DOGE and Military Cuts Could Enable Eliminate Income Tax

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There is massive cost cutting with DOGE.

200,000 jobs eliminated by firing all probationary employees.
77,000 taking the 8 month offer to quit.

Soon $100 billion in savings out of $500 billion in known waste.

Proposal to halve the US, Russian and China military budgets would save $440 billion for the USA.

USA would still be the dominant world power by far.

Individual income tax is $2.4 trillion per year.

Getting to $1.2 trillion of spending cuts is very doable. This could then boost GDP growth to 4-5% per year and reduce interest rates to 2-3% which would cut another $300-400 billion of interest payments.

I know people have trouble believing these things will happen but a lot of it is clearly being executed.

32 thoughts on “DOGE and Military Cuts Could Enable Eliminate Income Tax”

  1. Time to leave this website for good. Run by and largely frequented by Musk/Trump fans with heavy handed censorship of comments which conflict with those worldviews. So much for the freedom of speech trumpeted by the same people.

  3. I have a more cynical view of things related to cutting government. Basically the Federal Government is the only entity large and powerful enough to stand up to oligarchs and large corporations. So kneecap Federal government by cutting income and services and viola, Trump and his ilk can do what they want with impunity.

    • The federal government has M
      monopoly on violence therefore they can always stand up to the oligarchs. You simply don’t agree with some of the founding principles of diffuse government. You’re a statist. The current administration isn’t trying to dissolve the federal government, just pare it down the 2 million men work force, picking the low hanging fruit first.

  4. I have stated previously that you cannot run a countries administration like a business.
    Now we are starting to see why.
    We have seen what happens when the wrong people try to run something.
    Notably when the bean counters took over and practically wrecked Apple before Jobs returned.
    In most cases you would not want a politician to try to run a business.
    Certainly business leaders should have access to government and be listened to.
    Certainly government should look to business to reform and streamline its processes.
    But why do we think that businessmen are a good idea to run an administration?

    Business is about profit. A government is not about profit instead it should be about the well being and support of its citizens as well as value for money for taxpayers.

    Businesses promote their own interests as a group and those interests do not always align with government. In fact often government has to act as a regulator against issues such as environmental regulation, tax collection, monopolistic practices, corruption etc. It would seem that one of the first aims of businessmen running government would be to cut back on such restrictions to the detriment of the rest of the population.

    Businessmen can run their businesses like a dictator and fire people at will.
    But the government of the USA does not work that way.
    Elon knows a lot about how to run a company but nothing about how to run a political adminstration, how it works, why it works?
    Government administration is big, old, and complex with a different culture. Making changes is generally a hard and long slog and usually have to take place over more than one administration.
    The business maxim “Move fast and break things” is fine in a business and if the business fails then so be it. But not great when applied to trains, planes or government because the level of fallout if the plan goes off the rails is too significant.
    In the news today; Some 325 essential nuclear security workers at the NNSA, which manages the US nuclear weapons stockpile, were let go, according to the Reuters news agency.
    In an email sent to employees at the NNSA on Friday, officials wrote: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

    A couple of thoughts about government vs state government. Sometimes federal is the way to go and sometimes state run is better.
    UNITY; Having a unified federal service strengthens the country. Having each state run its own education, health, pollution etc strengthens the states at the expense of the country and in the process creates greater differences, so the states become more unalike which can result in wanting complete independence. We have seen this in Europe, for instance Spain.
    STRENGTH; Billionaires already shop around individual states for the best deal. At the moment the federal authorities have some say over things. If the federal authorities are removed then the power goes further to the billionaires to go to whichever state will give them what they want.
    Pollution for instance, if a state pollutes but it affects a neighbour then who pays the bill?

    • I agree with everything you said, and I just want to add a couple of things: no business normally operates on a multidecade timeframe; sure a business might have some long-term R&D moonshot in the pipeline, but it is not their core mission (even in the case of businesses that focus on innovation). Nations usually work on 50-100-year time frames minimum: you do not know how much energy you need, but you build a dam to last, the same is true for when you build railways or highways, the same is true for education. Obviously, as time goes on, some investments reveal themselves more useful than others, and people might claim that some were wasteful. That might be the case, but that might be very wrong. Massive tsunami barriers in some Japanese prefectures were considered a waste of public money, and, until the last catastrophic tsunami, they were, then they revealed themselves as the most valuable investment in the zone, preventing tens of billions in damages.
      Musk and many others in the current US administration seem not to understand that (for example, they do not understand that USAID was developed as a diplomatic power projection tool that helped the US for decades, way more effectively than moving the army).
      The truth is that businessmen are shortsighted, and the more the economic cycles have become frenetic, the less they understand the value of long-term strategic planning.

  5. This could be the beginning of the end of America. How?
    1. DOGE cuts $1t with another $0.5t coming from Trump near term, assuming the courts don’t significantly react in time to stop him. I’m leaving out the tri-lateral halving of the military budgets because there won’t be agreement, at least not in time for step 2.
    2. While everyone is still reeling from the cuts and the courts are ponderously going through appeals and endless delays like how Trump avoided prosecution until the election, Trump and the sycophant congress will slash income taxes in the next round of budget negotiations, coming up in March, then again in October for the next fiscal year. People will be starving and homeless in greater numbers by then, our western hemisphere allies will be in a trade war by then, but without tariffs, the deficit will get even worse, because the promised savings won’t materialize once inflation crushes middle class spending power. The middle class won’t save on taxes because the states will attempt to make up some of the cuts, or if not, the decline in grants, gov’t services, and just simple functioning – e.g. falling bridges, breakdowns in airline safety, court backlogs, rising crime from poverty, plagues (bird flu, measles in Texas), etc. (all already happening) – will get so overwhelming that the rich will start to leave most of the country to rot or leave altogether.
    3. Trump’s federal government, or what’s left of it, will be so draconian and incompetent that the states won’t be able to rely on it for anything. Trump is getting sued for $80m in migrant housing costs yanked out of NYC’s bank account retroactively, by NYC’s Mayor Adams – despite the illegal quid pro quo prosecution abandonment that Trump’s corrupt DOJ just gave him in exchange for help with mass deportation (another labor purge we’ll miss when it’s gone, and when crime from “natives” goes up to make up for the relatively small increase from illegal migrants). Eventually, the federal government will become such an unreliable partner & provide so little anyway, that states will just say “we don’t need your money with all the strings & problems attached.”
    3. The United States becomes the loose federation of independent states, also split by mass migration/sorting and culture wars (abortion rights alone are ripping the country apart since the overturning of Roe & where SCOTUS comes down on mail order abortifactants to states where abortion is banned will make it worse). The center will not hold, especially with trade wars & a rump military too gutted to function (we’ll be lucky to be able to fight ANY wars overseas & Europe & Canada are already talking about aligning without America, when NATO gets gutted after Ukraine falls due to Trump’s surrender).
    4. Once taxes are slashed, it’ll be next to impossible to replace the services cut to dysfunctional status, and the oligarchs will prevent new taxes or any politician promising new taxes, from being elected. America will cede every basic research advantage – which private industry never paid for anyway. China will firmly take America’s place in all innovation industries, automating everything even while their population shrinks.
    5. Elections, already unfair due to purging, gerrymandering, and not counting absentee ballots (see Greg Palast’s reporting), will be like they are in Hungary or even Russia, preordained phony choices among carefully selected candidates adhering to dear leader…who will be J.D. Vance when Trump eventually leaves the scene (maybe even before his term ends if a few republicans can join the current effort for impeachment #3).
    6. America will basically cease to exist, breaking into fractions in practice, or even legally. Human rights will be on a state-by-state level. There may not be an invasion – though Alaska might fall back into Russian hands – but the world will move on without America, mostly led by a China-Russia BRICS+ block already forming.

      • I never watch that. But anyway, the news doesn’t go away because you don’t listen to it.
        Hopefully, the courts will rein Trump in but congress has to regain its co-equal status too.

        • You are very inventive and you think too much. It’s nice to read your monologues on technical content but when it comes to politics you are displaying extremism. A severe case of TDin

          There has been a tremendous variety of respiratory and flu viruses this winter… I’m grateful for the silence coming out of the bureaucracy… This administration isn’t going to sow panic like your chosen party did in 2020 to derail Trump. Now you got Trump pissed off and he’s gutting your boys. That’s what you get for going through his wife’s undergarments.

    • You make some good points but I think (hope) you overstate them.
      Also that many of these things will have an effect on earnings and taxes.
      It does seem baked in that the poorest will suffer most and the richest will benefit most. Also that the experiment with the economy and tariffs could backfire, but we shall have to see.
      Your fears about NATO are possibly premature. I agree that Europe has brought this on itself with relying too much on the USA. Maybe even Trump does not know where he wants to go. If the USA leaves NATO then it will lose access to bases such as air bases and early warning bases in the UK, Scandinavia, and Greenland.
      As to the breakup of the USA I think that is (for the moment) a stretch. But making states more independent encourages state politicians who fancy being leader of their own country to consider breaking away (see Spain/Catalonia and UK/Scotland).

  6. So, no taxes for anybody.

    Except, SS and Medicare.

    Social Security is taxed at 6.2% of earning’s per employee, with another 6.2% paid by employer.

    12.4%.

    Cut-off at ~$175,000.

    Maximum collected from any worker, ~$21,000 per year.

    If you earn a million dollars per year, you pay ~$21,000 in SS taxes.

    If you earn $175,000,000 you pay ~$21,000. That’s 0.0062% in taxes.

    People pay sales taxes. People pay property taxes. People pay licensing fees. People pay fuel taxes.

    All these are a significant percentage of most people’s wages. It hurts to pay.

    Taxes will remain a burden on the backs of those with the least, while those who control 90% plus of the wealth are freed of their responsibilities.

    Or, reduce Social Security taxes to ~10% across the board, all the way up, and pay that into the SWF.

    And, where’s the plans for reindustrializing America?

    In fact, what the h3ll is the American Mission?

    What are we all striving for?

    Show me a road map.

    All the cutting is being done simply to justify reauthorizing the over 4 trillion dollar tax cuts that went mostly to the top ~15% of the people last time.

    When one card player has all the chips, the game is over.

  7. Sounds great. But were do we get the money to service the national debt? (remember when Republicans were so hot about the national debt?) Not anymore. And since their slaves to the Trumpster, who should be surprised. And about money to run government now? Well, who gives a s*** about details. Hey, no one likes income tax. But someone has to pay to make specified actions, happen in a rational society. I think the more you make, the more you pay. The less you make, the less you pay. It’s not complicated.

    If we all wish to live in a common society, we ultimately want the same things. To do that, we all have to live by certain rules. I find it “shockingly amusing” how many people call themselves “Libertarian”, until they have to call 911. Then they scream, “where are they”! Guess. You want to live in an isolated cabin somewhere, apart from anyone else, fine, knock yourself out. Live in a community with other people? Deal with it.

  8. Real Budget Fixes:
    Outlaw Public Unions
    Eliminate COLAs
    Attach school money to the child
    Eliminate Tenure
    Cut half the Flags at each level in the Military
    Eliminate the TSA, Dept of Ed
    Eliminate Ethanol
    Establish rules that cut 90% of Non-Profits (most being a scam, loved by Politicians)
    Federal Government should not be in the Charity business, they’re terrible at it.
    Use the Military more for emergencies/disasters – there are lots of Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen & Marines sitting around. (The U.S. Military – “Making large numbers of people stand around, doing absolutely nothing, for long periods of time, since 1776.”)

  9. Eliminate taxes for <$400k? No, no, NO!.
    Part of our problem with the current tax system is that half of the people in this country get their Federal Government for free. You will never get those folks to oppose Federal spending; it doesn't cost them a thing.
    EVERYONE should pay. Make it 0.0% for the lowest decile, 0.5% for the next, 1% for the next, 2% for the next & 3% for the next & current levels for the upper half.
    When you get something for free, it's worth zero effort on your part, except that it's a stab in the back when taken away. Seriously, incentives to be lazy are not good things.

  10. Hyper confirmation bias to the point of being a fever dream… and no one mentioning that by the evidence to date DOGE is delusionarily incompetent or that so very many of the “excesses” they loudly trumpeted turned out to their ignorance and misunderstandings of how any of the governmental systems for taking care of hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars actually functions.

    Everyone buying this crap is in for a very nasty set of rude awakenings.

    And before you start soapboxing:
    Yes, so many things could be done better.

    But that is NOT what Elon’s hackers are doing.

    They’re trying to implement a tech bro libertarian wet dream without knowing what the hell they’re doing and are inflicting immense damage on so many critical systems.

    • Smog,

      Transparency removes the smog of the story are asked to believe to one where we get to see what is. Massive spending has gone to control AND coordinate the narrative in the media which has provided that smog ridden story. Massive spending has gone for things that the vast majority of taxpayers don’t approve of much less would approve of their tax dollars going there. Massive dollars have gone to the Democrat Elite for them to provide the actual aid (Clinton foundation to Haiti) yet only a small % gets to Haiti. What DOGE is life the smog to find massive corruption and fraud. Trump and Congress then cuts when Americans just don’t want which was smog covered corruption and fraud. To ensure “critical systems” and actual good isn’t also cut in the speed of fixing massive smog covered corruption, there is an exemption which can be used to keep that funding going. But the problem is that the evil dragon’s don’t like the light shined on them by DOGE so all they can do is try to further fraud people by making accusations that really have no basis. Finally we are in days when the evil dragon that has imprisoned us for years can be put away.

      Thank you Trump, Musk and the rest of the Patriots that work for The People that fight the Smog covered Evil Dragon

      • An example. One of many. Way too many

        “Social Security checks going out to 150 year olds!”

        No. The kiddie hackers didn’t know how to handle the old system formats when they (illegally) scraped the government databases with their improvised scripts to in order to find things to foment rage.

        Heard any corrections yet?

        Don’t hold your breath waiting.

        And the list goes on… and on… and on… and on…

        A Gish gallop for the ages.

        • There were SSI benefits being paid to the dead. We know this.
          Per the AP (Jan 15th)
          “US recovers $31 million in federal payments to dead people”
          So obv it was happening before Trump even took office.

          • Your conflating an Biden-era pilot program to efficiently root out SSI waste…

            (Yes, you read that correctly)

            … with the DOGE “uber-elite hackers” being unable to comprehend the system formats they were haphazardly rummaging through and loudly proclaiming their ignorance by screaming about “FRAUD” instead of asking questions about the anomalies they’d thought they found.

            Want to lay odds that they have already fired or will fire soon the very people involved in that Biden-era pilot program?

    • Sorry but i choose ‘tech bro libertarian wet dream’ over DEI, Dems, and bleeding-heart no-fix, work-from-home NPR-watcher, Fluff Career-lifers anytime. The key is how long will all those underachieving pension-craving chair-moisteners be on the Dole until they find their true ‘career fit’. I hear they’re raising minimum wages in CA.

      • Techbros’ strategy to “move fast and break things” works well only on relatively new sectors of our reality/civilization: for example, you could take over Twitter and completely destroy it (to the point that the banks that financed the takeover are underselling the debt) and the world would lot collapse. In the era of the dotcom bubble hundreds of companies were created and failed, many lost their money, but it did not impact the world too much. If google collapsed today there would be ripples, because now is integrated in our system of things.
        Nations are way more stratified than Google and more connected to our daily lives.
        Furthermore the approach of sending unexperienced people to do complex tasks because “data is data” is nonsensical, data are data only when you UNDERSTAND them, otherwise data are just numbers: if you are tasked to make planes more efficient but you completely lack the understanding of what a plane is, you might think that having redundant engines is so wasteful, you might decide to remove one, and since the plane still flies you might think that they are completely useless and decide to remove them both because is so inefficient to carry around that much deadweight, similar discussion could be done for the landing gear that is used less than 1% of the total travel time of an intercontinental flight.
        Ignorance is never an advantage, but tech bors do not like experts because experts are the more qualified people to tell them that their idea looks cool at first glance, but is very supid/ineffective/destructive and so on.
        Musk and Trump made their mission to fight against expert opinions on tariffs, medicine, research, the economy, and so on…
        What I find hilarious and sad is that this is nothing “tech-related” or new.
        In the declining phase of every empire (the Egyptian, the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, France under King Luis XVI, the Augsburg Empire, the British Empire, even the church-state in Italy, and also the soviet union) we always see the same pattern: the governing elites used to see an increase in influence and power developed during the rising phase of the empire when such growth is no more possible (because the available tech does not allow you to expand further or because you reach the borders of empires of equivalent power), they start draining the internal resources more and more. They promote reforms (religious reforms persecuting internal minorities, tax reforms increasing internal taxation compared to reaping wealth from outside the empire, administrative reforms changing the feudal system, and maybe clustering the aristocracy, or the beurocracy, under a tighter control) that are meant to more efficiently “manage” the available resources (because less resources are coming from the outside). This always ends in the same way: those who exert more and more control on less and less resources drain the general population and enrich themselves until it is unsustainable.
        At that point:
        1) the general population aligns with external powers to topple the internal ruling class (Egyptians and Greek elites were substituted by the Romans, the state of the church was conquered during Italy’s unification, and so on…)
        2) the system fractures because the structures that kept it together have been hollowed out (the end of the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Augsburg Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, are examples of this second outcome)
        3) the population rebels against the ruling class, usually because they are following a charismatic leader, destroys the ruling class and since this process is followed by a power vacuum and the destruction of the weights and balances that governed the previous system (and were already weakened), this ALWAYS ends with an authoritarian regime: the Roman Republic ended with Julius Caesar giving rise to the Roman Empire with Augustus, the French Revolution ended with the Terror and the rise of Napoleon, the Russian revolution ended with the creation of the Soviet Union and then Stalin). In every circumstance, although the outcome might seem better (the Roman Empire was more powerful than the republic, Napoleon extended France power to the resto of Europe, and the soviet union took russia from the Middle Ages to the condition of a global power in few decades), in EVERY CASE the common citizens were worse off as they were under an absolute ruler that did not care about their interests and they completely lost any saying in the administration of the state and of their own lives.

        I am not sure how this is going to end in America, but if you are not a billionaire, you will be probably worse off.

    • Are you arguing that what DOGE finds won’t be available to the Executive, Agencies involved, Congress & Courts?
      Or that the data will be useless?
      And what’s your plan for finding those “many things (that) could be done better”?

      • I’m saying that “DOGE” has been, is now, and will continue to use false, warped, bad and deliberately misunderstood data in order to craft stories fitting into a predetermined set of narratives designed to induce outrage.

        All to cripple a (somewhat) functional government that had the temerity to not bow down before the oligarchs completely and give them their forever tax cuts, and that even dared to prosecute their puppet for crimes he committed.

        So, no… there will be no savings.

        As the linchpins to an incredibly massive but somewhat stable structure are pulled everything will go to hell all at once everywhere and vast amounts of wealth will have to be wasted trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again in a way that saves face for the idiots that caused the disasters in the first place.

        They’ve lived off their primary grift… the notion of “ALL GOVERNMENT BAD”… so long they’ve come to believe in it, religiously so.

        Ironic, as they knew better even as recently as the Reagan era,

      • “Went through spending” … as in the supposed “auditing” ?

        What did you think they were doing?

        Does DOGE firing tens of thousands of people in critical roles without warning, altering operations and crippling and effectively shutting down entire sections of various agencies count?

        Yes, they’re being fought in court but they haven’t slowed down one bit, much less stopped.

        The DOGE minders installed in various agencies are even now still swinging their chainsaws wildly at anything within reach that can be twisted to fit their narratives.

        The damage is being done NOW and they’re boasting that they have so much more in store.

        They’ve been boasting about it all along.

  11. I like the idea of using these alleged macroeconomic levers/ gauges to enable efficient, pro-greatness, pro-individual growth. However, a low-revenue, low-infrastructure mentality is far from ideal.

    What should be the Shopping List:
    1. Fix electric infrastructure – source and distribution and local capacity (privatize and incentivize)
    2. Naval/ air-traffic modernization (civil and military)
    3. Reduce debt to mid- last-century on an economic ratio basis
    4. Re-enable on-shored critical mineral, critical chip, and critical nuclear supply-lines, near-full verticalization (privatize and incentivize)
    5. Enable robust orbital, cislunar, lunar, and inner solar system exploit, patrol, base, and industrialization (privatize and incentivize)
    6. Reduce Corporate taxes
    7. Reduce Personal taxes
    8. “Your First Child is Free through College” expense-recomp grant (spend it and recoup)

    What can be the Income/ Savings:
    1. Government efficiency and world-empathy re-alignment savings
    2. Tariffs part-balanced with corporate tax cuts
    3. Consumption tax part-balanced with personal tax cuts
    4. Reduce and ethically-re-align eligibility for legacy and social services’ payouts

    • There are good ideas in your post, Jer.

      Different points of view, all coming together with the assumption of goodwill on the part of all parties, can go a long way in solving big problems.

      I’ve negotiated many contracts in my life, often with people who I didn’t like. But the agreements made all our lives better.

      Maybe this is one of those rare moments in time to put aside our emotions and implement big changes that benefits all the people on earth…

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