One of Elon Musk's DOGE wizards got the boot for finding that the government works and is not as inefficient as he was expecting

No good deed goes unpunished.

 

... “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...

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Now the Trump administration is imitating the most odious revolutionary rhetoric of the Obama administration

 

WH's Karoline Leavitt: Trump "Is Fundamentally Transforming Our Country For The Better"

 

We are fundamentally transforming our country for the better, truly restoring our government, the 27-year old know-nothing says, when they're actually gutting it. 

These people all think they're so smart.

 

They think they're cutting something down to size which is already on its knees. Federal employment today has hardly been lower as a percentage of civilian population in the post-war. The low point was achieved already in 2018. The Leviathan State is a complete myth.

 

If Trump truly restored our government, he'd be hiring dramatically, not firing. 

For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as “crooked” and likening their removal to “getting rid of all the cancer.” A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.

To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports.

The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. ...

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The country is $36 trillion in debt because it is not taxing enough, and hasn't been taxing enough since Ronald Reagan. We pretend we can borrow to infinity for what we want, but we can't afford it all anymore. That is why they're surrendering to Putin, and taking a meat cleaver to DC.

This is not a serious country, otherwise a South African wouldn't be running it.

 

 

 

 

 

Lyin' Joe Biden's IRS is auditing the middle class, not the rich as promised

 Discussed here:

 "As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000," reports the Journal. "Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million." ... 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited," she wrote in a letter to Rettig. ...

The IRS had set a goal of hiring 3,700 new agents in the first year of boosted funding. Instead, in the first six months, they'd hired 34.

Awkwardly, "revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023," per a previous watchdog report. And it's not just hiring that's in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.

LOL, according to this stupid definition by a university pinhead, there are only 23.8 million middle class workers

“If you are holding a position that is non-managerial, non-executive level, doesn’t have a lot of decision power, you would have been classified in our study as working class,” Addo says [here].

In February 2022 there were 128.2 million total private employees. 104.4 million of them were "production and nonsupervisory".

 

That's a ratio of workers to supervisors of about 4.4:1 in the private sector. In the federal government, the ratio's much worse, somewhere between 7-10:1. That's probably closer to the truth also for the entire government sector,  which is 22.2  million strong.

 

The supervisors are the elite minority, hello. 

The best proxy for middle class has always been homeownership: house, condo, whatever. It's one of the most basic things which has defined us and more importantly united us for generations. There was a time when everyone said, rich and poor alike, that they were middle class, it was that strong of an American ideal. 

Now we're stuck with a bunch of eggheads trying to divide us by overthrowing definitions.

Total households in 2020 numbered about 128.5 million in the United States. Roughly 84 million were owner occupied at the time, 42 million renter occupied, a ratio of 2:1.

 

The average size of a household in 2020 was about 2.53: (84 + 42) 2.53 = 319 million (a relatively small additional number of Americans lives in subsidized housing, military housing, and institutionalized housing).

A broad swath of Americans, 66%, lives in an owned home, with about a third distributed at the top and the bottom renting out of either convenience or necessity.

 

And most of them are by definition nonsupervisory employees.