In this case, DOGE should be quarantined from making further changes until CAT can operate alongside DOGE for auditing purposes. Every change and access should be reviewed.
My nature is to give the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing that they are rushing and it manifests in laying off even teams of highly skilled and critical nuclear safety staff...that means someone there doesn't know what they're doing or the chaos could be the point as well. I would hope it's not to that extent, but this is why I maintain that CAT should be auditing DOGE's changes.
And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff.
Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm.
That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.
If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.
The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.
The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are. No one in the bottom 60% is going to be better off. The .1% are benefiting the most. That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
> If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts
That's not what these are. The reaction of every billionaire to Trump's admin ought to tell you that on it's own.
> Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
A million seconds = ~11.5 days
A billion seconds = ~31.7 years
A trillion seconds - 31,710 years.
We're not talking about play money, or monopoly money. Musk bought the election for a fraction of a billion dollars, ffs.
And again, America is already on record inequality, about the same or more as right before the French Revolution.
Money IS a zero sum game, and when too much of it is going to the 0.1% it inflicts massive harm to millions of people. If you want to learn more about this, and what's about to happen to the US economy, you can listen to one of the world's best traders talk about it here [0].
> In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item.
Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.
>One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
That tech has been handed over to the private sector as a precaution and also as a method of keeping the politicians' hands off it. Gives them cover to honestly say "I know nothing, I was briefed on nothing, we have nothing". Plausible deniability.
Elon Musk is also quite possibly the last person I'd ever want to touch world-changing technology. let alone be the sole arbiter of who gets to get near it.
If they did have ill intent, towards what is that ill intent targeted, and why should I care? These aren't organizations or missions I much care about. This isn't my government, except by an accident of geography. I have little say in how it's managed or what it does, but I have a high burden for it. It's unclear that this government protects me in any substantial way (or even in indirect, insubstantial ways). Meaningful reform is impossible at the sociological level, it requires too much buy-in too slowly, and that will always be hijacked by those with influence or watered down to meaninglessness.
Otherwise said, you want to destroy government, because you never cared about learning what various agencies do. And you want reform it, but without knowing what it does and without knowing what you want to improve other then "let it go away".
Your default assumption should be ill intent when it comes to information security, my friend.
In this case, DOGE should be quarantined from making further changes until CAT can operate alongside DOGE for auditing purposes. Every change and access should be reviewed.
Yes. But it's not. That's the issue. They have unlocked access to systems to which they can control how they desire, unmonitored.
1 reply →
My nature is to give the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing that they are rushing and it manifests in laying off even teams of highly skilled and critical nuclear safety staff...that means someone there doesn't know what they're doing or the chaos could be the point as well. I would hope it's not to that extent, but this is why I maintain that CAT should be auditing DOGE's changes.
I generally try to assume that people are well intentioned. But when they start doing Nazi salutes...
I was shocked by the appearance of that aspect too but then a day or two later, the ADL and Netanyahu supported him on that.
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
Definitely good to keep a watch, though.
5 replies →
And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff.
Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm.
0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...
> to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1%
That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.
If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.
The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.
The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
> that isn't even what your link is saying.
You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are. No one in the bottom 60% is going to be better off. The .1% are benefiting the most. That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
> If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts
That's not what these are. The reaction of every billionaire to Trump's admin ought to tell you that on it's own.
> Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
A million seconds = ~11.5 days A billion seconds = ~31.7 years A trillion seconds - 31,710 years.
We're not talking about play money, or monopoly money. Musk bought the election for a fraction of a billion dollars, ffs.
And again, America is already on record inequality, about the same or more as right before the French Revolution.
Money IS a zero sum game, and when too much of it is going to the 0.1% it inflicts massive harm to millions of people. If you want to learn more about this, and what's about to happen to the US economy, you can listen to one of the world's best traders talk about it here [0].
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc
1 reply →
Man it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.
Also what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.
> it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.
It really is. There have always been 'third rail' topics that get rapidly flagged despite community interest, but I've never seen so many.
> what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.
No idea; all the links seem to work for me anyway.
1 reply →
The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration.
In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents.
One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
> In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item.
Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.
2 replies →
>One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
That tech has been handed over to the private sector as a precaution and also as a method of keeping the politicians' hands off it. Gives them cover to honestly say "I know nothing, I was briefed on nothing, we have nothing". Plausible deniability.
Elon Musk is also quite possibly the last person I'd ever want to touch world-changing technology. let alone be the sole arbiter of who gets to get near it.
If they did have ill intent, towards what is that ill intent targeted, and why should I care? These aren't organizations or missions I much care about. This isn't my government, except by an accident of geography. I have little say in how it's managed or what it does, but I have a high burden for it. It's unclear that this government protects me in any substantial way (or even in indirect, insubstantial ways). Meaningful reform is impossible at the sociological level, it requires too much buy-in too slowly, and that will always be hijacked by those with influence or watered down to meaninglessness.
Otherwise said, you want to destroy government, because you never cared about learning what various agencies do. And you want reform it, but without knowing what it does and without knowing what you want to improve other then "let it go away".
If on DOGE, that is ill intent.