President-elect Donald Trump could use the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to create an “economic renaissance” if his incoming administration is able to significantly decrease the number of regulations, a venture capitalist said this past week.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who held a fundraiser for Trump earlier this year with fellow tech investor David Sacks, spoke about the potential boons of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy‘s efforts leading DOGE under Trump in the latest episode of the “All-In” podcast.
NEW: Chamath Palihapitiya says he thinks the U.S. economy could be growing at 5% if it wasn't for excessive regulations, calls on the Trump admin to use DOGE to create a flat tax.
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During the All in Podcast, Chamath said DOGE could ignite an "economic renaissance."
"I think… pic.twitter.com/qucDUoFf7c
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 23, 2024
“None of these regulations have expiring dates, and so as a result, I think what you probably have is an incredible restraint on the U.S. economy,” Chamath said while addressing a chart that showed the thousands of regulations federal agencies issued each year.
“I think that the U.S. economy could be growing at 4 or 5%, but the reason that it doesn’t grow at 4 or 5% is in that one single chart. It is impossible to be able to live up to your economic potential when you have this burden on your neck,” he said.
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The “real opportunity” for DOGE, Chamath posited, is to “basically do whatever it needs to do using the law to wipe as many of these regulations off the books.” He added that it would be “better” to cut them all to “zero” and reenact the ones found to be necessary in a “piecemeal” fashion.
Chamath then spoke about a post to X that asked users what they thought about the Internal Revenue Service, and the responses it got from people saying they want a flat tax to replace the U.S. Tax Code.
Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy could use DOGE “as a mechanism to shrink the tax code” and “create a flat tax,” Chamath suggested, though he noted that such a drastic change would require approval from Congress.
Chamath went on to say that the “idea of just cutting this all the way down and then finding through that process what you actually need, I think can find America 100, 200 basis points of GDP growth.” He continued: “It could be an economic renaissance.”
Both DOGE and Chamath have posted to X about the U.S. tax code over the past couple weeks.
DOGE shared a graph depicting the millions of words being added to the federal tax code and regulations over the decades.
In 1955, there were less than 1.5 million words in the U.S. Tax Code.
Today, there are more than 16 million words.
Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year.
This must be simplified. pic.twitter.com/2CxJMt1Rcr
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) November 17, 2024
“Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year,” DOGE said. “This must be simplified.”
In a post to X on Friday, Chamath said: “Replace the US Federal Tax Code’s 7000 pages and millions of words with a simple flat tax. It could fit into a few pages of simple english, make paying taxes simple and enforcement even simpler.”