Hello and welcome to Euroconomics. Now, in this episode, I wanted to talk about my new favorite thing, which is Doge. I'm not talking about the silly meme coin currency, cryptocurrency. I'm talking about the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, at the time of recording, I mean, you'll get this about a week late. It's very early days, but I'm so keen to talk about it. I can't wait. We're just

going to dive in with what we know so far. And more to the point, we're going to talk about

some of the challenges that it's got up ahead of it, because if you are trying to cut two trillion

from the US government spending, you have to realize what an absolutely monstrous and Herculean

task that is. I mean, to put it in perspective, the mandatory spending that the US has

covers about $5 trillion. And then you've got US debt expense, which covers about another trillion.

So even if you cut all of the discretionary spending, which includes the military,

you still wouldn't actually get there.

So the task ahead of it to try and cut even one trillion of recurring cost from the US spending,

let alone two, is monstrous.

And we're going to get into it.

And I'm going to tell you, well, basically, we talk about the structure of Doge, how it's going to work, some of the challenge it has.

Then we get into the maths of basically how can they actually do these things.

And I'll lead you down the path of believing why it is completely and utterly unachievable. And then we will have some clever thinking

that will get us to a point where actually it might possibly be achievable. Right. So without

further ado, let's start off with the spending problem that the

US has. Now, for this, you might want to play along at home. If you open a tab and go to the US

debt clock.org, if you just type US debt clock into any search engine, it'll be the top link.

You'll get the US debt clock. Now, this is a fantastic website that sort of gives you

the basically calculated to the second of what's going on with with US spending and debt and

taxation and collection, all the rest of it. Hopefully you might notice they've added a doge clock on

here so it will tell you how much they've saved so far. So at the time of recording, it is up to 52.3 billion has been saved, which is a big number,

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