Elon is a Genius.com

Tag: numbers

  • It’s genius to stop protecting consumers

    It’s genius to stop protecting consumers

    Today, Elon and friends shut down the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Board. That saves the Federal Government about $810 million (PDF link) a year. Americans no longer have to pay that money every year! There are 5 employees who do still have to work there because that’s the law, so let’s call it $809.4 million.

    There are some pesky looking facts at first glance. It is estimated that the CFPB did save Americans about $20 billion in total, or about $1.4 billion per year. So technically Americans saved money by having the CFPB around, at least on average.

    Oh, also, the savings are much bigger than that. See, that’s just money they have directly returned to Americans. Then there are the additional savings from regulations they have put in place to prevent onerous payday lending fees, Their rule to close the Overdraft Fee Loophole would save another $5 billion or so per year. Add in the rule to cap credit card late fees and you get another $10 billion per year. Payday lender rules would save even more.

    So American taxpayers saved $810 MM, but assuming these rules disappear (or are no longer enforced) they will pay about $16 billion more in fees and fraud and other financial problems. That’s a savings of … negative $180 for each family in America! Straight into their pocket. Er, out of their pocket.

    But the genius is that there are more pockets! That $16 billion goes straight into the pocket of financial firms that can charge exorbitant fees again, or just plan commit fraud! Woo hoo!

    Would you be surprised if I told you that financial stocks were the biggest gainers on the stock market today?

    (Source: Bloomberg)

    Back to the genius. Corporations get to keep that extra money as profit. And some they will give straight back to the government as taxes! (Though not as much as you think.) Their stock price will also go up with increased profits. And they can even decide to donate some of the new windfall to politicians, and maybe even Elon! Like a thank you gift. It’s genius.

    Remember those ads on TV where “For just $15 a month, you can sponsor a child in need?” Well, that’s exactly what’s happening here! For just $15 a month, your family can sponsor a mega financial corporation in need of endless profit growth. And no one will complain, because it’s not like it’s a tax increase. It’s just an invisible tax, and who’s going to protest that?

    Genius.

  • It’s genius to make up numbers!

    It’s genius to make up numbers!

    Today the New York Times had an article titled: “DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week.“

    The biggest cut on the old (wrong) list was an $8 Billion cut to ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even a casual common sense check would have led any reasonable person to realize that this doesn’t make sense. The entire ICE budget for a year is only $8.5 billion!

    But Elon is not a man with a reasonable amount of common sense. Or perhaps we just don’t see the genius in this decision? Perhaps Elon was slyly trying to send a message to President Trump that the President should stop his crackdown on immigration? After all, Elon was also in the United States illegally for a while! It’s clearly a genius move to come to terms with his past.

    Okay, so … so what if the DOGE website said that they had cut $8 billion from ICE when they really cut $8 million, a savings of well over 2 cents to every man, woman and child in the United States. So what if they confused “ceiling values” (the maximum they could spend on a project) with what was actually spent on a different project? So what if that meant that a $655 million savings was actually only a savings of $18 million, along with a loss of some good programs at USAID? What was the point of these absurd mistakes?

    There are really only 2 possible explanations. First, that Elon is an utter buffoon who has the math skills of a mediocre 6th grader and is so clearly incompetent that he would be immediately fired from any job with even passably competent management.

    Or, that Elon is a genius who knew that these errors would get headlines, and then that most people wouldn’t notice the quiet correction and would think that DOGE is actually saving the taxpayers non-trivial amounts of money.

    And come on, which one is more likely? Do you really think this guy looks like an utter buffoon?

    (Photo from Gage Skidmore and used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.)

    Here at Elon Is A Genius, you know which one we’re choosing!