Giving the DOGE a Bone: How Musk's Mission to Dismantle Government Sucks in Progressives like Jon Stewart

Don't get me wrong, I like Jon Stewart. The problem is that, like so many, he's been brainwashed into believing right-wing economics that don't work.

A couple of weeks ago, I first started writing this piece about Elon Musk and DOGE - the “Department Of Government Efficiency” run with Vivek Ramaswamy. The idea behind DOGE is that billionaires Musk and Ramaswamy will find $2-trillion in cuts in order to eliminate the U.S. Federal deficit, which is currently running at nearly 7% of GDP.

Jon Stewart and Mark Cuban, the “Democratic” billionaire.

As a Generation X-er, I’ve followed the career of Jon Stewart since the 1990s. I even watched his MTV show, but he took off with the Daily Show and his take on the news. He also helped launched the careers of Steven Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, and many others.

Stewart is now a kind of elder statesman, and continues to challenge politicians on their hypocrisy and a shows a genuine commitment to trying to find common ground, which is important at a time of extreme divisions. Stewart’s satire is not cynical. He’s a satirist like Swift. It comes from a sense of disappointed idealism - the idea that we could all be better to one another, while recognizing the dark humour of people’s oblivious cruelty.

What it really shows is that there is no ideological difference between Cuban, who campaigned for Harris, and Musk and Ramaswamy, who are now heading up DOGE.

DOGE is a $2-trillion threat to U.S. Stability and Prosperity

DOGE should be DOA, based on Musk’s conflicts of interest alone.

Since I first started writing this post - not long before Christmas - there have already been two massively disruptive events involving Musk.

He started barking orders and essentially took over as President of the U.S., ordering Republican House Speaker to kill a joint Republican and Democratic government spending resolution in the house, nearly resulting in a government shutdown.

Notably, one of the changes removed from the bill was bipartisan agreement on trade with China, with Musk had removed. You can read it at the link here:

"The original bill would have made it harder for Musk to build Tesla factories in Shanghai."

The other was a massive blow-up between Core MAGA, including Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer with Musk and Ramaswamy over H-1B worker visas. The online screaming match continued for a number of days. Ramaswamy said American culture was the reason U.S. engineers weren’t worth hiring, and Musk said he would “go to war” over the visas. In this instance again, Musk had a direct financial motivation.

Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year.

We reported that roughly US 15,000 employees were let go at Tesla around April 2024. Every department was affected, but the layoffs were concentrated in Texas and California, where Tesla has more workers than anywhere else.

Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas.

These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H1-B visas during the time it was laying off US workers (via Reddit).

The result has been some interesting, pointed - and even accurate - criticism of the use and abuse of the H1-B visas, with hardcore right-wing Trump supporters pointing out that American workers were being fired while immigrant workers, even highly-skilled and trained ones, were preferred by big tech because they could be paid less, and that it was hard for them to quit, even if they were poorly treated.

Trump sided with Musk. To anyone wondering why, Musk is worth more - on paper, anyway - than all of MAGA combined.

“Corruption: The Abuse of entrusted power for personal or private gain”

I’m introducing the definition of corruption to remind people what it is, because it seems to be so pervasive - and spreading - that many corrupt practices have been normalized.

Democrats have been raising the issue of Musk’s conflicts of interest, but supposedly “traditional” media outlets like USA Today and the Economist, with no mention whatsoever of the potential for corruption posed by putting a government contractor in charge of $2-trillion in cuts.

USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques wrote “Donald Trump has handed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy the critical task of reducing the size and reach of the federal government. It's in the best interest of all Americans that they succeed”.

Musk has an obligation to his shareholders to maximize profits. Will he cut his billions in contracts with the U.S. Government? What if he cuts funding that affects his competitors? What about his company’s revenue from other country’s governments? Does that make him and his companies financially vulnerable?

Musk’s current wealth is very much based on speculation on stock prices - which makes for a more precarious position than it would suggest. If his position was really secure, why would he have worked so hard to elect Trump? There’s a saying about banks and debt. If you owe $1,000 to your bank, and you can’t pay it, you’re in trouble. If you owe a billion dollars to a bank the bank’s in trouble.

Musk’s companies are insanely overpriced. Tesla is an electric car manufacturer, and when you compare the stock price to company earnings of car manufacturers, Tesla is insanely overpriced. Twitter is not making money, and Musk used debt to buy it.

One of the classic anti-government, free market lines is to say “government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.” Well this is literally the richest person in the world using the government of the most powerful country in the world to pick winners and losers.

Unless Musk is willing to step down from all of this companies and put them in a blind trust, putting Musk in charge of picking and choosing $2-trillion in government spending cuts is the arguably one of the greatest conflicts of interests in history.

I say all this to make the point that there are truly enormous risks involved with Musk and DOGE that are being ignored.

Cutting $2-Trillion is the Equivalent of Shutting Down Entire States’ Economies

A string of mainstream publications and conservative think tanks are praising the proposals.

USA Today is writing op-eds talking about how important it is, and The Economist wrote some suggestions, which included denying even more Americans health care by raising the Medicare eligibility to 67 from 65.

Cutting $2-trillion would shrink U.S. GDP by 7%. 40-million people making $50,000 a year each losing their jobs.

To put that in perspective, in the U.S. in 2024, there were only three U.S. states whose GDP was over $2-trillion: California, Florida and Texas. It’s the economic equivalent of entire states losing every single business and job.

The obsession with the federal deficit is based in neoclassical economics that have failed so badly that they created the current global economic and political shitshow. It’s not because governments haven’t been doing what has been asked of them by conservatives. It’s because they have.

A federal cut of $2-trillion doesn’t make long-term economic growth and recovery easier, it makes it harder.

That is for three very basic reasons of accounting, and government accounting is different than household or corporate accounting, for many reasons, including the fact that government has a central bank and a mint. In a crisis, when the private sector is in trouble and needs money, they have had to turn to government, as they did during the global financial crisis of 2008 and during the pandemic. The Federal Reserve and other Central Banks created trillions of dollars in quantitative easing.

New money that is legal tender in the economy has always been created by government, not the private sector.

1. The $2-trillion deficit that the U.S. government is spending goes into the private sector. It means the amount of money flowing unto the economy will plunge by $2-trillion a year.

2. That money will not be replaced, or returned to taxpayers, or better spent on something else. This is deficit reduction. The “savings” will not be “passed on” to anyone, cuts will be.

Lots of this has been people being “helpful” by suggesting that if people are looking for ways to reduce the deficit, they could slash whichever budget items they are ideologically opposed to.

Federal government finances really are fundamentally different than business.

It is not like running a household. It is not like running a business. You run a business for personal and private profit.

While people have talked about the impact of 25% tariffs being a shock to the U.S. economy that will drive up prices, that is a fraction of the impact that a $2-trillion cut in spending will have on the U.S. economy - and which Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed.

When the government runs a deficit, which means that spending is higher than income, it means that the government is, as a matter of definition and fact, putting more money into the economy than it is taking out. The government is being a net positive contributor to the private sector.

As a matter of definition and of fact, all spending is someone’s income, and all government spending puts money in private bank accounts.

The reason people are talking about cutting $2-trillion, is because that is the size of the current deficit.

If $2-trillion is cut from the budget, the goal is to balance the budget. It’s not “$2-trillion in spending will be cut and the savings passed on to taxpayers..” It’s “There will be $2-trillion less money going into the economy.”

Current U.S. GDP is 27.36-billion. $2-trillion is 7.3% of that.

This is what people aren’t recognizing. When they talk about the impact of tariffs on the U.S. Economy, Elon Musk is over at DOGE juggling flasks of nitro glycerine.

The U.S. has been battered by a pandemic, a global financial crisis and is now dealing with a massive stock market bubble. You can’t cut your way out of debt - you invest and work your way out, and if the private sector won’t do it, the public sector can.

Jon Stewart and Mark Cuban

There’s a transcript here of Mark Cuban on Jon Stewart’s podcast.

I have to say that I find Cuban likeable. Like many billionaires, the authority and control granted by his wealth and income means he is treated as an authorities in everything, despite their more narrow proven skillset, which is persuading others to part with their money.

However,

Whether it’s crypto currency or DOGE, Cuban does not engage with the serious issues of conflicts of interest.

Cuban talks at length about the impact of cryptocurrency, which are digital tokens with nothing to back them, created by an anonymous genius who managed to create a digital currency that requires electricity to make, and it can’t generally be used as money.

Creating your own money is not a new thing to do. Anyone in an economy can create their own money with an IOU. The problem is getting other people to accept it. However, crypto is totally unregulated, which also makes it a favoured way to launder money and for criminal, terrorist and corrupt organizations to move money around.

There is no question it is being used to scam people, quite deliberately. The actual drugs and crime from other countries that are affecting the United States, are using cryptocurrency to pay each other and to launder money.

Cuban doesn’t touch on those ethical or legal issues of crypto.

Those used to be the kind of thing that might be off-putting about an investment. Like, if North Korea is using crypto to pay for developing its nuclear program (which it is), the fact that the value of your investment is being driven by the proceeds of crime or terrorist financing, that makes it a risky investment.

Governments and the people they represent are right to be concerned about “investments” that lead to the proliferation and development of nuclear weapons.

CUBAN addresses none of this.

CUBAN:

Another area was crypto. I mean, I was very clear early on that there was data from Pew Research that said, you know, at least 40% of young men were into crypto. And the way I explained it to them wasn't a big picture crypto thing at all. I was like, look, for a 21 year old kid, particularly men these days, they're not like we were when we were growing up, where it was a rite of passage to open up a bank account or to get a savings account.

Now they download Robinhood or Coinbase or some app, and they live in an app economy. And if you downloaded Robinhood or Coinbase, you're buying crypto over stocks. And you're buying crypto not just because you wanna see it go up, but because it makes you part of a community. You know, Dogecoin is a meme stock that everybody talks about it, Bitcoin, whatever it may be. And so if these young men have their entire net worth tied up in crypto, And you've got a SEC head, Gary Gensler, doing everything possible to reduce the value of their net worth, and everything they read in in those apps about, you know, what's happening to the price of their crypto is, you know, driven and talked about relating to Gary Gensler, they're not gonna vote for you.

And I said it to Gary Gensler directly, I said it to Kamala, I said it to her team, that Gary Gensler could cost her the election. And there's an argument to be made when you look at the numbers. You know, a whole lot of young men voted against Kamala Harris, and I think a crypto had a lot to do with it.

Now, I will say a couple of things here.

One is that I have complete sympathy and support for anyone who is or has invested in crypto, but the fact that the number of people involved in crypto is 40%, that is a defcon level 10 warning that there is something seriously wrong with the economy.

That something wrong is that we have an “everything bubble” in assets and real estate that is deflating. People start acting squirrely when the market is out of whack, and there are a lot more scams and get-rich-quick schemes because the working and middle class economy is sinking but the economy at the top is white hot and burning out.

I have lived through several economic bubbles bursting, and weird crazes are part of the mania. I was more aware than most, because my dad was a financial executive. I remember the stock crash of 1987, when I was 18. In Canada, the price of oil had dropped, which left people in Alberta and Saskatchewan in a lot of debt.

In 1989 as a housing bubble was bursting in Canada, pyramid schemes were rife on campus at the university I was attending.

In the 1990s, in the lead-up to the 1999 dot.com crash, people were selling dot.com domain names for a million dollars. There had also been beanie babies and various kinds of trading cards. There was the Global Financial Crisis, an oil price crisis in 2014, and NFTs and “meme stocks.”

Cuban then compares Bitcoin to “digital gold”.

So just think of Bitcoin like digital gold. Period. End of story. Oh. It's just built on supply and demand. Only the difference is people are still mining gold, and it's physical. You have to pull it out of the ground. There's a lot of costs associated with that. Bitcoin is all digital, but it's limited in the number of Bitcoins that will ever be created to 21,000,000.

It makes no sense to say that bitcoin is digital gold. If it’s digital, that’s all it is. It’s not gold. Gold is real and material. Digital is virtual, but the crimes that are being committed and the harm that is being enabled by these investments being used to launder the proceeds of crime is very real.

Even the comparison to gold is based on a nonsensical economic theory that demands that money be “backed” by gold without ever addressing what backs the value of gold.

The value of gold is not that it grows, but that it does not corrode, which gives it permanance but does not make it a productive investment.

Unlike a farm or a factory, gold employs no one, creates no new value and generates no ongoing revenue.

As Warren Buffett has pointed out, given the choice between spending money on a productive business and a chunk of gold, he will choose the productive business, because it can return more than you put in without having to sell it.

Gold is a commodity, and commodities like grain, oil, or potash, and minerals are all subject to speculative manias.

Gary Gensler and Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission were enforcing existing laws because people are being ripped off by collusion.

The total lack of regulation around crypto currency - means there are no audits, no standards, anyone can create their own, and people are putting ungodly sums of real money into it, and around the same time Stewart and Cuban’s podcast went up, U.S. Regulators warned that Crypto could cause another financial crisis.

As the cryptocurrency industry scored massive electoral wins in November and skyrocketing crypto prices currently push the global valuation to more than $3 trillion, federal regulators have issued warnings about the nascent industry’s potential to cause widespread disruptions to traditional banking and financial markets.

The reports, which highlight crypto’s volatility, lack of regulations, and growing ties to traditional markets, echo alerts issued about the subprime mortgage industry before the 2008 financial crisis.

Lots of people have already lost billions to other crypto schemes, but the nature of any scheme is that the people running them also believe in them, because their own stake is on the line as well.

Part of the reason for widespread economic misery is that governments haven’t enforced the law to protect people from being ripped off, which they have been.

This is the problem with politics everywhere. Instead of challenging a hard-right message - that cuts are good for the economy - liberals and progressives reinforce and share it.

It means there is one ideology, and one ideology only at work, despite the political divisions.

To give credit to Stewart, he mentions other options. He mentions Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which Cuban says he has read and spoken to advocates, but that it will only work when interest rates are lower.

STEWART: Let's flip it to, you know, the there's a lot of people, and and it's, you know, this this modern monetary, policy

CUBAN: MMT. Yeah.

STEWART: Where they they talk about that the deficit doesn't matter because and and I tend to be sympathetic to this. You can print money, and why are we selling this debt to other people anyway? Why don't we buy it ourselves? I mean, it's all kind of a shell game to begin with. Why not make it easier on ourselves to pay that down through the minting?

CUBAN: Just blame more money, but now all of a sudden, more money is in the economy, and the economy reinflates. And, you know, it you you start then having to pay

STEWART: You think MMT does not you're not a proponent of that?

CUBAN: No. I I actually, I I read the books, and, you know, I talked to the people behind it. Right. When interest rates were 0 or near 0, it made a 100% sense. When interest rates skyrocketed to where they are now, it doesn't make sense because even if you just printed all that money the government can't just print money.

They have to borrow money to you know, even in a fractionalized environment, there has to be some reason to do it. It's not like there's a printing press that just goes brr brr brr brr.

I'm gonna blow your mind here. We've created this new market of of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and all these other things that kind of has, in some respects, out of nothing, made something. What if that was utilized to bring down those more, troublesome aspects of deficits? Because we do need government to spend to help stimulate certain things, to, stabilize people, to do things that have real value in people's lives.

Sure. But there's still you know, debits and credits still have to balance. And I'm not I'm not the economist who can give you detailed analysis of all this stuff.

STEWART: They by the way, they can't either. They just do it in a really, like, smug shitty way, but

CUBAN: I just looked at it just, you know, as a business guy, and when if we were just you still gotta balance things. Right? And so we in order to print that money, we gotta borrow it from someone, even if it's ourselves, and that inflates the balance sheet, and that creates other problems with inflation.

STEWART: Right. Right.

CUBAN: Because, think of it this way, John. Look at all Zimbabwe and all these other third world countries that tried to do the exact same thing.

This is where Cuban is completely wrong, about inflation and about “Zimbabwe and all those third world countries that tried to do the same thing”.

MMT works for countries that are monetarily sovereign, which means they have a floating interest rate and lend in their own currency. The U.S., UK, Canada, Norway and other countries that have their own currency can (and sometimes have) funded government operations through direct money printing, without inflation.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe and other countries is because they borrow in other countries’ currencies (especially during a commodity boom, like oil or grain) and when the commodity prices crash and the economy slumps, so does their exchange rate. The hyperinflation is because imports skyrocket and so do debt payments.

Hyperinflation in Germany was also not caused by government money printing. It was caused by private banks printing money and extending credit, which borrowers could take to the German central bank and have converted into money on demand. It created a massive currency and inflation crisis - and it’s actually very similar to what Cuban and other cryptocurrency holders are proposing.

Letting people turn the money they’ve made for themselves into government money, for nothing. That drives inflation.

Milton Friedman’s idea that government spending creates inflation is based on the idea that government has given people so much money that they are outbidding one another to drive up the price of gas and groceries. This makes zero sense, and is obviously false, but it persists through mindless repetion.

It ignores the role of sellers in putting up prices, cartels in collusion, and of banks in extending private credit.

Stewart actually references an interview with Paul Krugman from many years ago, when the government was deadlocked over the debt ceiling. Krugman appeared on the Daily Show to argue that there was no need for a debt ceiling at all - or for the U.S. government to go into debt.

Instead, Krugman proposed that the entire situation could be defused if the Federal Reserve created a $1-trillion coin, and the U.S. government could use that. At the time, I recall Stewart describing the idea as being “stupid”.

While the idea of a coin could use some marketing puffery, it was not stupid at all. Krugman was pointing out a political, economic and legal reality, which is that federal governments create money. They are the monopoly issuers of currency and legal tender, not the private sector.

Instead of issuing $1-trillion worth of bonds, or having to cut cutting $1-trillion in spending, the central bank can created $1-trillion with a few keystrokes and provided it to the U.S. government. This is called a “monetized deficit”, and 15% of the U.S. war effort was paid for in this way.

Cuban and Stewart’s discussion about DOGE returns to finding “efficiencies” and refers to “taxpayer money” rather than “public money”.

CUBAN: “…Going even back to Elon and Vivek, there's a difference between just deficit reduction, which seems to be their their focus, and problem solving. In between, there is efficiency. Right? You always wanna be more efficient with whatever tools, you know, people or AI, whatever it takes, you wanna be more efficient. But the question becomes, how do you solve problems, and what problems are you start trying to solve? Because at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to give our taxpayer money to the government for to solve problems that we need solved.

Stewart: But that's the kind of thinking, though, that's so crucial because there's 2 sides of the coin. 1 is profligate spending from the government that doesn't consider you know, I had a conversation with the deputy secretary of defense where we were talking about the $850,000,000,000 budget, and you would have thought, like, I asked what underwear she was wearing. Like, her response to being questioned about the lack of, passing an audit on $850,000,000,000

Multiple times. It would Multiple times. Just, you know, went like, how dare you? Do you even know what an audit is? And I'm like, I thought I did, but maybe I don't. But the arrogance of it was wild. So the idea of connecting spending to value but the flip side of that is the idea of cutting spending with no discernment for value either.

I saw the exchange between Stewart and the Deputy Director and it is, in fact, this is an example where Stewart does not fully understand what he is talking about, and the deputy secretary of defense is doing a bad job of explaining.

In fact, Mike McCord, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) made it crystal clear that you can still know where all your money and property are, you can still fail an audit because you can’t pull out the records to show it in the time they expect.

McCord: I've said this before and I don't know if there's a different way to say it, but — not passing an audit is not the same as not knowing [what] you have, how much money you have, where your airplanes are. Being able to pull the records, demonstrate it to an auditor, any record that they pick out of the stack and do it in the — time they expect, that’s what an audit is about.

The actual statement about the audits is here, and it explains that there has been substantial progress in reporting being free of “material weakness.”

So, in addition to the reporting entities that already had favorable audit opinions, $703 billion or 82 percent of our DOD wide 8$00 and $856 billion balance is now free of material weaknesses.

So, this now means that the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and DISA have gotten their house in order on all of their funding or cash as some people might think of it for both their general funds and their working capital funds. Unless you think this is simple to do for context, the department has improved from less than 7 percent to over 82 percent of its funding being free of material weaknesses.

Since I returned to this job and we're talking about a universe here of approximately 1,500 different active DOD accounts in the Treasury with a value of over $856 billion that must be reconciled.

So, if there’s indignation on the part of the Deputy Director, it’s that Stewart is missing that the DoD has improved financial tracking from 7% of funding to 82%, and that Stewart does not understand the audit process.

Stewart is assuming $850-billion is unaccounted for, when that’s not the case. It is being flagged and has been identified as an issue, this is part of how public audits and oversight work. Gaps and problems are flagged, recommendations for improvements are made, and there is follow up to see whether the recommendations have been followed or not.

This is about public administration by officials, not about decisions made by politicians.

While it is a certainty to say that some of that money will not have been well spent, auditing 1500 bank accounts with $856-billion requires time and resources. That is very different than Stewart’s assumption.

The ideas that Cuban - and certainly Musk and Ramaswamy and the GOP - want to impose on the government are based on the idea that the government must serve and submit to the private sector, based on the idea that government is dependent on tax revenues, when the private sector is dependent on government for its functioning.

We know this because the private sector received trillions of dollars in Quantitative Easing from central banks during the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic, but it is more profound than that.

The market exists only within a framework of law, regulations and rights that is created shaped by government and the courts.

They have been eroded in ways that have led to a system that has been weakened or corrupted to the point that these basic rules either are not being enforced. That is one of the critical problems with the economy and politics.

This is one of the issues that has arisen with some political extremism, including on the right, which is that the idea of government at all is under attack - even the “night watchman” state where courts enforce property, contract and the criminal law, as well as anti-trust.

Through enforcement of the law, government and the courts can and do enforce value, and they can and do determine what money can and cannot legally buy.

These create a functioning market in which people are willing to freely participate because it is not rigged.

Money is not just property or a store of value. It’s something we use to get other people to do something we want, and the people who receive it can then use it for the same purpose. That’s what makes a useful and incredibly powerful tool.

Whether or not we can or legally buy and sell human beings, or human organs, or child labour, or sex trafficking, or toxic drugs, or paying someone to change their vote, their their verdict or a contract award, or paying to murder someone.

That is how the law is defined and enforced.

When people say “liberal democracy” the “liberal” part is about liberty - working to ensure liberty and rights of all individuals against encroachment and all the ways that corruption and privilege, private or public, will seek to put a thumb on the scales of justice.

Rights are not for sale. Capitalism, libertarianism and communism are about particular economic systems. Liberalism is not.

The very nature of radical politics is that they require a double standard that leads to their corruption. Division and polarization is driven by a refusal to submit to the authority of your opponent - which leads to more escalation. What is required is extraordinarily difficult, which is to rebuild trust and confidence in a system where the same rules apply to all.

I agree with Jeremy Grantham’s assessment that we’re in a superbubble - an “everything asset bubble” that is bursting. If you look at the stock prices of the “Magnificent Seven” from just five years ago to today, there is no rational market justification for that increase in stock values.

The widespread queasy feeling that so many people have right now can be explained if we imagine ourselves as being on a roller coaster that’s clicking its way to the crest of the first big drop, and it’s a doozy.

But DOGE means that everyone on the political spectrum is repeating something that supports and perpetuates a core conservative ideology, that austerity improves things, when all the evidence of the last 15 years after the 2008 financial crisis shows the opposite. DOGE and the debate around establishes a completely false frame of debate around the economy, which is that if the deficit is eliminated, things will be improve, when they won’t.

When, not if, the U.S. markets revert to the mean, it will become very clear that what is required is a New Deal and a Marshall Plan. More competition, more access to capital, private debt restructuring to clear off the deadweight of old debt and access to capital as part of a broad-based industrial plan.

It would also help to recognize corruption, where it exists, for what it is. Corruption is not just a state: it is a process of corrupting people and institutions, to which the people and institutions themselves may be oblivious, because it has been so normalized.

There’s a saying about interviews with entrepreneurs and investors - “everyone talks their book.”

That’s what Cuban is doing, which is to be expected, but the problem generally is that when people hear of a crisis, their main question is, what’s an angle they can use to profit from it?

When it comes to the history of economics, and even recent economic disputes, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver are every bit as underinformed and misinformed as Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, or Elon Musk.

Everything they have consumed is the largely the same propaganda about the economy, which has ignored everything that researchers have learned about the economy and economics in the last 15 years since the global financial crisis.

There are lots of reasons for this. The U.S. Supreme Court decision that equated money with speech opened the floodgates and created a new ecosytem of paid propagandists, in addition to the pundits and political truthbenders.

Ultimately it’s what Josh Billings said “It ain’t what you do know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you do know, that ain’t so.”

30-

DFL