February 22, 2025 • 44 mins
Think Like an Economist podcast’s Justin Wolfers examines the “fuzzy math” behind DOGE’s supposed savings for Americans. The Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer details the new global alignments in a post-Trump 2.0 world.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and Donald Trump is pulling worse on
the economy than any reason.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
President.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
We have such a great show for you today, Think
like an economist. Podcast host Justin Wolfers steps by to
talk about the fuzzy math of DOGE savings for the
American people. Then we'll talk to the Eurasia groups Ian
Bremer about the new global alignment in Trump two point zero.
But first the.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
News Smiley, It's beginning to look a lot like Germany
in some people's hand gestures these days. There's quite a
lot of Boback. After Steve Bennon, who seems to hate
Elon Musk, did a similar gesture to him.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Personally, I don't want to make any hand gesture that
can be interpreted anyway that starts with an end and
ends with an eye. I just think stay away from
all of these hand gestures. French far right leader Jordan
Bardella canceled planned remarks at Seapack after ex Trump advisor
Steve Bannon made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology. That's
(01:11):
a direct quote, according to a statement. This is the
far right leader from France who's saying that it is
too close to Nazi ideology for him. Let's take a
moment to think about that for a second. The far
right leader from France, not the left wing leader, but
the far right leader from France is saying that that's
(01:32):
worth thinking about for a minute. It is probably the
strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, but it's worth pointing out
how far afield we have gotten in the United States
of America that this kind of rebuke must come from
someone on the far right from France. You're welcome. I
can't take it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
It's so bad.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, it's really a shape if the reports that we're
there's not going to be any more seapas anymore come true,
because then they'll just never have an up or you
to go there and do all these interesting hand motions.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
It's also worth just pausing for a moment and remembering
that we have this seapack and yet we don't have
a democratic version of it. We don't even have a
centrist version of it. We just have this one thing.
You know, if you are a listener this podcast, perhaps
you would like to have something that is like seapack,
(02:23):
but not as zealatus.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Not as awful.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
So this is the interesting new development is the staff
at multiple government agencies have been instructed not to speak
to Congress.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yes, Congress, which is supposed to be running this whole thing,
is getting less and less and less power, and we're
seeing it happen in real time. Here's a Democratic congress person.
She sent several letters to different federal agencies and the
employees were said that they were not able to speak
to her. The Committee on approbates as a long standing
(03:01):
relationship with agency career staff, Well not anymore. Are This
is the transparency that is doge.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Yeah, it's almost like, you know, there's supposed to be
these checks and balances in the government and we're deciding
that feels real irrelevant. The founding fathers didn't want that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, no, I mean, this is a takeover of the
United States government at the highest level, and that's what
we're watching in real time. And you know, Congress has
given up what little power they had and they gave
it up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and now
Elon Musk is cutting away at the government despite the
fact that that is not how any of this is
(03:38):
supposed to work.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
With those drastic overreaches and sledgehambers to oversight trump claims
power to fire administrative law judges.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That will Yeah, so again, Look, there are a couple
things that Trump wor is doing with the courts.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
That are bad.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
One is that they are really like either they haven't
quite yet done it, but they are priming themselves to
a judicial rulings, which, by the way, will tip us
into a constitutional crisis. I don't know that it's quite
happened yet, but there's a lot of kind of voodoo
math going on when it comes to unfreezing these funds.
(04:15):
A lot of them are being unfrozen or a lot
of them aren't being unfrozen as the way the federal
judiciary is instructed.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
So we're going to see more of this.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
We're going to eventually, hopefully not, but I think there's
a very likely scenario where the courts are ignored, where
these members of the federal government in Trump world, under
the instruction a Musk and Trump barrel through the guardrails
and continue to have their way with the federal government. Now,
(04:42):
the one piece I think of good news here is
that we're starting to see real pushback, and we're starting
to see it from both the right and the left,
because you're seeing these town halls of these people who
are suddenly understanding just what's stake in these town halls.
And I think we're going to see more and more
(05:04):
of that, And I think that we are absolutely one
hundred percent at the beginning of a real ground level
pushback that I think is going to be really important
and good.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
So I would say.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
That, I mean, I think there's a very interesting theory
of the case that a lot of people live their
life not being really affected by Trump's first term and
didn't see tangible changes to their life. They just didn't
like what was happening. But here we're seeing it all
the time, and there's even more evidence of it where
that could happen right here, Which is our next subject,
which is Trump fires federal workers who help fight forest
(05:39):
fires weeks after historic LA blazes.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, I mean, and the FDA and the cuts. You
know today they were talking about how they're going to
cut the FAI. I mean, these are things that if
they are cut, we're going to see real tangible results
right away. And TSA, for example, they're going to cut
the DSA that's going to mean longer lines and airs.
I mean, these things are going to affect.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Every part of our lives.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And I think it's really important to remind people that
this is not happening because the federal government is in
trouble now. I mean, certainly we run a big deficit.
This is happening because Republicans do not want to let
these tax cuts for corporations and millionaires expire.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
That is what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, And they have a theory of the case that
none of these people's work is necessary, that the private
sector will just pick it up and then they won't
have to pay for it anymore, and that theory of
the case is very dumb.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Justin Wolfers is the host of the Think Like an
Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. Justin wolf You, Molly Sancy
academic here to explain to us all the money that
don't or some members of the United States Senate call
(07:02):
it doggie, is saving the American people lots of money.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
So explain.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Could you just stop by telling me who calls it doggie?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
We had a senator call it doggy. The other day.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And actually there are some members of Congress who are
calling it doggie, and you know what, for power to them,
they are not wrong. Oh actually, Jesse said, everyone calls
it doggie.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I love seeing Christian Conservatives becoming comfortable with themselves, their sexuality,
their bodies, and what we can do with them.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
All right, so let's focus on the money they're saving.
It strikes me that they're not saving that much money. Discuss.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Yeah, So I'm going to start with the math, and
I'm not going to apologize to your listeners because actually
the math is the whole story. So there's a website
Elon says he's super transparent in which he lists every
one of his savings. So I went on that website
last night and I mapped it up. I imported all
the dater into a spreadsheet, and I added up all
(08:00):
the savings and it adds up to seven point three
billion dollars. Sounds like a low, right, Like you and
I could have a terrific night hour.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
It feels like a lot. I good, Yeah, summer house everything.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Now.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
So here's the thing. There are three hundred and forty
million Americans. So we're going to do long division seven
point three billion divided by three hundred and forty million.
What's that? That's about twenty dollars, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, that doesn't seem like that much.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
It's twenty one dollars and forty seven cents per American.
Now the President is so excited by how much money
that Doze is saving us that he's recommended that perhaps
we should have a Doge dividend that he sends out
dividend checks where one fifth of the Doze savings goes
out to us as Doge dividends or stimulus checks, and
the other four fifths, of course girded tax cuts for
(08:48):
the rich. That one fifth then adds up to four
dollars and twenty nine cents per american. Now, it turns
out a cart and of eggs costs more than that,
So so far Doze will yield savings.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Of nine e nine eggs.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Nine eggs. You can have many way you want them.
You have to cook them yourself.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Do they sell them in nine tacks? I thought they
didn't sell them a nine facs.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Yeah, Well, what you can do is buy a six
pack and then split another six pack with the neighbor. Okay,
and that's your dividend check. Don't spend it all at once?
Can I teach the listeners some economics?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Please? And teach me too.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Okay, so the amazing thing, right, the bottom line is
the dose savings are trivial. They're tiny. You're getting four
dollars and twenty nine cents, and in return, it's going
to be hard to get into the national parks. The
analysts who determine whether the Department of Transport invests in
good stuff or bad stuff got laid off, so we
might spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bad stuff.
That all sorts of services are getting cut across the
(09:43):
federal government. So you got your four dollars twenty nine
cents on the one side, and you've got a less
effective government on the outher. Okay, here's the most important
thing and the most difficult thing to understand about physcal policy,
and it's simply this. Our minds, our human minds, are
not very good at thinking about big numbers. So millions
sounds like a lot of money, billions sounds like heapes,
(10:07):
and trillions sounds magnificent, And that's roughly right. But the
thing to realize is these words sound the same, but
they mean very very very very different things. And so
when someone says I have generated savings of say seven
billion dollars, don't get impressed. The first thing you have
to do is take any number and reduce it to
(10:27):
a human scale, a scale that your mind understands. And
in this case, what I did is i'd made it
per person. Now I realize Elon is saving twenty one
dollars and forty seven cents per person, and that's a
scale I can understanding. All of a sudden, these impressive numbers.
We realize that Elon's looking in the wrong place, is
doing the wrong things.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Isn't there an eight billion dollars savings that's actually eight
million dollars?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Yes? Okay, So first of all, everything I just said
is taking Eilon at his word, saying I went to
the website, I counted his savings as he counts them,
and so on. Now it turns out there's a bunch
of Salutes who've gone into the Doze data where they
list Doze as savings, and they've said, hey, is this
really a saving? Now? The most prominent of these was
a case where those claim to have saved eight billion
(11:14):
dollars on a very small project that couldn't possibly be
worth eight billion, right, And this again is the problem.
So some idiot wrote down eight billion without realizing that
was completely out of scale for the sort of project
that I think about. Since that the project was eight million,
so Doze had to go back and say, well, actually
we are exaggerated by seven point ninety nine to two billion,
but don't worry, we staved you eight million.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm not an economist.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
You're not an economist, mind, but it's less. That's what
you're going to tell me.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, I'm not an economist, but I feel like there's
a lot of difference between a billion and a million.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
That's really, really really important to be literal. A billion
is a thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand billion.
So let's try and create our own scale here. May
Musk wants to save two trillion, and if he does,
that will balance the budget, which is the deficits around
about one point eight trillion. Right now, Okay, so he's
after two trillion, So if he saves two billion, that's
(12:10):
zero point one percent of the way there. Another way
of saying this is if he saves twenty billion, think
about how far he's got to run as being one
football field. A football field is one hundred yards. If
he gets to twenty billion, then he's moved the ball
forward one yard. Okay, he's moved it forward seven point
three billion, so he's moved the ball from his goal
line one foot. And I really want listeners to think
(12:33):
about that. Realize that on this fiscal football field, each
yard is twenty billion. So whenever you hear a word
that begins with M million, realize it's doing no work whatsoever. Right,
it's moving you forward like a quarter of an inch.
It's tiny, it's infinitesimal, like it matters for people in
their lives, but it's not. If what you think you're
(12:55):
going to do is fundamentally transform our government's finances, you
can't even stuff that begins with a letter M from million.
You've got to start with billion. And in fact, if
you want a yard, you want twenty billion. And he's
not even at one yard yet.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, I want you to sort of top line because
what Republicans have done have said like we are cutting
waste and fraud, which again fraud seems to me, and
according to elon things he doesn't agree with, discuss wonderful.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
So here's another economic principle for the listeners, and it's
one I tell my students. You're never allowed to use
the word cost without the word benefit. Right. You could
say I saved two thousand dollars worth of costs. Why
is that? Well, I stopped paying my mortgage. Right, that's
not a benefit to stop paying your mortgage. It's going
to come back and by you on the bum. So
the one exception to that rule that you can use
(13:43):
the word cost without benefits because if there's a cost cut,
there's a benefit cut is if you're eliminating waste for
auDA abuse. Because waste fordam abuse is all cost, no benefit.
And so that's sort of the idea behind Doze or
the animating politics or the animating narrative. The thing there's
not that much waste fraud and abuse. More than that,
(14:03):
Doge isn't finding it. Here's how you know something's waste,
fraud and abuse. When they discover it, people are arrested,
right that onto it. So far Doze is at zero arrests.
What they've done instead is they've discovered some things Elon
doesn't like. Elon doesn't like it when usaid, which is
basically how the US government helps other countries foreign aid.
(14:24):
It's less than one percent of our federal budget. It
gives us soft power, and it makes the world a
safer place. Elon doesn't like that, so he eliminates it.
But it's not waste fraud and abuse. That's a value judgment.
We had a whole circus last week where Elon discovered
that there were lots of Social Security numbers for people
who were not recorded as having been dead.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, as please talk about that.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
He literally goes on to claim, as the White House did.
Trump doubled down, as did his press secretary, that tens
of millions of people are receiving Social Security who shouldn't
be receiving it. That would be waste, fraud and abuse.
So you can see this is like a really important
thing from a retire perspective, because this is how doze
becomes a technocratic apparatus rather than a political one. Now,
the reality is that there were not tens of millions
(15:09):
of people receiving Social Security. He shouldn't. What happens is
there's one data based table. God, I'm so boring right now.
I'm going to bore everyone.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
No, it's not boring. It's a coding error.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Right, it's actually even more boring. There's one database table
at Social Security where they list all the social Security
numbers that have ever been issued, and then you want
to have another column in that table. Think of like
a big Excel spreadsheet, which says, is this person dead?
And it turns out if you just take all the
people who are not recorded as being dead, there's tens
of millions of people or social security numbers that were
(15:42):
issued to people born over one hundred years ago. Now
that doesn't mean those people are receiving social Security. In fact,
almost all of those records were people who died more
than fifty years ago before we had electronic death records,
and as a result, there was no easy way to
update this table to show that they were dead. But
if you go through those social scurity numbers, no one's
drawing a check from them, because social Security is a
(16:03):
remarkably more sophisticated operation than Musk and his coders. And
so it turns out that in reality, there are about
eighty thousand Americans age ninety nine or older who are
receiving Social Security, not sixty million. And actually eighty thousand
is about the right number because we actually do have
some old people in America who are receiving Social Security,
(16:23):
and a reasonable estimate is not that there were sixty
million people receiving social Security who shouldn't be, but rather
perhaps it's sixty and so the millions of people he found,
and therefore the billions of dollars he saved, was literally
a misinterpretation from a guy who was too busy to
be bothered to go to Google to say, why are
(16:45):
there so many Social Security numbers that are not yet
marked as dead? If he'd done that, he would have
discovered there was a twenty twenty three Inspector General report
that explains literally every line of this inexcruciatingly boring detail.
There's no problem with the Social Security database. The only
problem is when a naive person misinterprets it.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Part of the thinking behind this, I think, on the
part of a lot of conservatives, was that dought sort
of technology that the rest of us didn't know existed, right,
that they were going to be able to look at
things in ways that the rest of us couldn't, and
that they were going to be able. And I think
of it as like sort of the revenge of the buzzword.
Like there have been you know, for example, like two
(17:27):
years ago, everyone was going to put everything on the blockchain, right,
and then you know, the blockchain is.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Good, but the world is not running on blockchain.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And this is a sort of similar thing, right, everything's AI,
the AI, this the AI that, And I do think
to a certain extent, a lot of these bureaucrats thought
that AI was going to be able to rip through
the federal government and figure out everything, and we're seeing
in fact that they're just sort of haphazardly cutting things
Elon doesn't like.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Yes, So that's I think extraordinarily insightful. So if the
argument is that the government should run on modern technology,
I'm completely in favor. In which case I'm really very
disappointed that the first thing the Republicans want to do
is strip the technology modernization money out of the irs.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, that doesn't seem to square with the theory.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Right. Look, I can give listeners two answers. One, it's
not going to work. You can walk away and just
believe me because my first name is professor. But that's
a shitty way of thinking. What I want to do
is give you a really deep understanding of why it's
not going to work. So many of us have in
our minds the sense that government is bloated and inefficient.
I know that last time I went to get my
driver's license renewed, it was the most infuriating and frustrating
(18:35):
thing in the world. I know I've waited in the
long line at the post office. I know that sometimes
my kids that this local schools are not well run,
and so on. The first thing to understand is that
most government services a state and local government. They're not federal.
The best business analogy for the federal government it's a
company called ADP. ADP is a private sector company that
does payroll processing. Basically, a lot of companies send ADP
(18:58):
their bank account detail and it's probably true for you money.
It's how you get paid. They send your bank account
details and an amount of money and ADP will send
out the check. Many of your listeners will receive their
checks yo ad So basically, what is ADP. It's a
bunch of nerds with computers and basically a really big
check printer. Why do I bring them up? What is
the federal government? So it's not the DMV, and it's
(19:21):
not the local hospital, and it's not the local schools.
That's the state government. Most of what the federal government
does is takes in money through taxes and sends it
back out. It's basically there to take money in when
you're doing well and then give it back to you
when you need it. That's what social security is, that's
what unemployment insurance is, and so on. So it turns
out that yes, the federal government spends lots of money,
but it spends a lot of money in the same
(19:42):
way adp quote spends a lot of money. It's just
writing a lot of checks. It's writing a lot of
checks folks who also send them in money. So if
you want to save money, it's not really going to
be there's too many people manning the check printer, right,
it's really are we getting enough checks in and we're
sending enough checks out. So there's this old saying the
federal government's an insurance company with an army, and it's
(20:03):
basically right. So again, remember the first lesson we said,
which was I want you to think about twenty billion
dollars in savings as being one yard on a football field.
Total federal spending on payroll on people who work for
the federal government is two hundred billion dollars, which is
to say it's ten yards. You could fire everyone who
worked for the federal government and you'd move the ball
ten yards. Now, no one wants to do that. Elon
(20:26):
might end up reducing the federal workforce by ten percent,
and that's going to involve a lot of very very
painful cuts and a lot of very very painful services.
Ten percent of ton of billion is twenty billion. So
if he cuts the federal workforce by ten percent, a
massive amount, he moves the football forward one yard and
he's got ninety nine to go. The point here is
(20:46):
it's not about workforce reduction. That's not where the money is.
The money is in two places. It's a rich guy
is not paying enough taxes. That's the money that's not
coming in.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
I don't think Elon's so interested in that.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And then there's the money that's going out, which is
predominantly Social Security, Medicare, and medicaid. If you're against those programs,
you want to send fear of those checks before you
better go to Congress first. And if you think that
those programs are actually a really fair and useful thing
that the federal government does, then you realize that actually,
like most of what the federal government does, because that's
most of where the federal dollars are going.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, and then there's also one other saying which you
don't mention, which is servicing the national dat.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
So that still basically makes the federal government like ADP.
It's printing a lot of checks. And you're right that
some amount of our revenue now is just going to
pay in interest bills a large and increasingly large amount.
And then this brings us all the way back full circle,
which is where is our fiscal position, which is the
economy is very good. May disappoint some lirls to hear that,
(21:42):
but I believe that's true. When the economy is very good,
the government should be stocking away money to either repay
past debts or for a rainy day in the future. Instead,
we have a very very large budget deficit and very
large interest payments, and Trump is promising about four trillion
dollars worth of tax cuts back to the football field.
(22:03):
Four trillion now is two football fields, right, So Elon's
going to move the ball one yard and then Trump
is going to run it back two hundred yards. So
that's how this math isn't mathing. And so there really
is a quite serious fiscal situation that Republicans need to decide.
Do they want to blow out the dead. Maybe that's
what they want to do, which is leave it for
Democrats to clean up again and they get their priorities through.
(22:26):
That could be what's going on. At some point. You've
got to wonder how long this can go on?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Right, But that's a real question.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
I watched c SPAN because I have no life, and
I was listening to Rand Paul, who I think of
as almost always wrong about everything.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Because remember these tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The panic here is because Republicans don't want these tax
cuts to expire. If these tax cuts are allowed to expire,
talk goes through where the American government is financially.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I haven't done the matter too much on this, so
I'm just going to speak in broad terms. If the
Trump tax cuts expired, then we will still have an
ongoing budget defice at a time where it would be
a good time to have a budget surplus. There will
be a donor class who are furious. What's funny is there's,
you know, three classes of Republicans on this. There's the
old school, balanced the budget guys who haven't won an
(23:21):
argument since they lost to Reagan in nineteen eighty. Mike
Johnson claims to be one of those guys. I don't
believe him. There's the tax cuts for the rich because
it'll all trickle down, and then there's the put your
fingers in your ears and do whatever the dear leader says,
which is currently in the ascendency, and it not only
wants to extend that Trump tax cuts. Trump is still
(23:42):
talking about tax cuts on Social Security, no taxes on tips,
no taxes on overtime.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
He's really into no taxes on tips, which, by the way,
is completely unsustainable, right, because then everything can become a tip.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
You know exactly what I'm going to be doing, which is,
I'm going to tell the University of Michigan that I
am going to be willing to work for seventeen dollars
plus tips, but if the tips aren't good enough, I'm leaving,
and so as a result, all of my income becomes untaxable.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Fantastic, it is, literally, right, Yeah, go on.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
I'm loving it. Yeah, it's give me terrific.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I think that's a really good point here.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So fundamentally, this is a problem created by Republicans. I mean,
if you were to say tomorrow, and again, I know
you haven't run the numbers on this, but I just
want to like reiterate as a socialist. I'm not really
a socialist, but compared to a lot of these people,
I am. If you just let these tax cuts expired,
you raise the corporate tax rate a little smidge, and
(24:38):
you said, you know, if you make more than one
hundred million dollars a year you need to pay slightly,
you know, an extra two percent in taxes that you
could cut the deficit quite helcily quickly.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yes, No, his, I think the essential point I want
to leave. You'll listen this with Imagine that you've been
given a KPE and you're told that you're the super
deficit hole. You get to solve our physical problems. The
question is, would you spend your days and nights trolling
through the newspaper subscriptions at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission,
(25:11):
which we're cut and looking for fake Social Security payments
and finding none, or would you go and spend all
your time up the road at the irs, looking at
the millionaires and billionaires who we know are paying very
very low tax rates and using various sophisticated schemes and
have excessively low audit rates. Where do you think the
real money's lying? And I think when you think about
(25:33):
that question, the intuition, I think is obvious. If you're
after the real money, it's the taxes that aren't getting paid,
and that's the only place they're not looking. And instead,
what they're doing is they're looking at what seems to
be technocratic and it meets everyone's sense that government is inefficient,
but there's no money there at all.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It serves a political cira, but it doesn't necessarily it's
approved exactly.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So what you're seeing out of DOGE is pure political theater.
It's either cutting things but calling it waste when it's not,
or it's not really making important cuts at all, and
it's providing political cover then to ignore the rest of
the deficit issues so that they can generate text cuts
for the rage.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Oh Man, so interesting and also OI, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
You, great joy.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Ian Bremer is the president of the Erasure Group. Welcome
back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Ian, Thank you, Mollie goe to be with you.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So I felt like we had to have you on
because of the incredible stuff coming out of Trump World,
and it's bizarre for foreign policy debacle from the Munich
Security Conference on we've just seen such a high level
(26:49):
of unprecedented. I know you're not supposed to say unprecedented,
We'll just say without precedent when it comes to Trump
World and formulations. So talk us through where you are are,
what you see, and sort of your take on that.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
What we see is a reversion of the United States
to support the law of the jungle. In other words,
on the global stage, might mix right. If you're powerful,
you get to set the outcomes. It's an important shift because,
of course, for a long time, the United States was
actively involved in promoting a very different kind of world order,
(27:27):
still the most powerful country, but one where the US
supported collective security, where the US supported the promotion of
rule of law and free trade and even the promotion
of democracy, not always consistently, certainly a lot of hypocrisy,
but nonetheless that was the idea.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
That's clearly not the idea anymore.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
Ask the Ukrainians, or the Canadians, or the Germans, or
the Panamanians, or the Mexicans or any of a number
of other American allies right now who feel that the
United States is acting in a predatory manner because the
US is so much more powerful because they can't. And
I mean clearly, since I've just spent time. I spent
a week and a half in Europe and most of
(28:11):
that time talking with erstwhile American allies who increasingly feel
like the United States is led by an adversary to them.
And that's a really big change. So that's what's fundamental here.
And how much of that is true? Is that universal?
I'd answer no. There are a lot of countries that
don't feel like the rug has been pulled out from
(28:32):
under them the way the Europeans, for example, presently do.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
But certainly big changes are afoot.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
There are open questions about the survivability of the Transatlantic Alliance,
and certainly very big questions about what happens with Ukraine,
what happens with Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
That's NATO. You're talking about the surviv villains of NATO, right.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
Yes, and more and more broadly, I mean the alignment
of the US with Europe.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
But sure, I mean both of those things are true.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
It's interesting if you were awake at all during Trump
one point zero, none of this is a huge surprise
that said, the fact that this stuff still comes out
as a surprise, I think is actually kind of its
own surprise. Will you talk to us about for example,
(29:21):
it definitly seems like Trump two point zero is ten
times more supercharged, which they were promising. But I'm hoping
you could talk to us about the predatory idea here,
for example, the idea that somehow he's going to secure
some amount of mineral rights from Ukraine. That does seem
like something I have never seen in my adult life.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
So will you talk about that?
Speaker 4 (29:44):
So a lot of things here.
Speaker 5 (29:46):
First of all, on Ukraine, I have no problem at
all with the idea that the United States could cut
a deal exploiting Ukraine's natural resources in return for in
during national security going forward and providing arms. And I
have no problem with that where I think, I mean,
there's a question of how the deal should be structured,
(30:08):
what the right level of compensation is. You know, Ukraine
is not a country that has great infrastructure right now,
would take a long time to invest and take a
long time to get it out. I mean, you know,
the US should be paid for taking that risk if
they're going to make that investment. All those things Where
I would have a very serious problem, and I see
it as unprecedented. Is the idea that the Americans should
(30:28):
be paid back for aid eight that the American government
has already granted. That would certainly be unprecedented in modern
times for.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
The United States.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
And it's something that I mean, the Ukrainians may end
up accepting because they have no choice.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
That's predatory behavior.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
That's what you do as a corporate raider when you
know you're facing a company that is in bankruptcy and
has no choice, and you rip their faces off. And
I mean, to be fair, at Trump's background is in that.
In that field, he knows how to rip people's faces
off when they're weak, and he's now doing it geopolitically.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Now is that new?
Speaker 5 (31:04):
I think it is new, And I think it's new
because Trump's in such a more powerful position now in
so many ways than he was in twenty seventeen. I think,
you know, some of it is that America's adversaries are weaker.
China has the worst economy since the nineties, maybe the seventies.
Russia is actually in decline given the war and other problems.
(31:25):
Iran has just lost their proxy empire across the Middle
East America's.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Allies are weaker.
Speaker 5 (31:31):
The US economy is performing so much better coming out
of the pandemic than all of the other G seven economies.
US technology outstrips American allies by you know, wildly. Think
about America's energy production compared to Europe's desperate need, Japan's
desperate need. And then of course you have the political
consolidation around Trump. He is in a strong position. He
(31:52):
has the House and seidate, he has the GOP reporting
to him in a way that so many allies are
facing very big problems against their own incumbents. And you know,
you saw Canada's government just fall apart, South Korea's government
fall apart, Japan just had a big loss.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
And now they're in coalition.
Speaker 5 (32:10):
Even India had to face coalition, France, Germany.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
You know, it goes on and on.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
So we're in a particular time where this Trump administration
is really strong. And then Molly one more point, since
we're really leaning in on this, which is that Trump personally, really,
I think does feel not just vindicated, because it's the
greatest political comeback story in American history. If you think
about where he was on January sixth, then with the
(32:36):
second impeachment where he is today having won not an
election without the popular vote the first time around, but
with the popular vote, but also having survived an assassination
attempt where he was shot in the hit, right. I mean,
this man now, and he's said this in conversations with friends,
he believes that, you know, he was saved by God
(32:57):
and that you know, it's like divine intervention and is
why he's president now. So his level of confidence is
just extraordinary. That wasn't true at all in twenty seventeen.
He needed the Republicans to give him legitimacy. He didn't
have it himself, you know. I mean, he was pretty
insecure privately in terms of being the president.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
He isn't now.
Speaker 5 (33:19):
And so I think when you put all of those
things together, you have to recognize that this is a
This is a wildly different administration than twenty seventeen. That's
even before we talk about the fact that they have
Elon to activate them, who is so much more powerful
and capable than anyone they had in the first administration.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I understand when you say powerful, I'm not entirely going
to go along with capable, because what we're seeing now
in week five of whatever this is is that actually
Elon has had to rehire a bunch of people. The
ethos has moved fast and break things. They're breaking a
(33:59):
lot of them.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I'm talking about capacity, capacity to get things done. Does
that mean capacity to do things that people are going
to like or are going to work the way that
he intends them to work.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
That's a different story.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
But there's no question that if what Trump is interested
in doing is bringing about a revolution domestically and frankly
in some ways internationally, Elon is uniquely positioned in his
administration to help him do that. I disagree with many
things that the Elon is doing in the government, of course,
but I think he's incredibly capable. I think that you
(34:34):
look at who that he is appointed in cabinet can
get things done. You look at someone like Pete Hegseth
and he can talk about wanting to do a thirty
four percent cut down in defense budget. I'm very skeptical,
and I think the generals and admirals.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Are going to run circles around this guy. Elon.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
On the other hand, I think Tulsey Gabbert got appointed
because of Elon. I think he made some calls to
Republican senators, and he changed those votes because they're scared
of them. I think his ability to get things done
is beyond that of anyone outside an individual president I
have seen in my life in the United States.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Well, I'm not going to argue with you on this
because you clearly know something about Elon and I don't.
But I would say, certainly having unlimited funds is a
huge advantage. The question is again, and I wonder about
this is as someone who was a longtime fan of
the incredible things that came out of Silicon Valley, it
(35:28):
does feel to me like the what Elon is banking
on is a technology that almost exists, and so I
think there's a thinking here that AI can do things
that it can't quite do yet. And so and maybe
I'm wrong, but it certainly seems like why they would
fire like the nuclear scientists for ten hours, or why
(35:51):
they would fire today. A friend of mine who works
in that world sent me a text message to say
that they had fired the and again like this is
just you know, this has not been reported yet, but
from Los Alamos, you have things like a plutonium facility.
I mean, he said, you know, they fire the radiation
protection manager, Emergency response manager and security manager from Los Alamos.
(36:16):
Then they tried to get them back, and that's what
we're seeing at the FDA. We're seeing that at different
parts of the government where and even like and they're
still going. So Again, the larger problem it being unconstitutional.
If you don't believe that the law applies to you,
you can do whatever you want, which is the fundamental
(36:37):
underlying problem of Elon. But I would add that if
he were such a genius, wouldn't he be able to
fire people who weren't needed to be rehired right away.
Speaker 5 (36:48):
I don't know as much about how effective AI is
going to be for Elon using DOGE inside the US
regulatory environment and the government system. I know a lot
of people that I respect, with greater technological capacity than
you and I that believe that this is going to
be a game changer for the US over the medium term,
and that the Europeans.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Are going to be left way behind and all the
rest that.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
No, no, no, But what I'm saying is not arguing
with any of those points.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
I want to make your point in an area that
I know much better, which is usaid. Because here the
United States provides about forty percent of all the global
humanitarian aid period and the United States is now basically
shutting down the principle mechanism to deliver that aid. And
they are not doing this in a way to say,
(37:34):
let's first go through all the programs. Let's see which
ones are complete crap that no US taxpayers would support
if they actually knew what was happening. And there's a
lot of that, and let's keep the things that really matter,
like you know, preventing AIDS and stopping ebola when there's
an active outbreak, and you know, dealing with like children's
(37:54):
hunger and all that, and they are not doing that.
And the fact that they have chosen to shut everything
down fully aware that there are lots of really important
programs that are going to be caught up in that
that is the intention. They know that the cruelty is
in part the point. The thing that worries me the most,
I mean, aside from the fact that I just feel
(38:15):
bad for all of these innocent people that are being
caught up in it, is the fact that the Chinese
are going to make bank here. I mean, they're the
ones that are already the leading trade partners with almost
every country in the global South, and those ministers and
presidents and prime ministers who have just had their programs
cut by the US are.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
All turning to China.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
And what worries me most about the Trump elon approach
is that it is penny wise and pound foolish, that
it will get all sorts of wins today and will
deeply undermine America's power position in the world in five
and ten years time. And to be fair, I don't
think Trump cares that much about five and ten years
time out, but I do, and you do, and a
(38:59):
lot of sites in the United States do. And they're
being sold a bill of goods here.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, for sure, And I think that is certainly an
important point. So my larger question here is think about
with that Munich security speech, the j de Man's speech
where he said good night and good luck, what have
been you know, now we're a couple weeks out from that,
what have the sort of ripples been from that?
Speaker 4 (39:23):
I wish we were a couple of weeks. We're not
even one week out from that.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
We're not even one week out from that. Okay, we're
almost one week out from that.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
It feels like a year. That's the funny thing, right,
But we'll literally I was there. I was in the room.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
I was maybe twenty feet from him. How to go
over to say badly would be an understatement, but it
was a shock.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Some people were in tears.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
People were angry when he said specifically, I mean, look,
it's a security conference, and yet he didn't talk about security.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
I mean like he didn't talk about.
Speaker 5 (39:54):
Ukraine or China or Gaza in the speech he made
passing reference to I know, we got all these other things,
but what the most important threat is the threat you
know to inside the room. It's the woke virus, it's
the it's lack of free speech, and it's democracy falling apart, which,
of course I mean from my perspective, there are many
(40:15):
things that the Americans can and should lecture the Europeans on,
like innovation and competitiveness and entrepreneurship and lack of red
tape and all these things. JD chose the one thing
to lecture the Europeans on the Americans don't actually have
good standing on, right. But leaving that aside, he specifically
this is the part that really mattered. He talked about
(40:37):
the firewall, and most Americans don't know what the firewall is.
This is the Germans refusal to work with join government
with make policy with the Alternatives for deutsch Land party,
which right now polls it just over twenty percent and
this weekend's upcoming elections in Germany and is considered by
(40:59):
the entire German political spectrum outside of the AfD as
a neo Nazi party. They are, they are under surveillance
from German intelligence. It is about as raw and central
to German governance and what their state means as anything
you can imagine. And this is coming from a United
(41:20):
States which led the world in de nazifying Germany after
World War Two, coming from a vice president who went
to Dacow and saw the concentration camps the day before
he gave that speech, and then he says, you need
to end the firewall because you are not democratic if
you refuse to engage with the twenty percent of your
(41:43):
population that supports this in Germans views neo Nazi party.
And then later that day he refuses to meet with
the German chancellor. He does meet with the head of
the AfD, the sitting vice president. First of all, I
saw all of a sudden when he made that statement
I saw a man and yell out, this is unacceptable.
(42:03):
And most people in the room had no idea who
it was because it was a packed room and he
was sitting in the front and they would have been
looking at his back, but I could see him from
the side.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
It was the German defense minister.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
Oh wow, and Molly, in fifteen years of going to Munich,
I have never in my life seen anything remotely like that.
And so you know, you have to understand that even
leaving a side Ukraine, leaving aside everything else that we're
talking about on national security, that statement, that reality, backed
(42:34):
by the American President, backed by Elon who's been actively
promoting and supporting AfD personally and through his Twitter and
the rest, would make the United States look like an
enemy of Germany. And that is the way the Germans
took it, and it's the way an awful lot of
Europeans took it. This is now a serious crisis from
(42:55):
the Europeans who understand that the leadership in the United
States does not actually share a fundamental and core view
of democracy.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
And rule of law with the Europeans. So really it
really shook them.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Correct. Thank you, thank you, Ian.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
Bremer Lay.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly Junk Fast Elon has no bounds.
He's now making his way from Pennsylvania, where he did
a bunch of fuckery over to Wisconsin to mess with
their Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, this is a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. It is
coming up very soon. It will decide the control of
the state court. It will decide things like jerrymandering, abortion, etc.
Elon Musk has put is the single largest donor to
(43:52):
it on the Republican side.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
He has put a million dollars in there.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
You'll remember, a million dollars is a rounding error for
Elon Musk. Great and he may put in more because
of overturning of Citizens United, because of the fact that
basically now our elections are just billionaire repositories. He can
put as much money as he wants to in it,
and it becomes this sort of proxy fight. The people
(44:18):
who suffer will end up being the people of Wisconsin
who want to get abortions or who have miscarriages and
need to have mythipristone. Those are the people who are
going to suffer. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday Wednesday Thursday and Saturday to hear
(44:41):
the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and Donald Trump is pulling worse on
the economy than any reason.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
President.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
We have such a great show for you today, Think
like an economist. Podcast host Justin Wolfers steps by to
talk about the fuzzy math of DOGE savings for the
American people. Then we'll talk to the Eurasia groups Ian
Bremer about the new global alignment in Trump two point zero.
But first the.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
News Smiley, It's beginning to look a lot like Germany
in some people's hand gestures these days. There's quite a
lot of Boback. After Steve Bennon, who seems to hate
Elon Musk, did a similar gesture to him.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Personally, I don't want to make any hand gesture that
can be interpreted anyway that starts with an end and
ends with an eye. I just think stay away from
all of these hand gestures. French far right leader Jordan
Bardella canceled planned remarks at Seapack after ex Trump advisor
Steve Bannon made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology. That's
(01:11):
a direct quote, according to a statement. This is the
far right leader from France who's saying that it is
too close to Nazi ideology for him. Let's take a
moment to think about that for a second. The far
right leader from France, not the left wing leader, but
the far right leader from France is saying that that's
(01:32):
worth thinking about for a minute. It is probably the
strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, but it's worth pointing out
how far afield we have gotten in the United States
of America that this kind of rebuke must come from
someone on the far right from France. You're welcome. I
can't take it.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
It's so bad.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, it's really a shape if the reports that we're
there's not going to be any more seapas anymore come true,
because then they'll just never have an up or you
to go there and do all these interesting hand motions.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
It's also worth just pausing for a moment and remembering
that we have this seapack and yet we don't have
a democratic version of it. We don't even have a
centrist version of it. We just have this one thing.
You know, if you are a listener this podcast, perhaps
you would like to have something that is like seapack,
(02:23):
but not as zealatus.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Not as awful.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
So this is the interesting new development is the staff
at multiple government agencies have been instructed not to speak
to Congress.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yes, Congress, which is supposed to be running this whole thing,
is getting less and less and less power, and we're
seeing it happen in real time. Here's a Democratic congress person.
She sent several letters to different federal agencies and the
employees were said that they were not able to speak
to her. The Committee on approbates as a long standing
(03:01):
relationship with agency career staff, Well not anymore. Are This
is the transparency that is doge.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Yeah, it's almost like, you know, there's supposed to be
these checks and balances in the government and we're deciding
that feels real irrelevant. The founding fathers didn't want that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, no, I mean, this is a takeover of the
United States government at the highest level, and that's what
we're watching in real time. And you know, Congress has
given up what little power they had and they gave
it up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and now
Elon Musk is cutting away at the government despite the
fact that that is not how any of this is
(03:38):
supposed to work.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
With those drastic overreaches and sledgehambers to oversight trump claims
power to fire administrative law judges.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
That will Yeah, so again, Look, there are a couple
things that Trump wor is doing with the courts.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
That are bad.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
One is that they are really like either they haven't
quite yet done it, but they are priming themselves to
a judicial rulings, which, by the way, will tip us
into a constitutional crisis. I don't know that it's quite
happened yet, but there's a lot of kind of voodoo
math going on when it comes to unfreezing these funds.
(04:15):
A lot of them are being unfrozen or a lot
of them aren't being unfrozen as the way the federal
judiciary is instructed.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
So we're going to see more of this.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
We're going to eventually, hopefully not, but I think there's
a very likely scenario where the courts are ignored, where
these members of the federal government in Trump world, under
the instruction a Musk and Trump barrel through the guardrails
and continue to have their way with the federal government. Now,
(04:42):
the one piece I think of good news here is
that we're starting to see real pushback, and we're starting
to see it from both the right and the left,
because you're seeing these town halls of these people who
are suddenly understanding just what's stake in these town halls.
And I think we're going to see more and more
(05:04):
of that, And I think that we are absolutely one
hundred percent at the beginning of a real ground level
pushback that I think is going to be really important
and good.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
So I would say.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
That, I mean, I think there's a very interesting theory
of the case that a lot of people live their
life not being really affected by Trump's first term and
didn't see tangible changes to their life. They just didn't
like what was happening. But here we're seeing it all
the time, and there's even more evidence of it where
that could happen right here, Which is our next subject,
which is Trump fires federal workers who help fight forest
(05:39):
fires weeks after historic LA blazes.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, I mean, and the FDA and the cuts. You
know today they were talking about how they're going to
cut the FAI. I mean, these are things that if
they are cut, we're going to see real tangible results
right away. And TSA, for example, they're going to cut
the DSA that's going to mean longer lines and airs.
I mean, these things are going to affect.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Every part of our lives.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And I think it's really important to remind people that
this is not happening because the federal government is in
trouble now. I mean, certainly we run a big deficit.
This is happening because Republicans do not want to let
these tax cuts for corporations and millionaires expire.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
That is what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, And they have a theory of the case that
none of these people's work is necessary, that the private
sector will just pick it up and then they won't
have to pay for it anymore, and that theory of
the case is very dumb.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Justin Wolfers is the host of the Think Like an
Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. Justin wolf You, Molly Sancy
academic here to explain to us all the money that
don't or some members of the United States Senate call
(07:02):
it doggie, is saving the American people lots of money.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
So explain.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
Could you just stop by telling me who calls it doggie?
Speaker 2 (07:12):
We had a senator call it doggy. The other day.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And actually there are some members of Congress who are
calling it doggie, and you know what, for power to them,
they are not wrong. Oh actually, Jesse said, everyone calls
it doggie.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I love seeing Christian Conservatives becoming comfortable with themselves, their sexuality,
their bodies, and what we can do with them.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
All right, so let's focus on the money they're saving.
It strikes me that they're not saving that much money. Discuss.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
Yeah, So I'm going to start with the math, and
I'm not going to apologize to your listeners because actually
the math is the whole story. So there's a website
Elon says he's super transparent in which he lists every
one of his savings. So I went on that website
last night and I mapped it up. I imported all
the dater into a spreadsheet, and I added up all
(08:00):
the savings and it adds up to seven point three
billion dollars. Sounds like a low, right, Like you and
I could have a terrific night hour.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
It feels like a lot. I good, Yeah, summer house everything.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Now.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
So here's the thing. There are three hundred and forty
million Americans. So we're going to do long division seven
point three billion divided by three hundred and forty million.
What's that? That's about twenty dollars, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, that doesn't seem like that much.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
It's twenty one dollars and forty seven cents per American.
Now the President is so excited by how much money
that Doze is saving us that he's recommended that perhaps
we should have a Doge dividend that he sends out
dividend checks where one fifth of the Doze savings goes
out to us as Doge dividends or stimulus checks, and
the other four fifths, of course girded tax cuts for
(08:48):
the rich. That one fifth then adds up to four
dollars and twenty nine cents per american. Now, it turns
out a cart and of eggs costs more than that,
So so far Doze will yield savings.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Of nine e nine eggs.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
Nine eggs. You can have many way you want them.
You have to cook them yourself.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Do they sell them in nine tacks? I thought they
didn't sell them a nine facs.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Yeah, Well, what you can do is buy a six
pack and then split another six pack with the neighbor. Okay,
and that's your dividend check. Don't spend it all at once?
Can I teach the listeners some economics?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Please? And teach me too.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Okay, so the amazing thing, right, the bottom line is
the dose savings are trivial. They're tiny. You're getting four
dollars and twenty nine cents, and in return, it's going
to be hard to get into the national parks. The
analysts who determine whether the Department of Transport invests in
good stuff or bad stuff got laid off, so we
might spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bad stuff.
That all sorts of services are getting cut across the
(09:43):
federal government. So you got your four dollars twenty nine
cents on the one side, and you've got a less
effective government on the outher. Okay, here's the most important
thing and the most difficult thing to understand about physcal policy,
and it's simply this. Our minds, our human minds, are
not very good at thinking about big numbers. So millions
sounds like a lot of money, billions sounds like heapes,
(10:07):
and trillions sounds magnificent, And that's roughly right. But the
thing to realize is these words sound the same, but
they mean very very very very different things. And so
when someone says I have generated savings of say seven
billion dollars, don't get impressed. The first thing you have
to do is take any number and reduce it to
(10:27):
a human scale, a scale that your mind understands. And
in this case, what I did is i'd made it
per person. Now I realize Elon is saving twenty one
dollars and forty seven cents per person, and that's a
scale I can understanding. All of a sudden, these impressive numbers.
We realize that Elon's looking in the wrong place, is
doing the wrong things.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Isn't there an eight billion dollars savings that's actually eight
million dollars?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Yes? Okay, So first of all, everything I just said
is taking Eilon at his word, saying I went to
the website, I counted his savings as he counts them,
and so on. Now it turns out there's a bunch
of Salutes who've gone into the Doze data where they
list Doze as savings, and they've said, hey, is this
really a saving? Now? The most prominent of these was
a case where those claim to have saved eight billion
(11:14):
dollars on a very small project that couldn't possibly be
worth eight billion, right, And this again is the problem.
So some idiot wrote down eight billion without realizing that
was completely out of scale for the sort of project
that I think about. Since that the project was eight million,
so Doze had to go back and say, well, actually
we are exaggerated by seven point ninety nine to two billion,
but don't worry, we staved you eight million.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm not an economist.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
You're not an economist, mind, but it's less. That's what
you're going to tell me.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, I'm not an economist, but I feel like there's
a lot of difference between a billion and a million.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
That's really, really really important to be literal. A billion
is a thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand billion.
So let's try and create our own scale here. May
Musk wants to save two trillion, and if he does,
that will balance the budget, which is the deficits around
about one point eight trillion. Right now, Okay, so he's
after two trillion, So if he saves two billion, that's
(12:10):
zero point one percent of the way there. Another way
of saying this is if he saves twenty billion, think
about how far he's got to run as being one
football field. A football field is one hundred yards. If
he gets to twenty billion, then he's moved the ball
forward one yard. Okay, he's moved it forward seven point
three billion, so he's moved the ball from his goal
line one foot. And I really want listeners to think
(12:33):
about that. Realize that on this fiscal football field, each
yard is twenty billion. So whenever you hear a word
that begins with M million, realize it's doing no work whatsoever. Right,
it's moving you forward like a quarter of an inch.
It's tiny, it's infinitesimal, like it matters for people in
their lives, but it's not. If what you think you're
(12:55):
going to do is fundamentally transform our government's finances, you
can't even stuff that begins with a letter M from million.
You've got to start with billion. And in fact, if
you want a yard, you want twenty billion. And he's
not even at one yard yet.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Right, I want you to sort of top line because
what Republicans have done have said like we are cutting
waste and fraud, which again fraud seems to me, and
according to elon things he doesn't agree with, discuss wonderful.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
So here's another economic principle for the listeners, and it's
one I tell my students. You're never allowed to use
the word cost without the word benefit. Right. You could
say I saved two thousand dollars worth of costs. Why
is that? Well, I stopped paying my mortgage. Right, that's
not a benefit to stop paying your mortgage. It's going
to come back and by you on the bum. So
the one exception to that rule that you can use
(13:43):
the word cost without benefits because if there's a cost cut,
there's a benefit cut is if you're eliminating waste for
auDA abuse. Because waste fordam abuse is all cost, no benefit.
And so that's sort of the idea behind Doze or
the animating politics or the animating narrative. The thing there's
not that much waste fraud and abuse. More than that,
(14:03):
Doge isn't finding it. Here's how you know something's waste,
fraud and abuse. When they discover it, people are arrested,
right that onto it. So far Doze is at zero arrests.
What they've done instead is they've discovered some things Elon
doesn't like. Elon doesn't like it when usaid, which is
basically how the US government helps other countries foreign aid.
(14:24):
It's less than one percent of our federal budget. It
gives us soft power, and it makes the world a
safer place. Elon doesn't like that, so he eliminates it.
But it's not waste fraud and abuse. That's a value judgment.
We had a whole circus last week where Elon discovered
that there were lots of Social Security numbers for people
who were not recorded as having been dead.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, as please talk about that.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
He literally goes on to claim, as the White House did.
Trump doubled down, as did his press secretary, that tens
of millions of people are receiving Social Security who shouldn't
be receiving it. That would be waste, fraud and abuse.
So you can see this is like a really important
thing from a retire perspective, because this is how doze
becomes a technocratic apparatus rather than a political one. Now,
the reality is that there were not tens of millions
(15:09):
of people receiving Social Security. He shouldn't. What happens is
there's one data based table. God, I'm so boring right now.
I'm going to bore everyone.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
No, it's not boring. It's a coding error.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Right, it's actually even more boring. There's one database table
at Social Security where they list all the social Security
numbers that have ever been issued, and then you want
to have another column in that table. Think of like
a big Excel spreadsheet, which says, is this person dead?
And it turns out if you just take all the
people who are not recorded as being dead, there's tens
of millions of people or social security numbers that were
(15:42):
issued to people born over one hundred years ago. Now
that doesn't mean those people are receiving social Security. In fact,
almost all of those records were people who died more
than fifty years ago before we had electronic death records,
and as a result, there was no easy way to
update this table to show that they were dead. But
if you go through those social scurity numbers, no one's
drawing a check from them, because social Security is a
(16:03):
remarkably more sophisticated operation than Musk and his coders. And
so it turns out that in reality, there are about
eighty thousand Americans age ninety nine or older who are
receiving Social Security, not sixty million. And actually eighty thousand
is about the right number because we actually do have
some old people in America who are receiving Social Security,
(16:23):
and a reasonable estimate is not that there were sixty
million people receiving social Security who shouldn't be, but rather
perhaps it's sixty and so the millions of people he found,
and therefore the billions of dollars he saved, was literally
a misinterpretation from a guy who was too busy to
be bothered to go to Google to say, why are
(16:45):
there so many Social Security numbers that are not yet
marked as dead? If he'd done that, he would have
discovered there was a twenty twenty three Inspector General report
that explains literally every line of this inexcruciatingly boring detail.
There's no problem with the Social Security database. The only
problem is when a naive person misinterprets it.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Part of the thinking behind this, I think, on the
part of a lot of conservatives, was that dought sort
of technology that the rest of us didn't know existed, right,
that they were going to be able to look at
things in ways that the rest of us couldn't, and
that they were going to be able. And I think
of it as like sort of the revenge of the buzzword.
Like there have been you know, for example, like two
(17:27):
years ago, everyone was going to put everything on the blockchain, right,
and then you know, the blockchain is.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Good, but the world is not running on blockchain.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And this is a sort of similar thing, right, everything's AI,
the AI, this the AI that, And I do think
to a certain extent, a lot of these bureaucrats thought
that AI was going to be able to rip through
the federal government and figure out everything, and we're seeing
in fact that they're just sort of haphazardly cutting things
Elon doesn't like.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Yes, So that's I think extraordinarily insightful. So if the
argument is that the government should run on modern technology,
I'm completely in favor. In which case I'm really very
disappointed that the first thing the Republicans want to do
is strip the technology modernization money out of the irs.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, that doesn't seem to square with the theory.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Right. Look, I can give listeners two answers. One, it's
not going to work. You can walk away and just
believe me because my first name is professor. But that's
a shitty way of thinking. What I want to do
is give you a really deep understanding of why it's
not going to work. So many of us have in
our minds the sense that government is bloated and inefficient.
I know that last time I went to get my
driver's license renewed, it was the most infuriating and frustrating
(18:35):
thing in the world. I know I've waited in the
long line at the post office. I know that sometimes
my kids that this local schools are not well run,
and so on. The first thing to understand is that
most government services a state and local government. They're not federal.
The best business analogy for the federal government it's a
company called ADP. ADP is a private sector company that
does payroll processing. Basically, a lot of companies send ADP
(18:58):
their bank account detail and it's probably true for you money.
It's how you get paid. They send your bank account
details and an amount of money and ADP will send
out the check. Many of your listeners will receive their
checks yo ad So basically, what is ADP. It's a
bunch of nerds with computers and basically a really big
check printer. Why do I bring them up? What is
the federal government? So it's not the DMV, and it's
(19:21):
not the local hospital, and it's not the local schools.
That's the state government. Most of what the federal government
does is takes in money through taxes and sends it
back out. It's basically there to take money in when
you're doing well and then give it back to you
when you need it. That's what social security is, that's
what unemployment insurance is, and so on. So it turns
out that yes, the federal government spends lots of money,
but it spends a lot of money in the same
(19:42):
way adp quote spends a lot of money. It's just
writing a lot of checks. It's writing a lot of
checks folks who also send them in money. So if
you want to save money, it's not really going to
be there's too many people manning the check printer, right,
it's really are we getting enough checks in and we're
sending enough checks out. So there's this old saying the
federal government's an insurance company with an army, and it's
(20:03):
basically right. So again, remember the first lesson we said,
which was I want you to think about twenty billion
dollars in savings as being one yard on a football field.
Total federal spending on payroll on people who work for
the federal government is two hundred billion dollars, which is
to say it's ten yards. You could fire everyone who
worked for the federal government and you'd move the ball
ten yards. Now, no one wants to do that. Elon
(20:26):
might end up reducing the federal workforce by ten percent,
and that's going to involve a lot of very very
painful cuts and a lot of very very painful services.
Ten percent of ton of billion is twenty billion. So
if he cuts the federal workforce by ten percent, a
massive amount, he moves the football forward one yard and
he's got ninety nine to go. The point here is
(20:46):
it's not about workforce reduction. That's not where the money is.
The money is in two places. It's a rich guy
is not paying enough taxes. That's the money that's not
coming in.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
I don't think Elon's so interested in that.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
And then there's the money that's going out, which is
predominantly Social Security, Medicare, and medicaid. If you're against those programs,
you want to send fear of those checks before you
better go to Congress first. And if you think that
those programs are actually a really fair and useful thing
that the federal government does, then you realize that actually,
like most of what the federal government does, because that's
most of where the federal dollars are going.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, and then there's also one other saying which you
don't mention, which is servicing the national dat.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
So that still basically makes the federal government like ADP.
It's printing a lot of checks. And you're right that
some amount of our revenue now is just going to
pay in interest bills a large and increasingly large amount.
And then this brings us all the way back full circle,
which is where is our fiscal position, which is the
economy is very good. May disappoint some lirls to hear that,
(21:42):
but I believe that's true. When the economy is very good,
the government should be stocking away money to either repay
past debts or for a rainy day in the future. Instead,
we have a very very large budget deficit and very
large interest payments, and Trump is promising about four trillion
dollars worth of tax cuts back to the football field.
(22:03):
Four trillion now is two football fields, right, So Elon's
going to move the ball one yard and then Trump
is going to run it back two hundred yards. So
that's how this math isn't mathing. And so there really
is a quite serious fiscal situation that Republicans need to decide.
Do they want to blow out the dead. Maybe that's
what they want to do, which is leave it for
Democrats to clean up again and they get their priorities through.
(22:26):
That could be what's going on. At some point. You've
got to wonder how long this can go on?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Right, But that's a real question.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
I watched c SPAN because I have no life, and
I was listening to Rand Paul, who I think of
as almost always wrong about everything.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Because remember these tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The panic here is because Republicans don't want these tax
cuts to expire. If these tax cuts are allowed to expire,
talk goes through where the American government is financially.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I haven't done the matter too much on this, so
I'm just going to speak in broad terms. If the
Trump tax cuts expired, then we will still have an
ongoing budget defice at a time where it would be
a good time to have a budget surplus. There will
be a donor class who are furious. What's funny is there's,
you know, three classes of Republicans on this. There's the
old school, balanced the budget guys who haven't won an
(23:21):
argument since they lost to Reagan in nineteen eighty. Mike
Johnson claims to be one of those guys. I don't
believe him. There's the tax cuts for the rich because
it'll all trickle down, and then there's the put your
fingers in your ears and do whatever the dear leader says,
which is currently in the ascendency, and it not only
wants to extend that Trump tax cuts. Trump is still
(23:42):
talking about tax cuts on Social Security, no taxes on tips,
no taxes on overtime.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
He's really into no taxes on tips, which, by the way,
is completely unsustainable, right, because then everything can become a tip.
Speaker 4 (23:54):
You know exactly what I'm going to be doing, which is,
I'm going to tell the University of Michigan that I
am going to be willing to work for seventeen dollars
plus tips, but if the tips aren't good enough, I'm leaving,
and so as a result, all of my income becomes untaxable.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Fantastic, it is, literally, right, Yeah, go on.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
I'm loving it. Yeah, it's give me terrific.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I think that's a really good point here.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So fundamentally, this is a problem created by Republicans. I mean,
if you were to say tomorrow, and again, I know
you haven't run the numbers on this, but I just
want to like reiterate as a socialist. I'm not really
a socialist, but compared to a lot of these people,
I am. If you just let these tax cuts expired,
you raise the corporate tax rate a little smidge, and
(24:38):
you said, you know, if you make more than one
hundred million dollars a year you need to pay slightly,
you know, an extra two percent in taxes that you
could cut the deficit quite helcily quickly.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yes, No, his, I think the essential point I want
to leave. You'll listen this with Imagine that you've been
given a KPE and you're told that you're the super
deficit hole. You get to solve our physical problems. The
question is, would you spend your days and nights trolling
through the newspaper subscriptions at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission,
(25:11):
which we're cut and looking for fake Social Security payments
and finding none, or would you go and spend all
your time up the road at the irs, looking at
the millionaires and billionaires who we know are paying very
very low tax rates and using various sophisticated schemes and
have excessively low audit rates. Where do you think the
real money's lying? And I think when you think about
(25:33):
that question, the intuition, I think is obvious. If you're
after the real money, it's the taxes that aren't getting paid,
and that's the only place they're not looking. And instead,
what they're doing is they're looking at what seems to
be technocratic and it meets everyone's sense that government is inefficient,
but there's no money there at all.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It serves a political cira, but it doesn't necessarily it's
approved exactly.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So what you're seeing out of DOGE is pure political theater.
It's either cutting things but calling it waste when it's not,
or it's not really making important cuts at all, and
it's providing political cover then to ignore the rest of
the deficit issues so that they can generate text cuts
for the rage.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Oh Man, so interesting and also OI, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
You, great joy.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Ian Bremer is the president of the Erasure Group. Welcome
back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
Ian, Thank you, Mollie goe to be with you.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So I felt like we had to have you on
because of the incredible stuff coming out of Trump World,
and it's bizarre for foreign policy debacle from the Munich
Security Conference on we've just seen such a high level
(26:49):
of unprecedented. I know you're not supposed to say unprecedented,
We'll just say without precedent when it comes to Trump
World and formulations. So talk us through where you are are,
what you see, and sort of your take on that.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
What we see is a reversion of the United States
to support the law of the jungle. In other words,
on the global stage, might mix right. If you're powerful,
you get to set the outcomes. It's an important shift because,
of course, for a long time, the United States was
actively involved in promoting a very different kind of world order,
(27:27):
still the most powerful country, but one where the US
supported collective security, where the US supported the promotion of
rule of law and free trade and even the promotion
of democracy, not always consistently, certainly a lot of hypocrisy,
but nonetheless that was the idea.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
That's clearly not the idea anymore.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
Ask the Ukrainians, or the Canadians, or the Germans, or
the Panamanians, or the Mexicans or any of a number
of other American allies right now who feel that the
United States is acting in a predatory manner because the
US is so much more powerful because they can't. And
I mean clearly, since I've just spent time. I spent
a week and a half in Europe and most of
(28:11):
that time talking with erstwhile American allies who increasingly feel
like the United States is led by an adversary to them.
And that's a really big change. So that's what's fundamental here.
And how much of that is true? Is that universal?
I'd answer no. There are a lot of countries that
don't feel like the rug has been pulled out from
(28:32):
under them the way the Europeans, for example, presently do.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
But certainly big changes are afoot.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
There are open questions about the survivability of the Transatlantic Alliance,
and certainly very big questions about what happens with Ukraine,
what happens with Russia.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
That's NATO. You're talking about the surviv villains of NATO, right.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
Yes, and more and more broadly, I mean the alignment
of the US with Europe.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
But sure, I mean both of those things are true.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
It's interesting if you were awake at all during Trump
one point zero, none of this is a huge surprise
that said, the fact that this stuff still comes out
as a surprise, I think is actually kind of its
own surprise. Will you talk to us about for example,
(29:21):
it definitly seems like Trump two point zero is ten
times more supercharged, which they were promising. But I'm hoping
you could talk to us about the predatory idea here,
for example, the idea that somehow he's going to secure
some amount of mineral rights from Ukraine. That does seem
like something I have never seen in my adult life.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
So will you talk about that?
Speaker 4 (29:44):
So a lot of things here.
Speaker 5 (29:46):
First of all, on Ukraine, I have no problem at
all with the idea that the United States could cut
a deal exploiting Ukraine's natural resources in return for in
during national security going forward and providing arms. And I
have no problem with that where I think, I mean,
there's a question of how the deal should be structured,
(30:08):
what the right level of compensation is. You know, Ukraine
is not a country that has great infrastructure right now,
would take a long time to invest and take a
long time to get it out. I mean, you know,
the US should be paid for taking that risk if
they're going to make that investment. All those things Where
I would have a very serious problem, and I see
it as unprecedented. Is the idea that the Americans should
(30:28):
be paid back for aid eight that the American government
has already granted. That would certainly be unprecedented in modern
times for.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
The United States.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
And it's something that I mean, the Ukrainians may end
up accepting because they have no choice.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
That's predatory behavior.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
That's what you do as a corporate raider when you
know you're facing a company that is in bankruptcy and
has no choice, and you rip their faces off. And
I mean, to be fair, at Trump's background is in that.
In that field, he knows how to rip people's faces
off when they're weak, and he's now doing it geopolitically.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Now is that new?
Speaker 5 (31:04):
I think it is new, And I think it's new
because Trump's in such a more powerful position now in
so many ways than he was in twenty seventeen. I think,
you know, some of it is that America's adversaries are weaker.
China has the worst economy since the nineties, maybe the seventies.
Russia is actually in decline given the war and other problems.
(31:25):
Iran has just lost their proxy empire across the Middle
East America's.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
Allies are weaker.
Speaker 5 (31:31):
The US economy is performing so much better coming out
of the pandemic than all of the other G seven economies.
US technology outstrips American allies by you know, wildly. Think
about America's energy production compared to Europe's desperate need, Japan's
desperate need. And then of course you have the political
consolidation around Trump. He is in a strong position. He
(31:52):
has the House and seidate, he has the GOP reporting
to him in a way that so many allies are
facing very big problems against their own incumbents. And you know,
you saw Canada's government just fall apart, South Korea's government
fall apart, Japan just had a big loss.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
And now they're in coalition.
Speaker 5 (32:10):
Even India had to face coalition, France, Germany.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
You know, it goes on and on.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
So we're in a particular time where this Trump administration
is really strong. And then Molly one more point, since
we're really leaning in on this, which is that Trump personally, really,
I think does feel not just vindicated, because it's the
greatest political comeback story in American history. If you think
about where he was on January sixth, then with the
(32:36):
second impeachment where he is today having won not an
election without the popular vote the first time around, but
with the popular vote, but also having survived an assassination
attempt where he was shot in the hit, right. I mean,
this man now, and he's said this in conversations with friends,
he believes that, you know, he was saved by God
(32:57):
and that you know, it's like divine intervention and is
why he's president now. So his level of confidence is
just extraordinary. That wasn't true at all in twenty seventeen.
He needed the Republicans to give him legitimacy. He didn't
have it himself, you know. I mean, he was pretty
insecure privately in terms of being the president.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
He isn't now.
Speaker 5 (33:19):
And so I think when you put all of those
things together, you have to recognize that this is a
This is a wildly different administration than twenty seventeen. That's
even before we talk about the fact that they have
Elon to activate them, who is so much more powerful
and capable than anyone they had in the first administration.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I understand when you say powerful, I'm not entirely going
to go along with capable, because what we're seeing now
in week five of whatever this is is that actually
Elon has had to rehire a bunch of people. The
ethos has moved fast and break things. They're breaking a
(33:59):
lot of them.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I'm talking about capacity, capacity to get things done. Does
that mean capacity to do things that people are going
to like or are going to work the way that
he intends them to work.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
That's a different story.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
But there's no question that if what Trump is interested
in doing is bringing about a revolution domestically and frankly
in some ways internationally, Elon is uniquely positioned in his
administration to help him do that. I disagree with many
things that the Elon is doing in the government, of course,
but I think he's incredibly capable. I think that you
(34:34):
look at who that he is appointed in cabinet can
get things done. You look at someone like Pete Hegseth
and he can talk about wanting to do a thirty
four percent cut down in defense budget. I'm very skeptical,
and I think the generals and admirals.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Are going to run circles around this guy. Elon.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
On the other hand, I think Tulsey Gabbert got appointed
because of Elon. I think he made some calls to
Republican senators, and he changed those votes because they're scared
of them. I think his ability to get things done
is beyond that of anyone outside an individual president I
have seen in my life in the United States.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Well, I'm not going to argue with you on this
because you clearly know something about Elon and I don't.
But I would say, certainly having unlimited funds is a
huge advantage. The question is again, and I wonder about
this is as someone who was a longtime fan of
the incredible things that came out of Silicon Valley, it
(35:28):
does feel to me like the what Elon is banking
on is a technology that almost exists, and so I
think there's a thinking here that AI can do things
that it can't quite do yet. And so and maybe
I'm wrong, but it certainly seems like why they would
fire like the nuclear scientists for ten hours, or why
(35:51):
they would fire today. A friend of mine who works
in that world sent me a text message to say
that they had fired the and again like this is
just you know, this has not been reported yet, but
from Los Alamos, you have things like a plutonium facility.
I mean, he said, you know, they fire the radiation
protection manager, Emergency response manager and security manager from Los Alamos.
(36:16):
Then they tried to get them back, and that's what
we're seeing at the FDA. We're seeing that at different
parts of the government where and even like and they're
still going. So Again, the larger problem it being unconstitutional.
If you don't believe that the law applies to you,
you can do whatever you want, which is the fundamental
(36:37):
underlying problem of Elon. But I would add that if
he were such a genius, wouldn't he be able to
fire people who weren't needed to be rehired right away.
Speaker 5 (36:48):
I don't know as much about how effective AI is
going to be for Elon using DOGE inside the US
regulatory environment and the government system. I know a lot
of people that I respect, with greater technological capacity than
you and I that believe that this is going to
be a game changer for the US over the medium term,
and that the Europeans.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
Are going to be left way behind and all the
rest that.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
No, no, no, But what I'm saying is not arguing
with any of those points.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
I want to make your point in an area that
I know much better, which is usaid. Because here the
United States provides about forty percent of all the global
humanitarian aid period and the United States is now basically
shutting down the principle mechanism to deliver that aid. And
they are not doing this in a way to say,
(37:34):
let's first go through all the programs. Let's see which
ones are complete crap that no US taxpayers would support
if they actually knew what was happening. And there's a
lot of that, and let's keep the things that really matter,
like you know, preventing AIDS and stopping ebola when there's
an active outbreak, and you know, dealing with like children's
(37:54):
hunger and all that, and they are not doing that.
And the fact that they have chosen to shut everything
down fully aware that there are lots of really important
programs that are going to be caught up in that
that is the intention. They know that the cruelty is
in part the point. The thing that worries me the most,
I mean, aside from the fact that I just feel
(38:15):
bad for all of these innocent people that are being
caught up in it, is the fact that the Chinese
are going to make bank here. I mean, they're the
ones that are already the leading trade partners with almost
every country in the global South, and those ministers and
presidents and prime ministers who have just had their programs
cut by the US are.
Speaker 4 (38:36):
All turning to China.
Speaker 5 (38:37):
And what worries me most about the Trump elon approach
is that it is penny wise and pound foolish, that
it will get all sorts of wins today and will
deeply undermine America's power position in the world in five
and ten years time. And to be fair, I don't
think Trump cares that much about five and ten years
time out, but I do, and you do, and a
(38:59):
lot of sites in the United States do. And they're
being sold a bill of goods here.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, for sure, And I think that is certainly an
important point. So my larger question here is think about
with that Munich security speech, the j de Man's speech
where he said good night and good luck, what have
been you know, now we're a couple weeks out from that,
what have the sort of ripples been from that?
Speaker 4 (39:23):
I wish we were a couple of weeks. We're not
even one week out from that.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
We're not even one week out from that. Okay, we're
almost one week out from that.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
It feels like a year. That's the funny thing, right,
But we'll literally I was there. I was in the room.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
I was maybe twenty feet from him. How to go
over to say badly would be an understatement, but it
was a shock.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
Some people were in tears.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
People were angry when he said specifically, I mean, look,
it's a security conference, and yet he didn't talk about security.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
I mean like he didn't talk about.
Speaker 5 (39:54):
Ukraine or China or Gaza in the speech he made
passing reference to I know, we got all these other things,
but what the most important threat is the threat you
know to inside the room. It's the woke virus, it's
the it's lack of free speech, and it's democracy falling apart, which,
of course I mean from my perspective, there are many
(40:15):
things that the Americans can and should lecture the Europeans on,
like innovation and competitiveness and entrepreneurship and lack of red
tape and all these things. JD chose the one thing
to lecture the Europeans on the Americans don't actually have
good standing on, right. But leaving that aside, he specifically
this is the part that really mattered. He talked about
(40:37):
the firewall, and most Americans don't know what the firewall is.
This is the Germans refusal to work with join government
with make policy with the Alternatives for deutsch Land party,
which right now polls it just over twenty percent and
this weekend's upcoming elections in Germany and is considered by
(40:59):
the entire German political spectrum outside of the AfD as
a neo Nazi party. They are, they are under surveillance
from German intelligence. It is about as raw and central
to German governance and what their state means as anything
you can imagine. And this is coming from a United
(41:20):
States which led the world in de nazifying Germany after
World War Two, coming from a vice president who went
to Dacow and saw the concentration camps the day before
he gave that speech, and then he says, you need
to end the firewall because you are not democratic if
you refuse to engage with the twenty percent of your
(41:43):
population that supports this in Germans views neo Nazi party.
And then later that day he refuses to meet with
the German chancellor. He does meet with the head of
the AfD, the sitting vice president. First of all, I
saw all of a sudden when he made that statement
I saw a man and yell out, this is unacceptable.
(42:03):
And most people in the room had no idea who
it was because it was a packed room and he
was sitting in the front and they would have been
looking at his back, but I could see him from
the side.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
It was the German defense minister.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
Oh wow, and Molly, in fifteen years of going to Munich,
I have never in my life seen anything remotely like that.
And so you know, you have to understand that even
leaving a side Ukraine, leaving aside everything else that we're
talking about on national security, that statement, that reality, backed
(42:34):
by the American President, backed by Elon who's been actively
promoting and supporting AfD personally and through his Twitter and
the rest, would make the United States look like an
enemy of Germany. And that is the way the Germans
took it, and it's the way an awful lot of
Europeans took it. This is now a serious crisis from
(42:55):
the Europeans who understand that the leadership in the United
States does not actually share a fundamental and core view
of democracy.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
And rule of law with the Europeans. So really it
really shook them.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Correct. Thank you, thank you, Ian.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
Bremer Lay.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly Junk Fast Elon has no bounds.
He's now making his way from Pennsylvania, where he did
a bunch of fuckery over to Wisconsin to mess with
their Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, this is a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. It is
coming up very soon. It will decide the control of
the state court. It will decide things like jerrymandering, abortion, etc.
Elon Musk has put is the single largest donor to
(43:52):
it on the Republican side.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
He has put a million dollars in there.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
You'll remember, a million dollars is a rounding error for
Elon Musk. Great and he may put in more because
of overturning of Citizens United, because of the fact that
basically now our elections are just billionaire repositories. He can
put as much money as he wants to in it,
and it becomes this sort of proxy fight. The people
(44:18):
who suffer will end up being the people of Wisconsin
who want to get abortions or who have miscarriages and
need to have mythipristone. Those are the people who are
going to suffer. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday Wednesday Thursday and Saturday to hear
(44:41):
the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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