DOGE By The Numbers

Make a note of these statistics, and use them for context over the next few minutes.

1 million seconds is about 278 hours. 1 billion seconds is about 31 ? years. 1 trillion seconds is about 31,700 years.

The DOGE Days These are the DOGE Days, and just like the Corona Days of past, these DOGE days are making some people a little crazy. DOGE is a disruption – a break from the past, a new set of rubrics, customs and rules and people don’t always like that kind of thing – especially if it means their secret is being told, or their cookie is being taken away. People are big stakeholders in their secrets and their cookies. That’s just human nature.

It’s a difficult thing to talk about anything that matters in America today without pissing some people off. We’ve become so embedded in our political silos – so “we vs. you” and “us vs. them”. If you don’t agree with one side, you’re a traitor, and if you’re a traitor, you will be dealt with accordingly. Somehow in the past 20-ish years, we’ve lost our way from the commonsense middle – that place where our beliefs aren’t all on one side or all on the other, but somewhere between the two because that’s where most of us live, regardless of the lever we pull. But it’s still a damn difficult thing to talk about anything that matters in America today without pissing some people off.

But talk about them we must, and we must talk about them for the simplest of reasons that many of us don’t really want to believe: deception. We’ve been deceived too much and for too long by those we have elected to lead us. That’s not a firebomb being tossed from the left or right, or a conspiracy posted by a grown man who lives in his mother’s basement. It’s a matter of fact that is easy to see when we apply some basic critical thinking, some basic fact checking, and some basic courage to call bullshit on bullshit.

Here are a few examples from just last month:

1. Do you know that guy “Mr. Wonderful” on Shark Tank? His birth name is Kevin O’Leary (a Canadian) and he recently came out in favor of DOGE by saying that the U.S. federal government has, “One hundred years of never being scrutinized, never been examined, never looking for any efficiencies”. Not true. For decades, inspectors general have audited the federal government looking for waste, fraud and abuse. The Government Accountability Office has been doing it for more than a century.

2. Washington State senator Pat Murray gave a floor speech recently. In it she said, “The single biggest driver of our national debt since 2001 has been Republican tax cuts.” Also not true. There have been 5 tax cut bills enacted since 2001, Murray ended up voting for two, the first directly and the second by not objecting to the unanimous consent motion. All passed with some level of bipartisan approval.

3. Finally, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave us this: “Prices at the grocery store are going up because democracy is being taken away.” It’s one thing to root for your side of the political aisle, it’s complete another thing to openly, directly, and blatantly lie from an office of elected influence about something as vital as grocery prices. With respect sir, that comment was absurd, ridiculous, and obviously not true.

Disagreement and information. Disagreement is a societal right in America. Some might even say it’s a vital to the American fabric. But ignorance is not, and neither is uninformed nonsense. The bridge between the two is information. Today’s message isn’t about the rightness or wrongness of DOGE, and it’s not sponsored by CNN or Fox. Today’s message is why there is a DOGE at all. DOGE was conceived to resolve a problem that isn’t political, but mathematical. Some disagree with the methods, and they may be right about that, but all should agree that waste, fraud and abuse isn’t a good thing. It’s your money and those we hire are supposed to be the stewards of that. That’s not red or blue, it’s green.

Here are a few simple facts about the debt and deficit that you may or may not have known until now.

Simple words, giant numbers.

1. We’ve all heard about the “debt” but rarely are we given its context to provide meaning. The national debt has increased 6X since Obama took office in 2008. That’s a 600% increase in less than 17 years. As a taxpayer, your personal share today is over $323,000 (and growing). Do you know what you got for it? Read on.

2. Roughly 45 cents of every dollar of tax you pay goes only to pay interest on debt. Those are goods and services that were either provided in the past or never provided at all, but you are paying for them today. Remember: regardless of your income or your politics, you are paying for this.

3. In 1981 the ratio of national debt to gross output (GDP) was 31%. Today that measurement is over 123%. For context, if you want to buy a house, your total debt can’t exceed 44% of your income.

4. In 2023 the Treasury collected tax receipts of $4.4 trillion. Congress spent $6.1 trillion. That’s a $1.7 Trillion deficit (so far in 2025 it’s over $2 Trillion and still ticking). That deficit gets added to the debt every year with interest due.

5. The debt is comprised of 2 kinds of liabilities: funded and unfunded liabilities. “Funded” liabilities are provided in the budget and are currently about $24.5 Trillion. “Unfunded” liabilities are current promises made that the government has not set aside the money to pay. Those total about $218 Trillion.

6. There are two kinds of federal spending: discretionary and non-discretionary. 74% of the federal budget is non-discretionary, meaning Congress can’t touch it. This is for things like Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and food stamps. 26% of the federal budget is discretionary. This is for things like defense, public safety, transportation, and education. 100% of non-discretionary spending is borrowed, and 100% of that money must be repaid with interest.

7. Since 2010, Social Security has been paying out more than it receives. The current FICA tax rate of 12.4% only covers 38% of Social Security obligations. The Social Security model was designed on a template that assumed an ever-increasing population. Now the US birthrate is at an all-time low, mathematically making pay-go impossible. Since 2012, the government has known that Social Security will become insolvent by 2035.

Occam’s Razor. While all Americans don’t agree on the methods, most agree that this is a problem that needs to be solved. Solving any problem begins with point of view and perhaps the best point of view to solve this problem comes to us through “Occam’s Razor”, a theorem in physics that states, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer”. In other words, the simplest answer is often the best. Following Occam’s Razor, here are three simple solutions that just might help solve this problem before it’s unsolvable.

1. Increase tax receipts. The key word here is “receipts” not “rates”. It sounds good to villainize rich people who apparently still aren’t paying something called a “fair share”, and to rally the minions about how babies will die because rich people are getting a tax cut, but it’s been proven by history and math time and time again that tax rates are lowered, tax receipts increase. This is because the U.S. economy is dynamic and capitalistic, not static and socialistic (yet).

2. Decrease spending. The idea of “waste” in government is so common that we’ve grown to accept it as a cost of doing business, and yet when confronted with the question every politician alive agrees that waste and fraud is bad and must be eliminated. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, lots of citizens and politicians complain about “how” DOGE is attempting to cut expenses but none of them (not a single one) offers a better way to do it except to say that the current means and methods are draconian. For context, the US occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, it took 25 months to create the Mueller Report, and DOGE is less than a month old. It will take time, and adjustments will be needed. Maybe we should give this a bit of time before bitching, complaining and criticizing. Some might call that “common sense”. And then again, some might not.

3. Change the message. Our leaders need to change the message. They need to get their facts right, they need to stop skewing information to bonk their opponent, and they need to remind us that we’re in this together. The simple truth is that most taxpayers are willing to pay more of they believe they’re getting something for it, and the national debt and deficit spending are two problems that affect all Americans rich, poor, and in the middle.

1 million seconds is about 278 hours. 1 billion seconds is about 31 ? years. 1 trillion seconds is about 31,700 years.

Good luck and have a good week.

Joe Still 2024.03.02

Cite “I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.” – Douglas Adams