By Katherine Tinsley
2:01am PDT, Apr 16, 2025
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Dagen McDowell mentioned "Elon Musk math" after Jackie DeAngelis noted that the American public wants to know more about how their tax dollars are being invested.
"[Congressional Republicans] need to raise revenue, and they need to cut spending," DeAngelis told her cohorts on The Big Money Show. "You can't go and leave, you know, spending at levels that are, you know, costing this country and then say to the people who are already paying 46 percent of the federal income tax that you need to pay more for services that you don't get a benefit from because we want to recklessly spend."
"That just doesn't work. It doesn't sit well," she continued. "It's not part of how people traditionally view capitalism, I think, and they've got to do it. They've got to get the spending cuts done."
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Despite
Donald Trump's confidence in Elon Musk, Dagen McDowell still had her concerns about government spending.
"It's also the creep's way out — and I use the word 'creep' because they want to let the top rate creep up — the creepy way out of not cutting spending," she said.
"And it's just — the fact that we're running more than a $2 trillion deficit this year, it will come in higher than
Joe Biden's last year in office," she added.
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"The first six months of this fiscal year, we ran a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit," Dagen McDowell said.
"So if you run that out just based on the first six months, we could have a 2.6 trillion dollar deficit this year. It's absurd. Don't tell me you can't cut," she continued.
"The $150 billion that DOGE has found in cuts using Elon Musk math … it is $9 billion short of our budget deficit last month. … That's how out of control our finances are and borrowing," she added.
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Prior to serving as the head of DOGE, Elon Musk was best known for his car company, Tesla, and his work in the technology space.
Lydia Hu responded to Dagen McDowell's comments, saying, "To your point, Dagen, about what Elon Musk is doing — such a good thing for the country to get in there and leave his private job, his private enterprise, and devote his time to making sure our government is running more efficiently, but when he started off on that whole mission, he said his goal was two trillion dollars, two trillion dollars in cuts."
"And not to criticize him, but we're not [there] — he hasn't mastered that yet," she continued. "He's not even halfway there. So I think it's easier said than done."
