Midnight Ride of Paul Revere:
One if by land, two if by sea
Dear Elon,
Dear Elon,
I hear you’re not getting that many replies to your email asking federal employees what they did last week. I’m not a federal employee, but I felt bad for you, so I thought I’d send you 5 things I did this week. Since I know you’re super committed to finding government waste and all, I thought maybe I could help, so I did a little digging. Guess what I found?
1. I discovered the Artemis program to return humans to the moon is going to cost us $93 billion of taxpayer money. My dad worked on Apollo 11 and it was a really big deal back then, but that was 50 years ago and you know, the moon still looks pretty much the same, so I’m thinking maybe we could just watch the home movies, since our budget is so tight and all.
2. And hey! I also discovered that the US spent $757 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone! Can you believe that? Worldwide, they received 7 trillion dollars, while in the same year, Big Oil made 4 trillion dollars! So yay! There’s some pork we could cut for sure!
3. In fact, it turns out, the federal government spends about $92 billion every year subsidizing very big corporations that are reporting record profits. In fact – wait for it -- I found that Tesla did really great last year, making 2.3 billion (good for you!), but it paid $0 in taxes! Not only that, but Tesla received $2.8 billion in government subsidies, and Elon, guess what – all told, your own companies have been awarded nearly $21 billion by the government! With another $76.7 million promised just since Donald's inauguration. So you’ve got a way to cut billions from the government deficit all on your lonesome, do not pass go!
4. Oh, and here’s a really easy one – I discovered that every person in the Senate and Congress gets $174,000/year AND congressmen get $1 million/year just for their office stuff, and every senator gets $4 million/year for their office, PLUS – they get great health care, pension AND a savings account that taxpayers subsidize. Maybe they wouldn’t mind giving up some of those perks, cause I know they’re all so worried about this deficit, like you.
5. And I saved the best for last! I looked into how much money the 2017 tax cuts were costing us. And lo and behold, between the 14% tax cut for corporations, and the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, turns out, it’s costing the taxpayers $400 billion/year! That added over $2 trillion to the deficit since 2017. Which is exactly the number you said you wanted to cut from the budget!
Crazy, huh?
So hey! Maybe your little computer pals could stop hacking our nation’s most sensitive data and breaking our privacy laws and just go back to the pub and knock down some brewskis. I mean, that’s about -- what? 3 or 4 trillion right there? And you don’t even have to take away aid to starving people or the Medicaid that keeps Grandma in her nursing home, and you could even hire back those air traffic controllers & the guys watching for incoming missiles, so we don’t all get the heebie-jeebies every time we fly … or wake up.
Hope that helps!
Btw, what did you do last week, Elon?