f negotiations go well for the next six months and especially if we get something happening with China and all that needs to happen with China is that we agree on a pause while we work on a deal. That could be enough. A pause on tariffs until we work on a deal. So I feel like Trump is setting up the midterms really well. There should be a rate cut and there should be a whole bunch of tariff deals done by then. He's going to be hard to beat, you know, or at least the Republicans are going to be hard to beat.

I was reading Mario Nawfal's news summary, which I recommend by the way. His news summaries are terrific on X. That DOGE has put together some software to make it easier to fire government employees. So you know how everything is too complicated, but apparently it was sort of complicated to just fire anybody. So they figured out how to do a high-speed system for firing federal workers. Now apparently over 260,000 government employees have already been let go because of DOGE's work. Did you know that? It snuck up on me. 260,000 have already been let go. And then this will make it easier. And apparently there's a whole bunch of others who are targeted. So we expect the IRS to cut 40% of its staff and maybe the VA to cut 80,000. And I guess the ultimate source of this is Reuters. Wow.

Now here's a story that you've probably already heard. I think I've mentioned it, but I can't stop going back to it because it's blowing my brain. That according to Scott Bessent in the Treasury, over one-third of the payments that were issued by the Treasury in the recent past can't be tracked back to the appropriations to find out if they were allowed or inappropriate expenses. One-third. And keep in mind that all of the government's expenses go through the Treasury and one-third did not have a code on them to say what it was about. So you couldn't even judge whether they were allowed or not. So now that's been changed. And again I'm going to say that this might be DOGE's biggest win. Meaning that if expenses in the government suddenly and inexplicably go down over the next year and a half, isn't it going to look like all the fraudsters knew that they would get caught so they stopped doing it? Is it possible that even if they couldn't catch the fraud because the fraud was hidden too well, that if they set up a mechanism to catch it in the future, is it possible that we'll see this gigantic drop in expenses that nobody even understands? Like we don't know why it went down. If that happens and some of it happens before the midterms, oh my god. Now again, I'm being super optimistic, but I can't believe that a third of the payments went without some kind of a payment code and there wasn't a great deal of fraud going on. It's hard to imagine there was anything else going on.

But also DOGE. News, Libs of TikTok is talking about this on X. DOGE announced that they ended 522 contracts worth $285 million in just the last two days. Now how do you terminate 522 contracts in the last two days? I have a theory that they did it by the title because it would be pretty hard to really dig into all those contracts and talk to all the players, the buyers and the sellers, and to find out if it's appropriate. But here's one that they canceled. One of the contracts included a $181,000 USDA contract for, and this is the title of what the contract is, technical climate advisor for central Africa. Would you feel that you needed to do a deep dive before you cut that? I wouldn't. I would just look at the title. Do we need a technical climate advisor for central Africa? No. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm going to go with no. So it might be entirely possible that you could get rid of 522 contracts just by reading the titles and figuring out how much you laughed. If you laughed uncontrollably at just the title, that should be enough to cut it. I'd be perfectly happy with that standard. Why'd you cut it? We read the title and we couldn't stop laughing. Okay, good enough. That's all the research I need.

The Center Square is reporting that there was a failed vote to try to require voter ID in Michigan. Now I guess all the Republicans voted to require voter ID and all the Democrats voted no. So the thing failed. It fell 16 votes short. And my question is this. This is genuine curiosity. So that's going to prevent me from getting Alzheimer's. My curiosity. I'm actually curious about this. What do the normal Democrats think about this? Because you know that the far-left, really the ones who are really dug in, they're going to be in favor of any crazy thing as long as they can keep power. But if you were just a normal Democrat, not an elected official and not one of the crazy progressives, just a normal Democrat. Let's take Bill Maher. Take Bill Maher for example, a normal Democrat. What's he think about the fact that 100% of the Democrats don't w