What happens when you throw a new cotton t-shirt into the dryer after its first wash? You might as well hand it down to your kids, because that baby ain’t fittin’ anymore! 🤦
Now for a much trickier question: can you shrink the government like it was in the dryer, and expect it to still fit?
Let’s see what we can figure out!
Here are Five Fast Facts about shrinking the government:
- 🤑 Billionaire Boys Club - Trump has tasked two billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with heading up a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) once he takes office. Their goal is to find ways to shrink the government by 50%. Like the Starbucks Red Cup Day, it’s a limited time thing that will wrap up by mid-2026. To be fair, no one can argue these guys aren’t savvy with the moolah!
- ✂️ Biggest On The Block - It’s not like there isn’t any fat to cut! The federal government is easily the largest employer in the nation, with almost 3 million workers (not including the military). The next largest is Walmart, at roughly half that size. If they can, theoretically, find 50% to cut, that would push the unemployment rate from 4.1% up to 5%. Not great, but not historically terrible, either.
- 🎓 Not Helpless - Again, theoretically, if they do cut a bunch of folks, most of them will be educated and highly skilled, and therefore more than likely to find jobs in the private sector so that unemployment will come down.
- 🤯 Cost Of Not Cutting - Government regulation costs the economy around $2 trillion per year. That’s money and time spent by businesses complying with bureaucracy rather than innovating, making better products or services, or hiring more people. Think parasite, but with pocket protectors (and guns, if you don’t behave yourself).
- 🤔 Is It Real? - Let’s say the Boys Club actually finds a bunch of garbage to cut out (let’s be honest, it shouldn’t be hard). Will it actually happen? It probably depends on Congress. Trump can propose all he wants (and the DOGE isn’t even real yet), but Congress holds the purse strings, and we know what a fickle bunch of political opportunists they are. Time will tell!
🔥Bottom line: If the government did get streamlined like this, it would theoretically cut the amount of taxes we pay a whole lot, and it should make government vastly more efficient. The job losses would be tough for those folks, and people using the programs that get cut would have to figure out something else, so that’s not great. But, if we don’t do something pretty drastic, the results will be catastrophic: the government is currently so bloated that we’re adding $1 trillion of debt every 100 days. It’s not if there’s a massive crash, it’s when. And then we’re all in trouble.
How does that shrunken t-shirt sound now?
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