With Elon Musk’s recent departure from DOGE and his status as a special government employee, I don’t think any sane person is sad to see him go. Musk will, of course, be forever remembered as the person who completely ruined his reputation in two easy steps. Twitter and DOGE; that’s all it took. From Boy Genius to proto-fascist in less time than it has ever taken anyone else.
Now in the duration of its existence there has been a lot of conflicting information about what DOGE actually accomplished. DOGE, about which Musk claimed that he would identify $2 trillion in savings, didn’t get anywhere close. Beginning with the boy geniuses at DOGE not understanding how COBOL works — and thereby misidentifying everyone who did not have a birth date in the Social Security system as being 150 years old — on through to the many revisions of their own published data, DOGE has actually been a spectacular failure. Musk claims to have identified $175 billion in savings — which would be 8.75% of what he promised to find — but people don’t even believe that number.
I could do better than that myself in a single day. Don’t believe me? I can prove it to you right now.
- The percentage of the federal budget devoted to interest payment on our debt is about 17%. In a budget of approximately $6.75 trillion, that’s about $1.16 trillion. So the more we can do to bring down the debt, the better off we’d be.
- Now, we could get part of the way there without raising taxes. We just have to drastically improve our tax enforcement. Again, it’s estimated that the gross tax gap in the United States is roughly $696 billion. So this is the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid on time, and includes underreporting (77%), underpayments (14%), and failure to file at all (9%).
- If we could reduce that gap by half, that would be $348 billion, or well more than Elon claims to have found, without cutting anything.
How would we get from here to there?
- You could double the staffing at the IRS and have them go specifically after high income earners (including corporations) who are suspected of cheating on their taxes.
That would still leave us $812 million short of closing the deficit this year.
Eliminating debt, however, is not the kind of thing one can achieve in a single year. It would take years and years and years of consistent and persistent effort. We’d at least be moving in the right direction.
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is my proof that I could have done a better job in a single day than Musk’s entire team of incels was able to accomplish in the 4½ months they’d been at it.
I’ll take my paycheck now, please.
