Hope and Jade

That's Elon

Elon Musk has been pretty critical of the Big Beautiful Bill. He has a couple of people in Congress who are also critical, namely Rand Paul and Thomas Massie. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has also been critical.

Why?

I can’t speak for the politicians, but I think I can try and speak for Musk. This quote from X sums it up:

Elon is so jaded about the state of government that he might start his own planet from scratch.

I think Elon went into the Trump administration with very high hopes of changing things quickly, like he can do inside companies. He bought Twitter and turned it into a platform for free speech instead of highly censored and controlled speech that worked with the government security complex to make sure it was controlled.

Trump, being a private executive, could speak Elon’s language. Trump is also used to working quickly and getting stuff done in an autocratic way. When he makes a decision, people move to enable it.

If you look at Elon’s track record, he builds a lot of impossible stuff. Tunnels under Las Vegas, rocket companies, electric cars, and many other things. He is sort of the Ayn Rand character John Galt personified.

He hoped to do it using technology inside the government, and he was off to a fast start.

I think he expected to get derailed by the Democrats, who were the primary beneficiaries of things that were getting uncovered by DOGE. The government tax collectors were like their private piggy bank.

I think he expected the reaction of the federal bureaucracy. Why would they work with him to reduce budgets? Even inside corporate America, there are fights over reduced budgets when they happen.

I think he expected the mainstream media to carry the water for all of the above, but he doesn’t care about it because on X, you can get an unfiltered message out.

I don’t think he expected the violence that Soros and Democratic operatives enabled against Tesla and people who own Teslas. That made him mad, and he doesn’t forget.

I don’t think he expected the pushback inside the Republican Party. That’s a biggie. He funded a lot of candidates and they bit him in the ass when he was going to take their candy away. Even with small majorities in each chamber, I think Elon figured he could push stuff through. I can hear him saying, “We have a majority, just vote.”

What he didn’t count on was that many Republicans masquerade as Republicans. They only become Republican show ponies during election season. Lindsay Graham is one.

I suspect inside the Trump Administration, people started telling him that what he wanted was “impossible”. You do not tell an entrepreneur like Elon that something is impossible. You figure it out and try and fail and try and fail and try and fail until the damn thing works.

We used to fight a “transaction tax” every goddamned year in DC. The DC crowd used that threat to get money from the entire exchange community in NYC and Chicago. Guess what? It’s still on the lips of policymakers, and now it’s on the lips of state and local policymakers. Bad policy and spending never go away because they can get so much money from it. It’s a perverse economic incentive.

If you look at Elon’s X feed, it is mostly about government spending.

Elon knows what America voted for. Sure, strong borders and all that. But Americans know the deficit is out of control. They are sick and tired of lip service being paid to it by both parties and want something done.

Elon always planned to go back to private industry, but I think he became jaded with the way the government works and the process. It would behoove Republicans not to push him aside. Peter Thiel also became jaded.

I remember one time I was in Washington talking to a political operative who worked for a representative. We were chatting about our jobs. He asked me how soon I knew if anything I did had an effect, and I said “sometimes almost immediately”. He said most of the time, it took him three to four years.

That’s Washington.

Washington thinks they are insulated from the rest of the country. Sure, they need our votes, but then they just move on. You think you are voting for someone who represents you, but in fact, they are there to represent Washington and protect the money that Washington doles out.

Washington speaks a very different language from the rest of America. It’s shoptalk. They can cite bills, procedures, committees, and other arcane things during their argument that make your face go blank. They enjoy doing it because no matter what side of the aisle you are on, you love the process, committee meetings, and all of that. It’s drama, and more importantly, it puts you in a power position where people have to cater to you even when, at the end of the day, nothing happens.

Our debt is unsustainable. Trump is making a bet that the US can grow far faster, and that GDP growth will help curb the debt problem. It’s a calculated bet, and a reduction in taxes combined with a reduction in regulations would give some wind to the sails.

The GOP can spin this bill any way they want, but the estimates I have seen of actual debt cutting happening are in the later years of the projected budget, not when Trump is in office. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office scores the budget using accounting rules, which is wrong, but even with that, the cutting doesn’t actually happen today.

We need to cut a couple of trillion in spending today and do it over the next couple of years. Freeze spending at 2023 levels and see what happens. No one will die. Only bureaucrats and crony capitalists will get hurt.

At Ace’s blog this morning, there is a great quote:

On another front, something that kind of puzzles me is this Big Beautiful Bill BS. I kind of don't understand the sanity of more debt and raising the debt ceiling while at the same time pushing DOGE. I think both Rand Paul

. . . and Elon Musk I think are right to be upset about this.

Frankly, I’m not interested in Government Efficiency. I want Government Reduction and Elimination.

That’s what I think most Americans voted for.