DOGE's Greatest Opportunity: Unleashing American Growth by Cutting Regulations
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I think the easiest thing for them to get done with Doge is the naming, the shaming, the auditing, the transparency of what we're actually spending. Because so many of the audits, Chamath, are just not completed. People don't know what's being spent. And if you show Americans...

a $12,000 hammer or people with job titles not coming into the office or coming into the office one day a week, one day a month, that's gonna infuriate taxpayers. And I think there's a very easy way to navigate all this. You just create the leaderboard and you not only shame people who are wasting our tax dollars, you celebrate the people who are heroes

who start showing frugality and cost saving. And they're going to do this with a leaderboard of the heroes and the goats. This could be the unifying not just the Republican Party as a sax is pointing out, Shamath. I think this could unify the whole country. Is there anybody paying taxes that wants to see money wasted that wants to see us pay people high salaries to not come to work? Shamath, what's your take on the sequence of events here?

What are easy layups that they could actually get done? And then where is the machine going to fight and try to stop this thing? I think you are highlighting something that they can do right away, which I think is very powerful, which is just using these distribution channels that Elon has now to create a massive layer of accountability. I do think that Sunshine is a really incredible platform.

disinfectant, I think the best way that they could start, if possible, is to stop paying their vendors until you actually have some amount of accounting to figure out, as you said, how many $600 soap dispensers are actually being bought and sold now.

That kind of, whatever you want to call that, corruption or grift, it's not going to account for hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, but I do think that it is a very moral and symbolic win that says we're going to start to get much more rational, and it starts to allow the average American to actually feel like they have a little bit of control and they have a more vested interest

in how the government spends money. But I actually want to take a step back for a second. And before I talk about what Doge can do, I just want to highlight something that's been going on in California, because I think it explains a lot. In California, and I'm just going to read this stat because it's incredible. The regulatory burden in California as a state from 1997 to 2015, this is when the data is available that I found, has increased by almost 50%.

As of May of 2022, there are almost 61,000 individual regulations in the state of California. So what does that mean and where does it come from? And Nick, if you can just put out the tweet, it has happened over a period of time in which the government has been the absolute singular source of employment in the state.

And we talked about this before, where this is also a problem at the federal level when you look at GDP and job growth, because it looks like a lot of these jobs are actually fake, manufactured government type jobs. So why is this a problem? You've seen in California, the issue that we have is that if you have a growth in the number of employees, in this case in California, all the job growth in recent memory,

has been state employees. What is the byproduct? Regulations go up. What is the byproduct of that? There are actually no private sector jobs and more to the point, the private sector flees. So now let's bubble that up and look at the federal government. Nick, if you want to just show that chart that I sent you. What is incredible, J. Cal, is that the more people are hired by the government,

Lo and behold, what do you see? The number of regulations issued by federal agencies has just continued unabated year in, year out. You cannot run a country like this. So because these these accumulate, right? Congress is doing less and less of a job actually trying to frame how the country should work.

That white space is filled in, as Freebrook said, by these federal agencies. It compounds and accumulates. This is not replacing laws. None of these regulations have expiry dates. And so as a result, I think what you probably have is an incredible restraint on the U.S. economy. I think that the U.S. economy could be growing at 4% or 5%.

But the reason that it doesn't grow at 405% is in that one single chart. It is impossible to be able to live up to your economic potential when you have this burden on your neck. So I think the real opportunity for Doge is to basically do whatever it needs to do using the law to wipe as many of these regulations off the books. We are better than...

cutting them all to zero, and then finding the ones we really need, and then repassing those, then we are going at this piecemeal. And there's some incredible ideas, by the way, that this creates. Nick, I don't know if you can find this tweet, but Doge asked what people think of the IRS. And there was an enormous amount of activity that essentially said, give us a flat tax and wipe out the tax code.

And people were very flexible in the amount of tax that they were willing to pay. But could you imagine the simplification in the tax code and the implications of that? I was in Singapore, by the way, 10 days ago when I started my trip. Nick Beep helped the name of the person I'm about to say, but I had a long meeting with who is there. And I was asking him the complexity of

of dealing with taxes, he's like, what do you mean? We pay a very simple tax system. There's no capital gains in Singapore. And so as a result, our filing requirements are de minimisly small. But as a result, people like him, meaning great entrepreneurs,

can spend all their time thinking about what to build, not how to- Not tax optimization. Exactly, or how to account for it. So could you imagine if these guys basically used Doge as a mechanism to shrink the tax code, create a flat tax potentially? I know that that has to be passed by Congress. I understand that. But the idea of just cutting this all the way down and then finding through that process what you actually need

I think, can find America 100, 200 basis points of GDP growth. It could be an economic renaissance. I mean, just to build on that, cutting all the regulations to zero, you might

have throw out some babies in the bathwater so why not put a clock on them and just say whenever this was enacted plus five years and then it rolls off or plus two years whatever number of months and then you could have them chamath rolling off every month i think that's a good idea but it has to be quarterly i think that's a good idea but jay cal i think you first have to cancel all these regulations and then say whatever we need we will reenact

To your point, on a five-year shot clock that then has to be renewed in a new congressional period. And I think that that's extremely healthy. Well, because you know what? People die. Paradigms shift. And then nobody even remembers these regulations. You have to do archaeology to figure out who created this, what was the intent, and you would never do that. You would never live, Sachs, with all of these rules forever. Just one last comment. In fairness to these government employees...

The one thing is that it's not their fault, right? Meaning in the sense that they were hired into a regime where the incentive was to regulate so that you had things to oversee. And so they did their job. In fact, I would say they did their job incredibly well. But the point is that now we need to pivot for them to do a totally different job.