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Comment by torlok | Hacker News Reader

What Trump and Musk are doing is picking up pennies by gutting public services citizens rely upon instead of plugging the tax system, and addressing the waste in the military and healthcare industries. The way Trump and Musk operate not only makes enemies out of loyal government employees, it will also cost the government more money once it starts losing in court.

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I as a taxpayer has no trust in the system if bureacrats never show even an ounce of care about taxpayer’s money.

Mind you Musk is the biggest taxpayer so he is interested that system spends money wisely

You realize how much he makes from the government right? You won’t see him making cuts there. You are a rube if you think he will do anything except things to benefit himself.

He is not getting handouts, he is doing risky uncertain rocket science that even NASA was unable tondo and gets compensated for risk and hard work

You aren't necessarily wrong, but this is almost the definition of privatizing the reward over public risk? The grants his companies received were just that, grants. And without those grants, his companies would have likely failed.

the reward is only obvious today, in the very beginning of SpaceX everyone thought elon was crazy and he had to bet his entire net worth multiple times to overcome early challenges.

I wanted to remind you that NASA and ULA that is fully funded by the government, completely fumbled space tech and had to rely on Russian Roscosmos (running ancient soviet era technology) to get to the space.

if you want to look where the waste is, look no further than NASA, ULA, Boeing and the rest of the military/space industrial complex

This is not addressing the point? That largely there is no financial reward equivalent for the public sector money here. Consider, you claim that NASA completely fumbled. This despite us having massive public reward in terms of space tech such as GPS.

GPS enabled US public corporations like Garmin, TomTom, Google (via google maps), all businesses (via google maps), Apple via iPhone, and contributed enormous economic benefits in terms of jobs, taxes, employment, GDP, etc.

This is exactly how public funding into basic research should benefit the country

Right, that was my point. There were rewards, but they were not a financial rewards. My gut would be that the things that have resulted from NASA and similar government spending far outpace even the wealthiest man in the world's personal value. But it is easier to count dollar values attached to individuals.

And now we run the risk of regulatory capture by someone just clawing all of the things they want into a pile they personally control in what looks an awful lot like the corruption that they are yelling about.

NASA was paying Putin for RD-180 rocket engines and for launching satellites.

I’d rather have american company SpaceX do it

non-sequitur much? Nothing I said indicates I do not want SpaceX to exist. Nor do I really care to say bad things about it. But, you can just as easily say that the investments into it from our government is as vital to its success as any private contributions.

So because he wastes our tax money in a way you think is cool, yet is still useless to society, then it’s okay.

rockets are being launched, satellite constellations are roaming the space, USA civilians and military now have low orbit global Internet capability - where exactly is the waste?

Housing sucks. Healthcare sucks. Quality of life and life expectancy are stagnant or declining.

I don’t care about rockets or more military grift. It is useless to humanity.

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