“Cutting waste”, for a conservative, is to reduce public services. They have spent a very long time putting out the idea that the government must turn a direct profit and pretty much none of them have the barest clue of what an indirect effect is. The more they crush public infrastructure the more space there is for private interests to come in and overcharge for services they don’t even really provide(health insurance, for example).
Nothing they do to streamline, especially with Elon must holding the lever, will be a benefit to the working class and the benefit to the owner class will be a few quarters of profits while they continue to descend into a place where there’s no money left for their customers to buy their products.
There is no good coming.
I hold out hope to be pleasantly surprised.
There’s a lot of waste in the government, especially in the military. We need to audit how money is spent, reorient spending culture from “use it or lose it” to rolling over unused funds, and improve reporting so these kinds of waste are caught sooner. I don’t think there’s anywhere near $2T Musk claims there is, but I could believe up to $500B or so in unnecessary spending.
Whether they do that is up to them, but I’ll be ready to applaud them if they somehow pull it off, and criticize when they make boneheaded decisions that screws people over for minimal fiscal benefit.
Is this your first election? Every cycle they shout about wasteful spending, and when they win they increase military spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut important services to cover it, then when that doesn’t cover it they quietly run up the debt just to shout about how high the debt is as soon as they’re replaced.
There’s holding out hope to be pleasantly surprised, and then there’s pretending that there’s even a whisper of a chance that they’ll do the exact opposite of the thing they’ve done for decades.
Nope, I’ve been through a few. In fact, I was originally registered Republican when I was naive enough to think they actually cared about small government. I’m now registered third party to juice those numbers a bit in the hope someone cares about registration statistics, because neither major party actually seems to do what they promise. Sometimes I’ll switch parties to the local dominant party (in my case, Republican), just so I can have a say in the primaries, but usually I don’t particularly care.
Given my two options, hope and despair, I choose the former.
