DOGE's Opportunity: Unleash American Growth by Cutting Regulations
00:00:00.000 | I think the easiest thing for them to get done with doge is
00:00:03.360 | the naming the shaming the auditing the transparency of
00:00:07.400 | what we're actually spending because so many of the audits
00:00:10.040 | shamoff are just not completed. People don't know what's being
00:00:13.780 | spent. And if you show Americans a $12,000 hammer, or people with
00:00:18.760 | job titles not coming into the office or coming into the
00:00:21.360 | office one day a week, one day a month, that's going to infuriate
00:00:25.640 | taxpayers. And I think there's a very easy way to navigate all
00:00:28.320 | this, you just create the leaderboard, and you not only
00:00:30.920 | shame people who are wasting our tax dollars, you celebrate the
00:00:34.720 | people who are heroes, who start showing frugality, and cost
00:00:39.040 | saving, and they're going to do this with the leaderboard of the
00:00:41.400 | heroes and the goats. This could be the unifying not just the
00:00:44.880 | Republican Party as a sax is pointing out from off. I think
00:00:47.920 | this could unify the whole country. Is there anybody paying
00:00:50.660 | taxes that wants to see money wasted that wants to see us pay
00:00:54.440 | people high salaries to not come to work? Show off what's your
00:00:57.400 | take on the sequence of events here? What are easy layups that
00:01:02.240 | they can actually get done? And then where is the machine going
00:01:05.520 | to fight and try to stop this thing?
00:01:07.360 | I think you are highlighting something that they can do right
00:01:12.320 | away, which I think is very powerful, which is just using
00:01:15.000 | these distribution channels that Elon has now to create a massive
00:01:20.200 | layer of accountability. I do think that sunshine is a really
00:01:24.720 | incredible disinfectant. I think the best way that they could
00:01:28.760 | start if possible is to stop paying their vendors until you
00:01:34.640 | actually have some amount of accounting to figure out as you
00:01:37.280 | said, how many $600 soap dispensers are actually being
00:01:41.360 | bought and sold now, that kind of whatever you want to call
00:01:45.280 | that corruption or grift. It's not going to account for
00:01:49.600 | hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. But I do
00:01:52.920 | think that it is a very moral and symbolic win that says we're
00:01:56.720 | going to we're going to start to get much more rational and it
00:02:00.920 | starts to allow the average American to actually feel like
00:02:05.160 | they have a little bit of control and they have a more
00:02:08.200 | vested interest in how the government spends money. But I
00:02:12.000 | want to actually want to take a step back for a second. And
00:02:15.080 | before I talk about what doge can do, I just want to highlight
00:02:18.560 | something that's been going on in California, because I think
00:02:21.520 | it explains a lot in California. And I'm just going to read this
00:02:24.800 | that because it's incredible. The regulatory burden in
00:02:29.480 | California as a state from 1997 to 2015. This is when the data
00:02:34.800 | is available that I found has increased by almost 50%. As of
00:02:40.640 | May of 2022. There are almost 61,000 individual regulations
00:02:49.680 | in the state of California. So what does that mean? And where
00:02:53.720 | does it come from? And Nick, if you can just put out the tweet,
00:02:56.640 | it has happened over a period of time, in which the government
00:03:02.160 | has been the absolute singular source of employment in the
00:03:09.120 | state. And we talked about this before, where this is also a
00:03:13.440 | problem at the federal level when you look at GDP and job
00:03:16.440 | growth, because it looks like a lot of these jobs are actually
00:03:19.640 | fake manufactured government type jobs. So why is this a
00:03:23.160 | problem you've seen in California, the issue that we
00:03:25.680 | have is that if you have a growth in the number of
00:03:29.760 | employees, in this case, in California, all the job growth
00:03:32.440 | in recent memory has been state employees. What is the
00:03:37.080 | byproduct regulations go up? What is the byproduct of that
00:03:40.680 | there are actually no private sector jobs and more to the
00:03:43.080 | point, the private sector fleas. So now let's bubble that up and
00:03:47.400 | look at the federal government. Nick, if you want to just show
00:03:49.440 | that chart that I that I sent you. What is incredible J Cal is
00:03:53.920 | that the more people are hired by the government, lo and behold,
00:03:58.800 | what do you see, the number of regulations issued by federal
00:04:02.040 | agencies has just continued unabated year in year out, you
00:04:07.560 | cannot run a country like this. So because the Congress is
00:04:13.080 | accumulate, right? Congress is doing less and less of a job
00:04:16.840 | actually trying to frame how the country should work. That white
00:04:20.520 | space is filled in, as Freeberg said, by these federal agencies,
00:04:24.680 | it compounds and accumulates. This is not replacing laws. None
00:04:28.840 | of these regulations have expiry dates. And so as a result, I
00:04:33.000 | think what you probably have is an incredible restraint on the
00:04:37.360 | US economy. I think that the US economy could be growing at four
00:04:42.360 | or 5%. But the reason that it doesn't grow at four or 5% is in
00:04:47.160 | that one single chart, it is impossible to be able to live up
00:04:50.920 | to your economic potential when you have this burden on your
00:04:55.480 | neck. So I think the real opportunity for doge is to
00:04:59.640 | basically do whatever it needs to do using the law to wipe as
00:05:05.000 | many of these regulations off the books, we are better cutting
00:05:09.720 | them all to zero, and then finding the ones we really need
00:05:13.120 | and then repassing those, then we are going at this piecemeal.
00:05:17.120 | And there's some incredible, there's some incredible ideas,
00:05:20.400 | by the way, that this creates. Nick, I don't know if you can
00:05:23.320 | find this tweet, but doge asked what people think of the IRS.
00:05:27.360 | And there was an enormous amount of activity that essentially
00:05:32.000 | said, give us a flat tax and wipe out the tax code. Yeah,
00:05:36.400 | people were very flexible in the amount of tax that they were
00:05:39.640 | willing to pay. But could you imagine the simplification in
00:05:43.520 | the tax code and the implications of that I was in
00:05:45.840 | Singapore, by the way, 10 days ago, when I started my trip,
00:05:48.480 | Nick beep out the name of the person I'm about to say, but I
00:05:52.040 | had a long meeting with who you know, is there. And I was asking
00:05:56.880 | him the complexity of dealing with taxes. He's like, what do
00:06:01.640 | you mean, we don't, we pay a very simple tax system, there's
00:06:04.760 | no capital gains in Singapore. And so as a result, our filing
00:06:08.080 | requirements are diminimously small. But as a result, people
00:06:11.880 | like him, meaning great entrepreneurs, can spend all
00:06:15.360 | their time thinking about what to build, not not tax
00:06:18.480 | optimization, exactly, or how to account for it. So could you
00:06:22.680 | imagine if these guys basically use doge as a mechanism to
00:06:26.000 | shrink the tax code, create a flat tax, potentially, I know
00:06:30.120 | that that has to be passed by Congress, I understand that. But
00:06:34.000 | the idea of just cutting this all the way down, and then
00:06:38.640 | finding through that process, what you actually need, I think
00:06:42.520 | can find America 100 200 basis points of GDP growth, it could
00:06:47.360 | be an economic renaissance.
00:06:49.040 | I mean, just to build on that, cutting all the regulations to
00:06:52.000 | zero, you might have throw out some babies in the bathwater. So
00:06:55.760 | why not put a clock on them and just say whenever this was
00:06:58.240 | enacted, plus five years, and then it rolls off or plus two
00:07:03.000 | years, whatever number of months, and then you could have
00:07:05.160 | them come off, rolling off every month.
00:07:07.560 | I think that's a good idea. But it has to be orderly. I think
00:07:10.880 | that's a good idea. But Jake, I think you first have to cancel
00:07:13.600 | all these regulations. And then say whatever we need, we will
00:07:17.120 | reenact your point on a five year shot clock that then has to
00:07:20.920 | be renewed in a new congressional period. And I
00:07:24.160 | think that that's extremely healthy. Well, because you know
00:07:26.600 | what people die, paradigms shift, and then nobody even
00:07:30.000 | remembers these regulations, you have to do archaeology to figure
00:07:32.640 | out who created this, what was the intent, and you would never
00:07:36.080 | do that you would never live sacks with all of these rules
00:07:39.160 | forever.
00:07:39.800 | Just one last comment in fairness to these government
00:07:42.520 | employees. The one thing is that it's not their fault, right?
00:07:46.320 | Meaning in the sense that they were hired into a regime, where
00:07:50.840 | the incentive was to regulate so that you had things to oversee.
00:07:56.080 | And so they did their job. In fact, I would say they did their
00:07:58.640 | job incredibly well. But the point is that now we need to
00:08:01.320 | pivot for them to do a totally different job.