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If it was 2008 and Ron Paul said he would do it would you believe him?
There was a super early video in 2008, which is probably memory holed at this point, where Ron was talking to a mere handful of supporters in NH.
It was the one time I heard anyone say what the president can do - he can take out his pen and veto bills.
And I don't know why nobody else has pointed out that the President absolutely can refuse to sign every single thing that lands on his desk.
'Anything you want me to sign is to be done on MY terms, and if you're not willing to work together to do that, enjoy your weeks of bickering and failing to get a supermajority.'
The resulting paralysis would be the second best outcome we could hope for.
There would be a month of pearl clutching and videos of people chaining up the entrances to national parks. But the thing about budget arguments is they always end.
Eventually both sides realize "hey if this goes on much longer people are going to start to figure out they don't need any of this shit" and they both drop their 'principles' and start to collude to keep the scam going.
A real president would point out that it's a scam at that moment.
Ron Paul is one of two people who I believe are aware the entire thing is a scam.
Yes, I would have trusted Ron Paul to do that.
If Elon just fires all the people who spend the money in the budget, then they should end up with the money at the end of the year.
maybe 16 years ago you might have thought it were possible for him to succeed.Would I believe he could succeed? No.
Both videos have the same clip about cutting $2 trillion from the $6.5 trillion budget; And since he's talking about $6.5 trillion rather than $65 trillion, I'm assuming that he intends to cut $2 trillion from each year rather than over the course of a decade. It appears that the GOP will have a simple majority in the House, but since the GOP doesn't have a supermajority (60%) in the Senate, the cuts will have to be achieved through budget reconciliation (which only requires a simple majority in both Congressional chambers to pass. However, only the discretionary portion of the budget can be dealt with through reconciliation, the mandatory portion of the budget (accounts for 2/32 of the budget) can't be touched through reconciliation. I don't know where they expect to find $2 trillion to cut, because discretionary spending in the FY 2025 budget only comes to $1.8 trillion. They're going to have to eliminate more than the Department of Education, they're going to have to cut the entire Department of Defense.
From An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034
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