We wonder how many federal employees complied with the DOGE demand?
Midnight last night was the deadline. CBS News:
‘DOGE’s Elon Musk says federal employees must document their work or resign; some agencies push back
‘Federal workers received an email on Saturday instructing them to document five things they accomplished in the past week, and Elon Musk said those who don’t reply would risk losing their jobs.
‘The email from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, had the subject line, “What did you do last week?” It instructed recipients to reply with five examples of what they got done last week, excluding any classified information, and asked workers to include their supervisor in their response.’
They either presented some evidence to show that they were gainfully employed… or else…the President explained:
‘If you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.’
The DOGE assault troops believe they can ferret out ‘waste’ and ‘corruption’ and save trillions of dollars. But they may be firing the wrong people.
The problem with government spending is not the form; it’s the substance. It’s not that the money is spent inefficiently; it’s that it is spent at all. And for many programs, the phantom employee, who doesn’t do anything, is the best of the lot. He does no harm…never complains and never needs an expensive triple by-pass.
Imagine the emails DOGE might have gotten from the feds who were enforcing, say, Prohibition.
‘I put in a very productive week’, one might have replied. ‘I destroyed three stills, arrested 49 moonshiners, and broke 1,450 bottles of whiskey.’
Or…
‘I went to a speakeasy to study the illegal distribution of alcohol. I had a drink, just to verify that they were really serving demon rum. Then, I went home.’
Who shoulda been fired?
Imagine that they put the DOGE test to Iraq warfighters…or to the grunts in the war against drugs…or anti-poverty bureaucrats or DEI honchos?
The malingerers were the real heroes…they were the ones who did the least damage. The last thing we would want is a group of earnest federales diligently and energetically pursuing their malignant policies.
And the best way to deal with them is to cut their budgets and eliminate their programs. Anything less than that is mere window-dressing.
So back to our line of thought from last week. We’ll come right to the point, before we forget it:
Wages, GDP, sales and profits should never get too far out of line — one with another. There is no reason for stocks to spin out of orbit either. Chickens cannot be separated from eggs and corporations cannot be de-connected from the value of the output they produce. If they get too pricey, they can be expected to fall. If they get too cheap, the best bet is that they will rise.
And overall…compared to the value of the ‘stuff’ in our lives…stocks should not increase by a single penny…not even in 100 years. (More on this counter-intuitive assertion tomorrow.)
How could that be?
Stocks rose 366 times since 1925. But against what? Of course, the answer is against the dollar. And therein hangs a tale. It is a tale with a twist. And a spin. The funny money distorted the whole system…as we will see. Not just prices, but sales, profits, and GDP too.
In dollar terms, the S&P 500 gained 2.7% in January after a 23% boost in 2024. The economy in which these remarkable gains were recorded, however, only grew 2.8% for all of 2024.
Shouldna… oughtna… done that.
Same as eggs. Why would the chickens be so much more valuable? As we will see, they are not really more ‘valuable’ at all. They have just been bid up in the speculative frenzy of what Tom calls the ‘greatest financial experiment in history’.
That experiment will sooner or later be shown to be a failure. Worldwide, there may be $100–150 trillion worth of barren chickens…asset values with no corresponding real output. And as this becomes more obvious, over the next 10… 20…or 100 years, the real return on US investment assets may be negative.
Stay tuned.
Regards,
 |
Bill Bonner,
For Fat Tail Daily
