The Left-Wing Pushback on DOGE Sounds Like the Return of Occupy Wall Street

The Department of Government Efficiency isn’t really a department, it’s a commission which will issue a report on how the government can cut spending. Just the thought of that has leftists, including NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in an uproar. Her column today is about the return of Republican interest in reigning in the size of government, something she detects via Trump’s love of Argentine president Javier Milei.

Donald Trump has called Milei his “favorite president,” and Milei was the first foreign leader to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after his victory. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which has increasingly sought to build a global network of right-wing activists and politicians, held its first-ever conference in Buenos Aires. Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, gave a speech lauding Milei’s relentless budget-slashing, and vowed that, with help from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, “we’re going to do the same thing in the United States.”…

In the American right’s admiration for Milei, you can see the rebirth of old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech-bro form. 

Why is Milei bad? Because he’s succeeded in bringing down inflation.

Since taking office a year ago amid devastating hyperinflation, he’s undertaken a campaign of economic shock therapy, slashing government spending by around 30 percent. In doing so, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in a recent New Yorker profile, he’s changed “the compact between the Argentinian state and its citizens — cutting cost-of-living increases to pensioners, funding for education, and supplies for soup kitchens in poor neighborhoods.” In some ways, Milei is succeeding; inflation has plummeted. But the poverty rate rose by around 11 points during his first six months in office, to almost 53 percent, and the country has fallen into a recession.

This is where I start tearing my remaining hair out as I’m reading. Inflation was 25% per month when Milei took office last December. Supermarkets were forced to increasing prices on products every single day to keep up with it. As of October, less than a year later, monthly inflation had dropped to 2.7 percent. That’s still not great but compared to where he started it’s a world of difference.

The left calls efforts to live within your means austerity as if it were a four-letter word. They are fine with government spending, even if it’s money that has to be borrowed year after year. If you think of it in terms of your own budget it’s the equivalent of someone racking up debts and constantly opening new credit cards to keep the gravy train going. As long as the government can print money, they can’t really go broke so why worry about it.

What Milei has done is cut up the credit cards and cut spending. Of course that’s painful but what’s the alternative?

Unfortunately, the comments on this story are chock-full of every dunder-headed left-wing economic argument you can imagine, starting with if only billionaires would pay taxes.

I agree with Vivek and Musk that we need to do something. Let’s tax billionaires out of existence first, then we can start discussing cuts to the most vulnerable.

Spoken like a true communist, comrade. The number of problems here is hard to enumerate but let’s just start with the fact that billionaires wealth isn’t income and isn’t sitting in a bank or a vault somewhere. In most cases it’s ownership of a company they created. That’s true for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the Walton family etc. So the only way to eliminate billionaires is effectively to have the government seize their property. This is called expropriation and it’s popular in communist countries but not something we do here in America. We don’t do it because a) it’s wrong and b) it doesn’t work. The government cannot run Amazon better than the private sector and shouldn’t try.

Moving along to the next genius. (This was upvoted 1,300 times so a lot of people thought this was smart).

If the rich paid their fair share instead of freeloading and leeching the wealth generated by the middle and lower classes, we’d have no problems with the deficit or debt. Investment in the country’s future by the government is not the problem.

This is false in several ways. As already mentioned, most wealth held by billionaires is ownership of a company or companies. There is no way to tax that without seizing it/forcing them to sell it. 

The other problem is that the US government’s debt vastly exceeds all of the wealth held by US billionaires. The national debt is something like $36 trillion. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has a fortune of about $350 billion. Even if you seized all of that it would pay off less than 1% of current US debt. 

You could add Jeff Bezos and all the other billionaires in there and you would never come close to paying off our debt. I can’t vouch for this number personally but Google’s AI tells me the total wealth of 801 US billionaires is $6.22 trillion. That’s a lot of money but it’s a fraction of the $36 trillion US debt. In fact, the deficit in 2022 and 2023 (just those two years combined) was more than $3 trillion or about half of all that wealth. Billionaires cannot possibly pay enough to cover this. It’s a pure socialist fantasy.

I could keep going. There’s a guy arguing Social Security is not an entitlement because he paid into it his whole life. Very simply, that money is long gone. It was spent to cover current beneficiaries when it was paid in. There is no account with your name on it holding all that money and even if there was, most people take out more than they pay in. It’s an entitlement not a savings account.

It goes on and on like this. It really makes me think progressives are going to tire of tent camps for Palestine soon and return to tent camps for Occupy Wall Street again.