Just cut 'em loose, just send 'em packing!

 

So, co-Presidents Trump and Musk propose to eliminate at least $1T (one trillion U.S.D.) from the federal budget. Let's do some off the cuff estimating. For workplaces that have not undergone automation, it's often the case that, to first order, about half of the expenses are for employee compensation and half are for materials (could be hard goods, soft goods, software, etc.).

Using this heuristic, we'd eliminate $500B in employee compensation costs. Again, to first order, I'll estimate that each employee's compensation totals $100K. Thus, something like five million former government employees would be looking for work. It's very difficult to see where these five million would find such work. I suspect that the co-Presidents would say "we'll deport at least that many undocumented aliens, the former government employees can take the jobs left vacant by such departures, and our tariffs will result in a huge influx of manufacturing jobs being on-shored or reshored."

I have my doubts. It's an intriguing thought experiment, but I'm not so sure that the skill set of, say, a NOAA meteorologist or an air traffic controller adapts well to lawn maintenance, housing construction, or fruit harvesting. Could they learn to do such work? No doubt. Would it be an efficient use of the skill set that such people have spent years developing? No. And that's emphatically NOT to say that the skill sets of lawn maintenance, housing construction, or fruit harvesting are any less valuable (though in many cases, not so time consuming to acquire) as those of the terminated federal workers.

So, do we then provide unemployment benefits for such people? Can we deport undocumented aliens as fast as the co-Presidents can fire federal workers?We certainly do live in interesting times, I hope not to come to the attention of important people!