, inflation has come down not just because the fiscal accounts have been turned to a surplus, but also because the economy is in recession and the currency is appreciating in real terms. https://globalamericans.org/explainer-mileis-economic-progra...
I'd say reasonably well given the problems in the country. The US is a very different situation.
I just don't understand why it's so hard for people to stay on top of trump's platform.
Doesn't it depend on how you pronounce it? Over here, we pronounce it 'doge'.
Because Musk thinks it's funny.
I’m not sure DOGE is successful but the concept of creating a program where the goal is to delete itself by accomplishing a specific mission by a specific time is great.
DOGE?
Of all things?
Such pork-barrels. Much wow!
( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=dogecoin&iax=images&ia=imag... )
Cost-plus is garbage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
http://www.alexandraerin.com/2015/05/fiction-the-redundant-m...
Starve the beast has been a republican strategy for decades. It doesn’t mean lower spending or financial prudence. It means starve the government programs you don’t like because they conflict with your ideology.
Note that trillions of dollars of spending on weapon systems is off the table. Things like the Abrams tanks the army doesn’t want or need. The trillion dollar boondoggle of the f35 1.7 trillion to upgrade nuclear weapon systems (the only purpose of which is to eliminate all human life)
This will be the biggest shit-show our country has ever seen. It’ll be an austerity program run by insane ideologues. We’ll be luck if it’s just a joke. But it’ll probably lead to a recession by July of 2025.