Hilarious. Before the election, the WSJ swore up and down that Trump's agenda while superior to the Dems would actually cost MORE money over the next 5 years than Harris's. Now a shiny object (Musk) has them playing to the Trump marching band.
Do I believe DOGE will save some money...a lot of money? Yes, maybe $200 or $300 of $400 billion. Will that move the needle on government spending? NO! The budget is over $4 trillion and they aren't going to turn an apple into an orange.
What I'm sure of; Elon isn't worried about your ass, he's worried about his own. He comes first. You think that Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt put the nation's interests ahead of their own? Nope. They accomplished a great many important things that benefited our nation...out of self-interest.
Would you have cheered for them to run a government accountability office at the time? Only if they had shit for brains.
The Great DOGE Reversal
The project led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy puts citizens back on top.
By Daniel Henninger
Dec. 4, 2024 12:13 pm ET
It is easy to mock or minimize DOGE. Its name, the Department of Government Efficiency, reads like a Muskian stab at humor. It may be an impossible dream. Critics argue that the intention of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to cut federal spending by $2 trillion is unachievable because so much of the total is big-three entitlement spending—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—that’s set in political stone, with Donald Trump’s assent.
These predictions of falling short shouldn’t deter us from recognizing that the real significance of DOGE is overwhelmingly political. It is a needed reordering of how Americans think about the relationship between government and their own interests.
Nothing new has happened to affect this longstanding tension other than what I think was the most notable event in the 2024 election—the movement of blacks and Hispanics toward Mr. Trump, based largely on their analysis of his first presidential term. It created jobs, or what they took to be the promise of jobs. Given this sea change in minority-voter preference—from the party of FDR to a 21st-century Republican president—the most important thing Mr. Trump should do is focus on producing more of the same.
Achieving that goal of expanded economic opportunity should be a logical extension of Mr. Trump’s intention to upend the status quo. This is a transition in thinking that began four years ago in Mr. Trump’s tumultuous first term.
Most of us in what’s called the “political world” remember the first Trump term as mainly about the Steele dossier, James Comey, the Mueller investigation, impeachments and the pandemic. But obviously for increasing numbers of black and Hispanic voters, as well as white males from the same income class, that stuff barely existed. Where they live, life looked better.
One then may ask: Why spend so much political capital and effort on the Musk-Ramaswamy DOGE project, which appears to be mostly about Washington, similarly distant from the interests and concerns of these voters? If they’re moving allegiance toward the private economy, why not bank the politics and let Washington spin its wheels?
Reducing “government” is a longtime conservative goal. Its original popularizer was Ronald Reagan, who spoke of it constantly. One of his best lines, at a White House conference on small business, was: “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
In the years since, views like that have been described routinely as conservative “ideology,” a word intended to diminish the idea to an abstraction, not connected to much of anything achievable or real. In fact, what the ever-common-sensical Reagan had in mind was the practical division of power between those who work for government—without doubt a necessary institution since the beginning of organized life—and those who work outside government.
As often noted here, government’s rise to dominance in most of our lifetimes began with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s. In succeeding years, the idea became normalized that a very powerful national government and business could coexist. That coexistence has never been challenged successfully. A primary purpose of DOGE is to reverse this relationship, to make government again the subordinate partner in the daily life of citizens.
Mr. Trump gave a hint of this reversal in his first term with DOGE’s precursor—the deregulation movement led by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and Vice President Mike Pence. Both helped develop the pre-pandemic environment of economic opportunity that minority voters often cited in this year’s election. Both men since have been vilified by Mr. Trump, and those signing up for the DOGE reformation shouldn’t expect gratitude from the boss.
But it is also true that Mr. Trump can’t deliver on his most productive MAGA economic promises with the force of an insistent personality alone. If his presidency falters, those hopeful voters likely will experience a reversion in four years to Bidenomics.
Don’t confuse Bidenomics with Joe Biden. The economic programs and priorities of the Biden years were a massive effort by impatient progressive Democrats to implant the idea of government on top forever. The Biden transfer of trillions from government into both the private and public economies was eye-popping, even by the party’s historic standards of FDR or LBJ.
The message sent by lower-income voters who transferred their support to Mr. Trump is that they no longer believe in a way of life defined and led by the public dole—i.e., government. But the long-term economic opportunity they desire—for themselves and for their own children moving into adulthood—will be thwarted unless government’s limitless growth and spread is capped now.
I don’t doubt that what Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy are attempting with DOGE is difficult, maybe too difficult. But if the choice has become choosing between one side’s eternal dole and the other’s DOGE, I’ll bet the future on the latter.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
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