Elon Musk Wants to Pay for His Tax Cuts with Your Social Security and Medicare [View all]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/elon-musk-vivek-trump-tax-cuts-social-security-medicare-1235212608/

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https://archive.li/6pnvl

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t even taken office and congressional Republicans are already taking cues from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the pair’s new playground, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

GOP lawmakers immediately lined up against the original short-term government funding bill released this week after Musk voiced his opposition. On top of that, a group of extremist Republicans, led by Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Andy Harris, are fighting to ensure that the fresh round of tax cuts Republicans have planned for Musk when Trump’s 2017 tax law expires are paid for with $2.5 trillion in spending cuts on programs Americans rely on chosen by — you guessed it — Musk.

Republicans have made their plan for the new year crystal clear: ram through massive tax giveaways for the ultra-wealthy and corporations, and pay for them by shaking down programs and agencies that working families rely on. And they’re putting unelected and unaccountable oligarchs — Musk and Ramaswamy — in charge of deciding how much pain Americans will have to tolerate so that the rich can get richer.

Contrary to Musk and Ramaswamy’s claims that DOGE will put money back in taxpayers’ pockets, nothing laid out in DOGE’s scattershot plans shows any serious understanding of improving efficacy and efficiency. Rather, it’s just the latest iteration of conservatives’ decades-long crusade to, as Grover Norquist famously said, reduce government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — combined with their perennial obsession to cut Social Security benefits for seniors.

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