"Less arguing and more doing."

November 25, 2024

As we head into a holiday week that will (hopefully) see fewer political stories, I hope to publish shorter newsletters. We all need a break from the 24/7 news cycle—which has been unrelenting since November 5th. Whether the news cycle cooperates isn’t up to me, but I will do my best to be briefer and more selective in my coverage. But I will write (and record the audio version) every day over the holiday week. Despite the size of the newsletter community, you feel like part of our family—and the holiday wouldn’t be the same without you!

Trump's refusal to sign the transition ethics pledge is interfering with the transition!

To no one’s surprise, Trump's refusal to sign the transition agreements and ethics pledges required by Congress is hampering the transition process. Most importantly, Trump is free to accept money from anonymous donors who are “funding” transition activities—the very evil that the Presidential Transition Act is designed to prevent.

See NYTimes, Trump Is Running His Transition Team on Secret Money. (Accessible to all.)

Per the Times,  

Those seeking to curry favor with the incoming administration now have the opportunity to donate directly to the winning candidate without their names or potential conflicts ever entering the public sphere. And unlike with campaign contributions, foreign nationals are allowed to donate to the transition.

As noted by the Times, foreign nationals—like Vladimir Putin—could be funneling money to Trump under the guise of paying for office space, transportation, and computers necessary to prepare for the new administration. Is Putin funding Trump's transition? While the example is farfetched, we will likely never know because Trump's team has refused to enter into agreements that were supposed to be signed in September 2024.

Because the Trump team has failed to sign the required ethics and disclosure documentation, they have been denied access to federal agency briefings and secure email systems. See MSN, 'In the dark': Trump team reportedly getting 'blocked' after transition's ethics 'failure'

Per the MSN article, above,

For example, according to Politico, Trump's pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services has been "rebuffed" in efforts to communicate with outgoing government officials.

Advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached out to the Health and Human Services Department multiple times after Donald Trump tapped him to lead the massive agency, hoping to jumpstart coordination before his takeover in late January.

“They were rebuffed,” according to the report. "Kennedy’s inability to communicate with the agency he may soon manage . . . is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government — something his team pledged to do shortly after the election.”

The failure of the incoming administration to sign ethics and disclosure documents is compounded by the failure of some nominees to submit to the typical FBI clearance process. As noted by CNN,

Critics say the intrusive background checks [by the FBI] sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.

That’s the point of “intrusive background checks,” isn’t it? By turning up embarrassing information before the nominee is confirmed, the Senate has the opportunity to consider whether the nominee is fit for the job. Skipping the background checks is a way to obstruct the Senate—and creates the possibility that the nominee might by blackmailed by a foreign adversary.

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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can’t keep their cost-cutting promises.

We should ignore the dog-and-pony show that is coming our way courtesy of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They claim that they will cut $2 trillion from the annual budget—in large part from cutting the federal workforce. Both claims demonstrate a monumental ignorance of what portion of the US budget can be cut and how big the federal workforce is.

As explained by Vox, it will be impossible for Musk/Ramaswamy to cut $2 trillion from the budget in a way that would make it through Congress. See Vox, Why Elon Musk can never balance the budget, in one chart.

The chart published in the Vox article is from the Congressional Budget Office:

As Vox explains, even if Musk and Ramaswamy took an axe to the small portion of the discretionary budget, it would be painful in the extreme—and would save only $1.1 trillion. But those cuts would never make it through Congress:

Let’s suppose that Musk and Ramaswamy decide to really go for it. They’re going to cut non-defense discretionary spending in half, maybe by shutting down all scientific and health research and K–12 school aid. They’re slashing Medicare and Medicaid by a quarter, and they’re eliminating food stamps, ACA credits, and unemployment insurance entirely.

These, to be clear, are all cuts that would require congressional approval and that Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump could not achieve through executive action alone. Furthermore, they’re cuts that seem politically impossible to push through. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose this is the package.

Doing the math, even this unbelievably ambitious package would amount to a little over $1.1 trillion annually. It’s barely halfway to Musk’s stated goal.

In short, it isn’t possible mathematically or politically to achieve $2 trillion in cuts. Achieving $1 trillion would require massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and subsidies for the Affordable Health Care premiums. Each of those cuts would fall heavily on Trump's base—just before the 2026 midterms. It isn’t going to happen.

“Ah,” you say! “Musk and Ramaswamy will achieve their savings by cutting the federal workforce!” Wrong, again! The federal workforce peaked in size in 1970 and has remained relatively steady.

The chart below shows that the number of federal government employees has remained relatively constant since 1970, while state and local employees have increased significantly. (Thanks to Paul Krugman (@pkrugman.bsky.social) for flagging this chart.) The purple line at the bottom of the chart represents federal employees.

So, to cut significant numbers of federal employees, Musk and Ramaswamy would need a time machine to turn back the clock to pre-WWII America—when the size of the economy was about one-tenth of its current size. (US GDP in 1940 was about $2 trillion. In 2024, it was $23 trillion. See US Real GDP by Year.

The US economy is the largest in the world—by a large margin. Although Musk and Ramaswamy may not like it, the size of the US economy is due in part to the federal government, which creates stable marketplaces and economic conditions for growth.

If you demolish the federal regulatory framework by firing millions of federal employees, we devolve into a kleptocracy—like Russia, which has an economy smaller than that of Brazil. Indeed, Russia’s current GDP is smaller than that of the US before WWII. See World Bank Ranking of GDP 2023.

And in terms of public sector employment as a percentage of the workforce, the US is middle of the pack in the world rankings, below the following nations (in order): Russia, China, Australia, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, France, Spain, and Italy. The US and Germany are effectively tied.

The myth that the US has a bloated federal bureaucracy is demonstrably false when compared to other developed economies. If Musk and Ramaswamy recommend cutting the US federal workforce by a million jobs, we will have a federal regulatory environment on the same scale as Haiti and El Salvador. That state of affairs might benefit robber barons and tech bros, but it won’t help working-class Americans.

Here’s the takeaway: We will hear an incredible amount of insufferable mansplaining and chest-thumping from Musk and Ramaswamy. But they will soon face the reality that government spending helps the American people (which is the point of having a government) and creates the conditions for a prosperous economy.

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Concluding Thoughts

Hoo, boy! The “blame the Democrats” articles aren’t letting up. I am not the only person who is sick of them. Josh Marshall takes on an article in Vox about the need for Democrats to have a “reckoning” in 2024 like they (supposedly) went through after the 2004 losses. Marshall writes:

The Vox article speaks of a “reckoning” the Democrats had to have then and another “reckoning” they have to have now. I absolutely see red whenever I see people using this word in a political context. In post-election terms, it appears to mean a kind of ash and sackcloth self-criticism session on the part of whoever you have decided is to blame for the Democrats’ loss.

No!

As an example of the “sackcloth and ashes approach” referred to by Marshall, I received a well-meaning email from a progressive organization that said we should move toward action (good) and we could talk about our “mistakes” later (er, okay). The email asserted that we “must have made mistakes” because we lost. (Really?)

While it is incontestably true that no campaign is perfect, Kamala Harris ran a very good one. It floors me whenever I see an article examining “why Democrats lost” that fails to acknowledge that there were two candidates in the race. It is like describing why a baseball team lost a game but talking about only one of the teams.

Who would do that? It doesn’t even make logical sense to do so. And yet analysts are spilling barrels of ink over why Democrats lost the election without confronting an uncomfortable question: To what extent, if any, did Trump’s appeal to racism, sexism, and white supremacy affect the outcome? After all, Trump put a lot of effort into building his campaign around those themes. Should we pretend that didn’t happen?

For the sake of argument, I am not taking a position on the extent to which those factors determined the outcome. But for goodness sake, at least acknowledge that Trump ran on those themes and consider whether they had anything to do with the outcome. Failing to do so might cause us to propose solutions that don’t address actual problems.

Josh Marshall makes this point in his article. Democrats successfully rebounded from the 2004 losses in “wave” victories in 2006 and 2008. As Marshall notes, Democrats didn’t succeed in those “wave” elections by self-flagellation and mortification (the “reckoning” referred to by Vox).

Instead,

What Democrats actually did after 2004 and actually began in earnest in the final six weeks of 2004 was simply to become an effective party of opposition, which meant opposing basically everything Republicans proposed to do and tripping them up over the actions they took born of the arrogance of unchecked power. . .

The details differ. But gist is the same. The real work of an opposition party is to oppose. It’s not to originate new theories of governance or have “reckonings”. It’s to oppose. It’s to hold the people in power accountable.

There’s plenty of time for theorizing and message testing. But the first thing to do is to oppose. Less arguing, more doing.

“Less arguing and more doing.” Words to live by—and to win by.

Daily Dose of Perspective

Light rain and intermittent clouds have prevented me from capturing new deep-sky objects with my telescope over the last few nights, so I have included a new image of the always-pleasing Pleiades taken last week.