DOGE will be a test
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Fareed Zakaria had an interesting op-ed this week. He talks about how much of the budget comprises defense, Medicare/Medicaid/social Security etc., and how it would be nearly impossible to cut $2 trillion from the budget.
A bit that caught my ear (I heard it on his weekly show).
But I support the impulse to reform — and not just because I think it will force greater scrutiny and efficiency on government, which needs it. The duo will also force the country and especially the Republican Party to confront a reality it has danced around for decades. The modern Republican Party was forged in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ever since the 1930s, the party’s strongest ideologues have promised to repeal the New Deal and dismantle the architecture of the federal government that was largely constructed by FDR. But they never did.
The first Republican president to occupy the White House after FDR was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who largely accepted Roosevelt’s legacy. Next came Richard M. Nixon, who actually expanded it, establishing bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and proposing a version of universal health care. All of this infuriated conservatives, who kept urging rollback. Ronald Reagan came to political prominence in a nationally televised speech he made on Barry Goldwater’s behalf — against a growing government and deeply skeptical of farm subsidies and programs such as Medicare and Social Security, warning of socialism that would doom the American republic to a future of unfreedom. But of course, during his two terms in office, Reagan never seriously tried to repeal Social Security or Medicare. In fact, federal debt held by the public as a percentage of gross domestic product grew under Reagan. It’s worth noting that the only president to oversee a balanced budget since 1969 was Bill Clinton.
Ramaswamy and Musk have both taken to posting a clip of economist Milton Friedman on their social media in which he argues for a very limited role for the federal government. (Ironically, this role would not seem to envisage any support for, say, electric vehicles and civilian space programs, which have helped create the bulk of Musk’s fortune.) But what decades of public policy have revealed is that Friedman’s vision has little support in the United States. We are where we are because the American public has voted for Republican levels of taxation and Democratic levels of spending — which leaves a gap that can be filled only by borrowing.
I don't have a WaPo subscription, but I think if you click on the link on Fareed's website, it bypasses the paywall and you can read it:
https://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2024/11/22/why-doge-is-an-essential-and-important-idea
If you can't read it now, please let me know. I'll post a transcript of his show in a day or so. The op-ed was the opening of his GPS show.
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A serious and durable fix to the budget would require bipartisan consensus and severe pain to a lot of people. If one party tried to do it alone the other party would run on relieving the pain and would undo everything.
I think it would take a serious exogenous event to get the two parties to be serious about it. A few failed treasury auctions followed by a massive sell off of federal debt. That kind of thing.
I saw an article today saying that we need to cut $8T over 10 years just to avoid having the debt grow more as a percentage of GDP. And that’s the rosy scenario where there are no recessions, pandemics, etc.
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Ask yourself this question- where are Vivek’s incentives? To work across the aisle and find strategic compromises? Or to draw up plans to cut 75% of the federal workforce in a DOA report in order to position himself as the big bad budget cutter going into 2028?
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@jon-nyc , ever the realist.
Yea, I'm pretty sure not much will happen. Every congresscritter has constituencies with skin in the game, and no one will willingly give up what they have.
It's human nature to resist change. It will take a disaster of some sort to make the change inescapable.
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I’m so old I remember the Grace commission. They came up with any number of good ideas that went exactly nowhere.
This latest iteration is DOA.
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@Steve-Miller said in DOGE will be a test:
I’m so old I remember the Grace commission. They came up with any number of good ideas that went exactly nowhere.
This latest iteration is DOA.
Yea, DOGE is listed in the See Also section of the Wikipedia entry for the Grace Commission.
