Touché

I’ve never been that much of an Elon Musk fan. I’ve basically thought he made his fortune through rent-seeking.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal have noticed that, too, and produced an amusing retort to Mr. Musk’s bitter complaints about the House’s budget bill:

Elon Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency made him persona non grata in the Beltway, and most criticism was nasty and unfair. That’s what Washington does to outsiders who want to shrink its power. But that makes it all the more unfortunate that Mr. Musk is now joining the Beltway crowd in trying to kill the House tax bill.

“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” the Tesla CEO tweeted Tuesday, as the Senate begins considering its version of budget reconciliation. “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

[…]

But the House bill does avoid a $4.5 trillion tax hike next year and cuts spending by some $1.5 trillion over 10 years by making some useful reforms to Medicaid, student loans and food stamps. It also ends most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green-energy subsidies.

Ah, but Mr. Musk doesn’t want to eliminate that pork. “There is no change to tax incentives for oil & gas, just EV/solar,” he said on X.com last week, retweeting another user post that said “slashing solar energy credits is unjust.”

For my part I did not support either Bush II’s or Mr. Trump’s tax cuts. It’s not that I oppose tax cuts on principle but that I thought that they would be more effective in producing economic growth had they been more targeted. I do think that we should limit our spending to what we’re willing to pay for plus the increase in aggregate product. And that’s our problem. We don’t produce enough of what we consume.

But preservation of Trump’s tax cuts come as no surprise—cutting taxes is practically the only thing on which Republicans can agree.

A big chunk of our budget problem is one that has been festering for three-quarters of a century: the Baby Boomers are retiring and those IOUs that fill the Social Security “trust fund” are being redeemed. Government spending has been paid for with Social Security withholding for some time. I see the federal cuts in employment as the federal government engaging in the belt-tightening that private companies have been doing for 40 years.