Comment by vlovich123

You have to think about who you’re listening too. The economic sustainability of the actions Trump has taken so far is a pittance:

* The beauracracy today is about the size it was in 1980 on a per capita basis. It’s not the largest per capita it’s ever been.

> The federal government’s workforce has remained largely unchanged in size for over 50 years, even as the U.S. population has grown by 68% and federal spending has quintupled, highlighting the critical role of technology and contractors in filling the gap.

> Compensation for federal employees cost $291 billion in 2019, or 6.6% of that year’s total spending

So firing everyone is a 6% improvement to the federal budget while a complete government collapse for a number of reasons including that the government won’t have anyone to collect revenue or prosecute crimes.

[1]

* The largest discretionary spending area is the military at 800 billion in 2023. Of that, personnel accounted for 173 billion, or 20%. Personnel is a tiny fraction of the government’s spend each year. Even [2] which is a right wing think tank supporting this effort, claims that the liabilities improvement is 600B over 10 years which makes it a <1% dent seeing as how we spend >6T each year and just hand-waves the pension improvement as “significant”. But cuts aren’t focusing on the biggest employer within the government like the military.

* The people Trump & Musk are firing now are people who haven’t been on the job long enough to have protections. This drastically reduces the numbers above as a best case since that assumes a uniform 10% reduction across all salary bands whereas the current 10% reduction is almost certainly across the lowest bands since the government pays based on seniority.

This is what Trump does - he often identifies a real problem and then does a sleight of hand trick to make you think the actions he’s taking, because they’re highly visible, are solving the problem when in fact he’s not actually making any meaningful dent. That’s why he made a big show about the deportation flights but not talking about how the places he’s sending them to aren’t the places the people are from - he’s bullied Costa Rica into accepting whoever he send [3].

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...

[2] https://epicforamerica.org/education-workforce-retirement/fi...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/us-deportation-fl...