Elon Musk can’t do arithmetic


Kevin Drum over at jabberwocking.com watched the Trump spectacle over at Madison Square Garden so we didn’t have to. He zeros in on Elon Musk:

“Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut "at least" $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.1 trillion  last year, not $6.5 trillion.

The arithmetic here is simple. If you add up Social Security + Medicare + defense + veterans pensions + interest on the debt you get $3.9 trillion. There's only $2.2 trillion left.

 

“So Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.”

 

Note here that Trump promised not to cut Medicare and Social Security. He promised to increase defense spending. And interest payments on the debt are legally obligated.

Who believes this stuff? Most Americans are innumerate, so they have no interest in checking Musk’s fairy tales. But what caused Elon to trade his brand as savvy technocrat for the smug ignorance of the Trumpenproletariat?

 

Might be the ketamine talking here. Or maybe somebody told Musk that if he didn’t support Trump, he’d be denationalized and deported. Either way, he’s unmoored from reality now.

 

https://jabberwocking.com/msg-report-3/

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