The Battle of Giants and the Big Beautiful Bill
The new law promises economic growth and secure borders, rejects absurd ideologies and harmful practices, and provides significant tax benefits. The main question surrounding it should not have been “Is it perfect for balancing the budget?” but “Is it good and necessary?” or “Is it a long-overdue course-correction that represents a tremendous improvement over the current situation and the leftist alternative?”
Amid the rousing successes of the Trump 2.0 administration, there emerge voices of discontent, originating not only from the TDS-affected left but from pockets within MAGA territory. Musk’s rejection of the Big Beautiful Bill, now Law, and his plan to create a third party might sow division and potentially jeopardize the Republicans’ winning streak in upcoming elections.
It is important to give credit where appropriate. Musk liberated Twitter and contributed in no small measure to the 2024 victory. Often, however, individuals who are highly intelligent and accomplished in theoretical STEM fields are less skilled in navigating life’s realities and making necessary compromises to achieve the best possible outcome.
Passing the Big Beautiful Bill was a feat of determination and efficiency. The new law promises economic growth and secure borders, rejects absurd ideologies and harmful practices, and provides significant tax benefits. The main question surrounding it should not have been “Is it perfect for balancing the budget?” but “Is it good and necessary?” or “Is it a long-overdue course-correction that represents a tremendous improvement over the current situation and the leftist alternative?”
Purely cerebral debates over numbers and economic theory may be useful in academic auditoria but cannot account for the myriad variables that reality in a free society may produce. Such discussions are reminiscent of a model suggested by the economist and Nobel laureate George Stigler and the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, which can be summarized as “If You’ve Never Missed a Flight, You’re Probably Wasting Your Time.”
The premise is that numerous travelers reach the airport hours before their flight and end up wasting much productive time over the years. Arriving too early is a waste of time. Arriving too late also wastes time in rescheduling the trip. Therefore, the theory goes, one must practice a Goldilocks approach, whereby one must arrive just early enough to make most flights on the nose, and the occasional missed flight would be offset by all the time saved over a long period. On the surface, this makes sense. Natasha Geiling explains:
Ellenberg breaks this down in mathematical terms by using a measurement of utility called utils. Let’s say that an hour of your time, to you, is worth one util. Arriving at the airport two hours early wastes you two hours of time, so you lose two utils. But missing a plane is more annoying to you than wasting time at an airport – maybe it’s six times more annoying than an hour of wasted time, so missing your flight costs you six utils. Ellenberg uses this quantification to assess the utility of three different scenarios:
Option 1: arrive two hours before flight, miss flight two percent of the time
Option 2: arrive one and a half hours before flight, miss flight five percent of the time
Option 3: arrive one hour before flight, miss flight fifteen percent of the time
Using util values for time, you can figure out which scenario affords you the most positive utility. In the first scenario, two hours of your time equals -2 utils …, but the chance of missing the flight two percent of the time has to be accounted for as well (-6 utils times the two percent chance of that happening). When the two are added together, the utility for the first scenario lands at -2.12 utils. For option two, your utility ends up being -1.8 (-1.5 utils plus -6 times five percent) and for option three, your utility is -1.9 utils. So from a mathematical standpoint, your best bet would be to arrive one and a half hours before your flight.
Such equations may have their place in theoretical cost-benefit analyses, six-sigma quality and efficiency calculations, and other engineering models. Life, however, as well as politics, is messy and unpredictable. People are not machines. It is difficult to factor in security delays, check-in queues, or other unexpected glitches or quantify one’s peace of mind. Arriving at the airport too close to the cutoff time is extremely stressful for most travelers, and the added stress accumulated over time would prove more costly and damaging to one’s health and productivity in the long run.
When the economy is strong and societies free, there is no limit to the prosperity that human ingenuity can generate. Something as simple as sand has been used for millennia to create glassware; more recently, it has been used to produce computer chips of extraordinary complexity. That is why Malthusian theory, which warns against limited resources and overpopulation and is favored by socialists, has been proven false. Today, the world’s population is larger than ever, and so is people’s relative wealth compared to prior epochs. When certain resources are exhausted, new ones emerge – as well as new technologies to utilize what was previously unusable. The Big Beautiful Law may not cut budget spending as much as ideally desired but between tariff revenue, recent investments, and a flourishing economy, it may well surpass the benefits of such cuts.
Trump is a realist and a deal-maker. He gets the best result within the art of the possible. Musk is a genius who thinks scientifically. There is a place and time for both types of intelligence. Both Trump and Musk possess greatness but in different ways. A popular theme in Greek mythology and art was the Gigantomachy – the fierce battle between Giants and Olympian Gods, which wreaked widespread havoc.
Hopefully, Trump’s and Musk’s disagreement will be smoothed over, so that the much-needed American revival we are witnessing can continue full-steam ahead without the drawbacks of avoidable infighting.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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Comments
who says musk was ACTUALLY maga??
musk wants his continued tax funding
musk wanted to get involved with 2024 djt
and trump knows that he can and will hire AND FIRE people
b/c djt is not a politician ..he is a businessman first
I don’t know the answer but he was hardly the only one demanding the impossible and getting outraged by not getting it.
If only pretending the bill didn’t need to get through the house and senate was restricted to Elon Musk.
We should all be thankful we have Donald Trump instead of a virtue signaling imbecile, we got a great deal of triumphs from the big beautiful bill.
Can someone please explain to me how giving a thousand dollars to every baby squirted out by crack whores and welfare queens at my expense is good for the country in general and to me, a net tax payer, specifically?
Sorry, I was actually replying to the comment below.
agree
a bad move by djt
The admonition “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” fits here. Musk, with his personality, tends to favor the perfect. IMO, that is his strongest and his weakest personality trait.
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While true we most definitely should avoid giving Elon our attention till he comes to his senses and stops demanding perfect bills or nothing.
The White House put out The One Big Beautiful Chart Book on the OBBB.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/One-Big-Beautiful-Chart-Book-How-the-OBBB-Reduces-Deficits-and-Debt.pdf
It is worth looking at and showed the lowest Federal deficit in the next 10 years at $1.7 Trillion (very last chart). That excludes about $200B per year of incremental tariff revenue assumed (versus $77B in fiscal 2024). I get the admonition about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. But, I will not kid myself. Perhaps $20T more debt in the next 10 years delivered by these wastrels in DC will be far from good for my grandchildren.
Look at it from the perspective of the blocs of Trump supporters who didn’t get thrown a bone for their issue in the BBB. We’re not “looking for perfection,” we’re tired of being the redheaded stepchildren who get NOTHING.
We know that Congress is at MOST capable of one significant piece of legislation every two years, and if you don’t make it in that one, you don’t get anything — yet again.
Sure, the House will file all sorts of bills NOW to make up the slack on those issues… and every one of them will show up on GovTrack as “Chance of passage: 1% or 2%.”
Yeah this was pork. Just because the pork isn’t all rotten doesn’t mean you feel like feasting.
You would rather Congress pass ~more~ bills?? Not me.
Being raped 95% of the time is still better than 100% under the Dems. My take under Trump is that we are down to 50%, and in under 6 months. It does tick me off to no end the number of Republicans who complain that we aren’t down to zero. Progress not perfection is the rule of the day. If you don’t think that Trump is having a positive effect, then go to Blue States where the leadership is now throwing everyone, including their own supporters, under the bus to maintain the status quo. To me, the biggest effect of the Trump effect is the shift back to the Statesa making them responsible for meeting their own needs. Oregon and the others having to massively increase taxces, or cut “essential” services is causing local revolts. Our Governor recently stated that they don’t have the money to pay 600 dept of transportation people this winter to plow snow. But then she announces massive funding for homeless services, their pet grifting project. This is how grassroot movements start, and Trump is smart by forcing this back to the state, and local level, where leaders have far more accountability than at the national level. Look at the high speed rail in CA. CA people didn’t care because they saw it as a nationally funded project. But have that money come out of their pocket directly, where they now see an Return on Investment of 0.01%, and it becomes newson defending it on his watch rather than being able to blame Trump for the loss of funding. The old days of politicians being able to easily justify waste by saying “hey its federal money” is coming to an end. Oregon and Portland may still be blue, but their efforts to make it more blue are, I believe, going to make it less blue down the road. If you don’t believe me, just ask Colbert how pushing the agenda too far worked out for him.
I appreciate the discussion of the mathematical model using flight delays as an example — very interesting stuff.
Yes, but…in addition to utils, you also lose the money paid for the ticket if you don’t cancel timely. That makes missing the flight somewhat pricier than implied here.
Not to mention, as a functionary of a corporation, missing a flight can mean losing a contract or being fired. I’ve seen way too much money be set on fire, business eventually fail, and employee lives ruined from collateral damage all due to executives that refuse to consider chain reaction consequences because their objective was actually to fully fund their golden parachutes.
The pic is blurry. Is that the BBB or an Epstein birthday card?
The same applies to the argument against 55mph saving lives. Turns out the time wasted on the road doing 55 vs 70 far exceeded the lost hours of living by dying prematurely in an accident. As Dr Long often told us, “always make sure that your cure isn’t worse than the disease.”
Getting back to utils, I have a friend who does business travel all the time, and he always takes a town car to and from the airport, and he flies economy class. His rational is looking at the cost of the whole trip, and not just the flight portion. His numbers at the time were that he spends $75 each way on the car, but he gets picked up and dropped off close to the terminal, doesn’t have to park or bother spouse to take them. He then spends $500 less on the flight by going economy. As I tried to teach my son, there is a big difference between being cheap and being thrifty. The key to life is knowing where to save money.