Episode 469: Neal and Toby discuss Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s visit to Congress, otherwise known as DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, as they pitch their ideas to cut excess government spending. Then, Guinness is the hottest beer on the market right now and loyal fans are concerned it may cause a shortage during the holiday season for the beloved stout. Also, the famed Notre Dame Cathedral will officially reopen this weekend after the mysterious devastating fire in 2019. Meanwhile, Robinhood is the Stock of the Week, and the Hawk Tuah Girl is the Dog of the Week. Lastly, the biggest headlines to lead you into the weekend. Download the Yahoo! Finance App (on the Play and App store) for real-time alerts on news and insights tailored to your portfolio and stock watchlists. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Mispronounced Words 03:10 - DOGE in DC 09:10 - Guiness Shortage 12:40 - Notre Dame Reopens 18:00 - Stock of the Week 21:10 - Dog of the Week 24:40 - Headlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is DOGE and what are its goals?
Then why Guinness is suddenly the hottest drink in America this holiday season. It's Friday, December 6th. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Thank you. Thank you. Here is the top 10. First is Kamala, as in Kamala Harris. Then there's Keoghan, as in Barry Keoghan.
as in the freaky guy from Saltburn, as in Sabrina Carpenter's now ex-boyfriend. Then there's Koi Kerhunche, which is a Dutch breed of dog that Shohei Otani owns, so people are looking that up. Buttigieg, as in Pete Buttigieg. Cheyenne, the fast fashion company. Then Speck You Lost 3B, a new exoplanet that was discovered this year. There's Frigie, which was the Olympics mascot.
Semiglutide, as in Ozempic, as in Nova Nordis. Zendaya and Chapel Roan.
I think I went 10 for 10 there. Well, you did practice, but you did when, you know, when the spotlight shone on you, you executed well. So that was the U.S. list. In the U.K., the top word that people mispronounced was espresso, Sabrina Carpenter's song. And I guess the most common mispronunciation there was expresso.
It's actually a very nice snapshot of the year in news, news, politics, science. If you go down the list, it does show what people were talking about. So I like this.
Talking about wrongly.
Yeah, talking about wrongly. Let's revisit this in 2025. Now a word from our sponsor, Yahoo Finance. Neil, was it a fast week or a slow week for you this week? Slow week for sure. Coming back from a break is always tough. Agreed, a slow week for me too, but fast week when it comes to the market once again. That is something I found. The market waits for no man.
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Chapter 2: Why is Guinness the hottest beer this holiday season?
There are constantly new stories to be read and data to parse through. It's a runaway train that you can lose track of pretty quickly.
Yahoo Finance can help tame the beast, though. It makes each fast week in the market feel a little slower, a little more manageable.
Real-time market data, research reports, stock screeners, news updates you can trust. Yahoo Finance speeds you up so you can stay ahead of the curve.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of Notre Dame reopening?
If you want your slow weeks to feel faster and your fast weeks to feel slower, head to YahooFinance.com today. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy traveled to Washington, D.C. yesterday to soft launch their Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The two entrepreneurs met with lawmakers behind closed doors to kick off their much-hyped initiative to overhaul the federal government's bureaucracy, slash regulations, and trim wasteful spending. The exact mandate of DOGE is still murky, particularly because it won't be an official government agency, just an advisory body staffed by unpaid volunteers.
Plus, there's plenty of skepticism that it will be able to achieve its leader's goals. Elon Musk has pledged to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. But the math gets tricky slash impossible once you realize that the number represents about 30% of all federal spending, and two-thirds of the budget funds programs like Social Security and Medicare that are effectively mandatory.
So finding $2 trillion to cut seems to be some magical thinking.
Still, there is a ton of energy behind Doge in Washington since pretty much everyone can agree that the federal government could use some pruning. And I mean everyone. Some Democrats and progressives have shown an eagerness to engage with Musk and Ramaswamy, including Bernie Sanders, who said this week that Musk is right about proposed cuts to military spending. Neil, can Doge make a dent?
Well, let's take a look at one of their most hyped initiatives, according to them, which is to gut the federal workforce. And maybe that's illustrative of how this is going to work. So the federal government employs two point three million people. That accounts for one point four percent of the entire U.S. workforce in 2021. taxpayers spent $271 billion on payroll for these federal employees.
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Chapter 4: What is the Stock of the Week?
4%.
So say we were to cut, say they were to fire half of the federal workers workforce. And, you know, 60 percent of everyone in the federal workforce works for three things, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security. So you would absolutely gut those particular agencies, services giving or people giving services to people like veterans.
And you would reduce the deficit. If you cut half of the federal workforce, you would reduce the federal deficit by less than 10 percent. So this is just some of the math that they're working against when you want to when you say you want to cut something like two trillion dollars.
Chapter 5: What is the Dog of the Week?
And that's the math aspect of it. Just do a thought experiment real quick. Say we fired a bunch of DMV workers. People are still going to need their driver's license. They still need to register their vehicles. And yet now you're going to go into a DMV that has less workers there. They're handling two, three, four, five people. Does that actually make the government more efficient?
And then the other aspect of government waste that they want to go after Doge does is fraudulent payments, which, again, is understandable. You don't want money going towards fraud. You don't want it being misappropriated.
And yet, if you think about the way you push back against fraud is usually to add in more layers of maybe bureaucracy, more paperwork, more hoops to jump through to ensure that the money is going to places you want it to go. And again, that doesn't really achieve your goal of efficiency as well. So they almost... have an impossible task in front of them. It's a catch-22.
Chapter 6: What are the biggest headlines to lead into the weekend?
Whenever you go after trying to cut places, unless you make cuts in precisely the right ways, it might lead to inefficiencies.
Yeah, there's a great anecdote about what you were talking about where trying to cut bureaucracy leads to even more paperwork. So there was a government conference in 2010 that was held in Las Vegas. It featured a clown and a mind reader, and that caused an absolute scandal. Why is the government spending our taxpayer funds on clowns and mind readers to entertain government employees?
But that led to an insane amount of paperwork and documentation and even more inefficiency now that every single time there's a government conference or any government employee travels everywhere, they have to fill out an insane amount of paperwork. So that just created even more, you know, red tape, essentially.
That said, you did mention that, you know, I mean, a lot of Republicans are on board with this. Even some Democrats, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna in California, they are aligned with Musk and Ramaswamy on at least a few of the issues. One of the ones where I think there is common ground between Democrats and Doge is military spending, which is a major, major line item in the federal budget.
Bernie Sanders said, I would love to talk with Musk about these bloated government contracts for military contractors. Ro Khanna said the same thing. He was like, you know, Elon Musk, sees this from the inside because he at SpaceX is a big government contractor for the Pentagon budget. So maybe that is an area where that we do spend a ton of money that where they could find common ground.
I do think that the main takeaway here is one, the task is gargantuan. It will be difficult. But on the other hand, Lawmakers are willing to play ball. Senator Susan Collins, who actually leads the Appropriations Committee, did have a hour-long one-on-one meeting with Elon Musk. He didn't make a presentation. They were just chatting through ideas. But clearly there is some momentum here.
Whether they can pull it off, that remains to be seen.
And it's not the first time there's been a government efficiency agency that, you know, trying to clean this up, Reagan did in 1982. So this is, you know, every decade they try to do something. We'll see whether they can get anything done.
For this next story, we're going to do a little role-playing exercise. If you are at a holiday happy hour and a young person walks up to you and hands you a Guinness, do you A, politely decline, B, take a small sip, or C, tactically chug it so that the line marking the barrier between the dark stout and the creamy foam on top lands between the G and the harp logo on the outside of the glass?
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