IT CAN BE DONE, YOU JUST HAVE TO WANT TO DO IT BADLY ENOUGH: Javier Milei Ended a DC-Sized Deficit in…Nine Weeks. “Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years. Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks. How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency budgets by 50% while slashing crony contracts and activist handouts. For perspective, if you cut the entirety of Washington’s budget by 50%, you’d save a fast 3 trillion dollars and start paying off the national debt. It turns out it can be done, and the world doesn’t collapse into chaos.”
The cronies getting the contracts and the activists getting the contracts won’t be happy, but honestly, a world in which they are unhappy is likely a much better world.