That is what he leads off with in a Washington Post piece
But?
He also explains that cuts to Federal programs would actually tank the US ECONOMY that relies on those BIG spending expenditures….DOGE, the Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, in the ‘advosory board’ effort attached now to GOP House WQingNut Marjorie Taylor is being sold as something that , quite frankly IS set up to fail….
The American Government spending has roots spread out acroos the country and feed with jobs…
Zacaria thinks the juice ain’t gonna be worth the squeeze…
(He DOES believe there SHOULD be some cuts)
And the Democrats WILL be waiting to pounce on the fallout come in the 2026 MidTerm Elections…
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of DOGE, are both brilliant, and the federal government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome. There are more than 180,000 pages of federal regulations. Surely it’s worth taking a close look at them and retiring many.
Observers have pointed out that the duo’s goals will be much harder to achieve than they imagine. Washington is quite inefficient, but most of what it does is write checks — with great efficiency. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other mandatory programs make up about 60 percent of the federal budget. Trump has often said that he would protect most of this spending
Next is the Defense Department, at more than $800 billion, which has generally been considered untouchable for political reasons — though it is probably the department that most desperately needs to be streamlined. (For example, America has four air forces, the Air Force itself, the Army’s air force, the Navy’s air force and that of the Marines.)
Then comes interest on the debt, also untouchable, which is almost as large as the Pentagon’s budget.
What is left is about 15 percent of the federal budget, which includes certain veterans’ benefits, agricultural subsidies, spending on roads and highways, etc. To achieve the $2 trillion spending cuts that Musk has often talked about, he would need to eliminate all this spending and all defense spending. And then he’d still have work to do.
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….
….
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.
There is a strong argument that U.S. debt is on an unsustainable path, especially considering the rising costs that will come as more and more baby boomers retire. But slashing federal spending will almost certainly cause an economic downturn — recall Europe’s experience with austerity in the 2010s. The central lesson of macroeconomic policy in recent decades has been that government spending now constitutes so large a part of the economy that drastically cutting it can lead to a downward spiral of reduced consumer spending and declining confidence. Your expenditure is my income…..
I fundamentally agree with Zakaria’s conclusion…
Let’s have this DOGE propose actual spending cuts and see the public response.
Are these MAGA people really prepared for the draconian measures that Musk in particular is advocating?Is Trump really prepared to advocate the specific cuts that will be proposed or is all this simple political rhetoric with no seriousness of purpose?
Are cuts needed?Yes Should the pain of doing so be spread around to all facets of American society?Absolutely.
In my view the only practical way to reign spending in is equal cuts in all areas of government expenditures.
A good beginning?A freeze on federal spending with no accounting for inflation.Howls protest?Undoudtedly ,but you have to start somewhere .
Of course at the end of the day?Its likely to devolve into nothing more that ,whose ox is being gored?Yours or mine?