Yes, it is theft of the US Treasury, pure and simple. DOGE is salivating to get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund, a fund all US people paid into over the past ~80 years.

I'm not defending DOGE here but the Social Security "Trust Fund" is more of an accounting gimmick than a real fund. It's not like a regular individual trust fund with a named account beneficiary. Excess Social Security taxes that weren't immediately needed to pay current benefits were used to buy Treasury bonds (or bills). All of the funds are co-mingled. One branch of the government owes money to another branch of government but there are no real assets.

Yes, but it's an important accounting gimmick.

Counterpoint: No thank you!

The money is redistributed from your pocket, via taxes, to the pockets of primarily billionaires who don't need more money.

You're doing that thing where you are creating a plausible justification of their goals and methods that they have not in fact presented and that is not real. The fact that someone could have a good reason for wanting to change social security does not mean that musk does, or that any good result can come from this one.

They are doing this illegally, these are crimes. Stop propagandizing in support of them.

This is a crazed scheme from wall street. No thanks.

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/sJcvp

I hope this stays up and we can have some quality discussion about what is ostensibly a historical moment in time: the autophagy of a formerly democratic government.

Long term (and short term, looking at the stock market) this can't be good for business right?! Who benefits?

The honest answer is that other autocratic regimes, who were enemies of the US until a couple months ago, greatly benefit from this.

But it is bad for business, and once the entire business community in the US figures that out, I honestly do predict that this experiment in anti-Americanism is going to fail.

They're not CPAs, they have zero auditing experience, and the federal government is one of the largest entities on Earth. What could possibly go wrong? It's insane that the Republican Congress allows this to continue, but here we are.

From now on, whenever you hear "DOGE did this" or "DOGE did that", or "Trump did this" or "Trump did that" - just remember they're doing it with the blessings of this Republican Congress, because they can put a stop to this at any time of their choosing.

Not only that but they're feeding all of this data into their "AI" and letting it make the decisions on hiring/firing and cutting programs, as well as detecting "fraud". They're absolute charlatans.

The "Real Federal Auditors" should go on a game show and play against the "Real Billionaires."

Even the military. 1990s military cuts were pretty severe and set us up for some of the profiteering that happened during Iraq and Afghanistan by private companies.

Actually auditors do allow you to face the reality of numbers.

Of course, historically speaking, kleptocratic conservatives and liberals then promptly ignore the auditors and keep doing whatever they please.

Now in this case, the kleptocrats are just cutting out the auditors altogether since they had no intention to face the reality of numbers in the first place.

The honesty and openness with which this particular group of kleptocrats approach the practice of their corruption is praiseworthy in a certain sense. /s

Two million dollars? Conservatively less than a penny per taxpayer? This is what you’re worried about?