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Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending (www.economist.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://archive.is/2025.02.16-231927/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/12/elon-musk-is-failing-to-cut-american-spending

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

American spends the majority of its money on its worldwide spanning military

That's not true:

**Controversial pie chart removed until I review what's what. I have no time right now, I'm at work, but just in case it's BS I'll pull it **

The US spends more on healthcare, education and social security, and Elon "Sieg Heil" Musk sure is going after those.

It's not that he's failing to cut spending: firing federal employees right and left and destroying federal agencies WILL yield savings. What's not taken into account here is that it will also yield a disaster.

In other words, he's curing the patient by killing the patient. But technically, he's curing the patient I guess.

[–] disguy_ovahea 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Do you have a source for that pie chart? It doesn’t remotely represent the spending on the congressional budget website. Maybe the creator mislabeled all discretionary spending solely as education?

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-03/59727-Federal-Budget.pdf

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's from the Wikipedia page on the US government spending.

[–] disguy_ovahea 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yikes! Yeah, that’s disinformation. It needs to be taken down.

That pie chart is sourced from a commercial (.com) site that claims it obtained its data from another .com site, and does not remotely represent the information on the congressional budgetary government (.gov) website. It falsely claims $1.7T spending on education, which is the entire annual discretionary budget. The only way that could be possible is if the US spent no money on defense for a year.