On Tuesday I spoke at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on President Trump’s economic politics and actions. As you can imagine, it was pretty negative – with failing to cut major spending programs, its illegal and legal immigration downloads, and tariff downloads.
One potentially bright spot was in Doge. I was leading them to tell them that they didn’t have dogs to hunt.
However, I have defeated Doge’s limitations, which I learned from my research and discussions with fellow economists.
From my research
In “Six Ways to Understand Doge and Predict Its Future Behavior,” Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne are:
According to Chris Edwards, total compensation for 3.8 million federal defense and non-disabled workers accounts for only 8% of spending.
Why is this important? The government is different from most private sector scholarships. The private sector creates things. The range of federal government volumes involves government giving huge sums of money to people. So, even if the number of employees is 10%, if the number of employees decreases, you will not cut government spending by 1%.
From a discussion with an economist friend
It’s important which employees were cut. Of course, many people point that out. For example, I believe that by reducing the number of probational workers, we will reduce the appropriate employees. But I’m in a different sinking. A sure-fire agency employee – I’m looking at you, the SEC and EPA -Might have the ability and power to charge a cost of $10 million for almost profit. Cut that employee and make sure Oher employees are too busy to pick up their portfolio, saving $10 million. His salary savings are rounding errors.
However, reducing the number of Park Service employees by 5% can save a little by giving up on the valuable things they were doing.
Additional notes:
While preparing for a speech last Friday, I was reminded of the funny lines that former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson from Wyoming had on politics. I googled his name to find it and found out, behold, he died that day. I found some interesting lines that I remembered, but not what I was looking for.
Here’s the funny line I found (fourth 8:37 points):
Politics is derived from Latin. Poly means a lot, and tic means a bloody insect.
There’s one more thing I’m moving forward from memory, and I’ve used it to criticize recent bipartisan measures for the social increase in retirees with state and/or local government pensions.
Apparently, Simpson had toured the Capitol buildings to many senior Japanese officials, trying to explain the US political system in just a few lines. Here’s what he said:
There are two political parties in America: the evil party and the stupid party. I’m a stupid party member. Occasionally we defeat both evil and stupidity. It’s Street Bipartisaship.
