It’s hard to use words like “unprecedented” to describe what has happened this last week, but the disarray the government currently in has no precedent to my knowledge.
The current disarray moves well beyond the precedented events like government shutdowns and rapidly screw things up across the board.
> It’s hard to use words like “unprecedented” to describe what has happened this last week, but the disarray the government currently in has no precedent to my knowledge.
Certainly, there is no precedent in US history for an authoritarian, law-flouting executive takeover centering illegal purges of the executive branch as a whole (and a particular focus on illegally purging federal law enforcement and internal government accountability officials), racial scapegoating, and massive "deportation" efforts that rapidly encompassing setting up massive concentration camps, almost all done by executive fiat, with the tacit support of a Congressional majority that is ideologically aligned with both the policies of the executive and the decision to execute them without regard to existing law rather than through legislation.
There are a history of similar things one might point to in other countries, but it's a first for the USA.
The hyperbole is a bit much for me. It shouldn't amaze me, but here we are. Partisans are able to construe spending cuts and shrinking the purview of the state, with authoritarianism.
Although I am not inclined to agree, it is fair to dispute specific funding cuts or firings. It would also be reasonable to temper those arguments against the futility of general cut-backs without specific cuts.
Consider a few hypotheticals:
If we accept that special interest groups exist for spending, then it would also be reasonable to accept that these groups would protest cuts in the most hyperbolic way imaginable.
If we accept that the Federal gov. is not free from corruption, selective enforcement, what is in effect "legislation from unelected bureaucrats", or entrenched bureaucracies which oppose the will of the people - If we accept that any of this exists or is possible, it is not unreasonable to accept that some of these bureaus would be cut or eliminated.
It is reasonable to expect that these bureaus and special interest groups would stand in solidarity. They have every incentive to join together and expand the largess of the central government. It makes sense that partisan media groups would paint any criticism or cuts in the most hyperbolic and odious terms.
All of these things are easy to reason about. It is also easy to take cursory glance at the historical record. It is easy to examine the economic and political ideologies of the odious authoritarians which the partisans are so quick to invoke. Where did these odious authoritarians cut spending? Where did they reduce the purview of the state? If we examine this, we will find that cuts and reductions are entirely antithetical to the authoritarian platform. It is a contradiction in terms. For these reasons, I regard the comparisons as ridiculous hyperbole.
Humor me here. How is the following not a non-sequitur, "Cutting spending and regulation is authoritarianism. What we need are more regulations, central planning from unelected bureaucrats and socialism"?
Often, the most despotic legal institutions have what are among the largest and most centralized legal structures for their time. One does not carry out a Soviet-style purge on little more sheer whim. It takes quite a bit of organization to achieve such carnage and displacement that soon follow.
> There ultimate in removed regulation is an apparatchik unhelpfully advising: "Just don't screw up"
What you posit as merely "unhelpful advise" is in practice an unpronounced threat: "Do it the way we expect or else". It isn't a removed regulation but an obscured one where the final interpretation rests with the apparatchik.
>The ultimate in simple taxes is serfdom
I never got the memo when black became white. The simplest tax paid is zero taxes. Serfdom renders individuals as property fixed to the land/estate they pay tithes/taxes to. They couldn't by an be further from each other.
Serfdom sounds pretty reasonable. No taxes means no redistribution of wealth, leading to a few growing richer and richer, because of accumulated advantages. While the majority go porer and porer, eventuellt might have to work all the time to be able to buy food and pay the rent, scared of protesting against an abusive employer.
That's a kind of serfdom. Not literally the same thing but ...
Look up "the working poor", is a little bit already a reality to some
> The hyperbole is a bit much for me. It shouldn't amaze me, but here we are. Partisans are able to construe spending cuts and shrinking the purview of the state, with authoritarianism.
There is plenty of precedent for both spending cuts and shrinking (in some areas, usually while expanding others) government from US Presidents. Simply refusing to spend appropriated funds as directed by law where even the excuse given isn't either of those but imposing ideological constraints not contained or authorized at the discretion of the executive in the governing law is, on the other hand, not. Openly ideological and patronage oriented purges of the federal workforce (at least, since the adoption of civil service laws expressly to to stop that) again is not, and is neither about shrinking the scope of government or cutting spending.
>Simply refusing to spend appropriated funds as directed by law...
Again, this is how the issue is being played in a partisan fashion. Yet, when we dig deeper, beneath the soundbite interpretations, we find that legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have complex and conflicted views on how much authority The President has over government bureaus.
>...the President’s authority over independent agencies depends not on the Constitution but on a common statutory phrase, which allows the President to discharge the heads of such agencies for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” This phrase—the INM standard—is best understood to create a relationship of residential review—and a particular remedy for legal delinquency flowing from that review. It allows the President to discharge members of independent agencies not only for laziness and torpor (inefficiency) or for corruption (malfeasance) but also for neglect of their legal duties, which includes egregiously erroneous decisions of policy, law, or fact, either repeatedly or on unusually important matters...
The cited sources illustrate how complex the law is. If we accept the authority of the state, then it is up to the Supreme Court to rule on the specifics. If the ruling is in favor of Trump's actions, we can again reasonably expect the partisans to paint this as an out-of-control judiciary. From that point we may see more arguments for "packing the court", the entire narrative around "authoritarianism" again becomes an exercise in partisan hypocrisy.
The point about cutting budgets, agencies and reducing the purview of the state remains. It is in direct contrast to authoritarian ideology, which without exception seeks to expand the purview of the state. Many quips have been leveled here, but no one has approached this point.
Georgetown Law and Cass Sunstein laying out the different views and complexity of the issue, or a partisan youtuber offering, "Trump Broke the Government AND THEN CHANGED HIS MIND (And Then Changed His Mind AGAIN)"
So you don't even have a cursory understanding of the law or why it exists? As long as it fits your agenda, literally anything goes. Legality, lawfulness, fairness, the wellbeing of tens millions of people? All be damned.
So this seems to be the current strategy, as soon as someone opposes the actions of the Trump (and by extension the Republican party which has by now almost completely purged of dissent) everyone argues they are partisan (the whole if you are not supporting us you must be against us). This by the way is a very common strategy of authoritarian regimes.
Regarding spending cuts being antithetical to authoritarian regimes, note that the cuts don't affect the military or law enforcement (except for people who were involved in prosecuting Trump) that's very much in line with many authoritarian regimes.
> The hyperbole is a bit much for me. It shouldn't amaze me, but here we are. Partisans are able to construe spending cuts and shrinking the purview of the state, with authoritarianism.
It is easy to construe blatantly illegal and facially unconstitutional acts as authoritarian, actually.
And it seems like many conservatives have collective amnesia about January 6; the fake electors plot; the Trump–Raffensperger phone call; how an astonishing number of Trump's colleagues and staffers in his first administration have unambiguously spoken out about his fascist sympathies and ambitions; how Trump unabashedly praises Putin, MBS, and Kim; how he frequently threatens journalists who write unflattering articles about him; how he describes people who do not support him as "enemies from within"; etc. While these facts are not related to spending cuts, they are profoundly germane to any assessment of the President and the intentions behind his policies.
But you can't argue with these conservatives; at this point it is fair to assume that they don't debate in good faith.
Even the most charitable view is that this approach is dangerous and easy to mess up
Even if you like the fiscal goals - I do, for example - the gitmo housing plan is messed up
I hope their spending dragnet now result in a balanced budget, its not hyperbole to acknowledge how disjointed and disruptive it is
I wish we had a comprehensive immigration policy that wasnt undermined for decades, its not hyperbole to acknowledge that this dragnet to address this is staffed by people interested in punitive disruptions to people's lives, that this particular process has plenty of mistakes in it and it doesnt afford people access to a lawyer if improperly arrested by immigration personnel despite an authorization or citizenship. and that its punitive to go after some statuses (or anyone in this way really) even if identification isnt a mistake
yeah there are a lot of problems, a lot of parallels to how worse things started, and lacks the accountability to prevent those outcomes
its fine to acknowledge that while being a beneficiary of other policies. there are court cases on appeal that I want new prosecutors to drop, stuff thatll fly under the radar, there are plenty of other things going on to happen for some industries and new industries
I agree with you that its not as black and white as partisans are saying, and its pretty clear that lamenting or protesting the outcome is an unproductive use of energy in a system that doesnt support that, while its clearly an oligarch land grab that you can spend time getting a piece of too
I'm not sure how any of the current initiatives will lead to a balanced budget, to be honest. Here's a site by the Congressional Budget Office, which will likely be more reliable than the Treasury going forward.
- Over FY24, revenue ran to $4.19 trillion, while spending ran to $6.14 trillion – leaving (up to rounding before calculation) a deficit of $1.95 trillon.
– Of all of this spending, ~$4.10 trillion is likely untouchable politically, since accounted for by the DoD, Social Security, Medicare, and interest on public debt. This leaves us with ~$2.04 trillion worth of spending to cut $1.95 trillion from. I think you can see how feasible that is.
Federal salaries and benefits are _peanuts_ compared to the trillions of dollars involved – I think around 8.6%, although the CBO doesn't have spending broken down by cost objects.
Assuming Elon's run the numbers, he'll be perfectly aware that trimming down the federal workforce won't do jack shit to get the US to a balanced budget. His motivations are different.
However, it still leaves the question: Were cuts possible in terms of realpolik in any other way? We can argue that there should have been more nuance and in the ideal world, yes, we would like more measured cuts.
Additionally, even if we found areas to cut which are generally agreeable, the proponents of that spending would use every means possible to oppose those cuts. The special interests would have every incentive to use the most inflammatory language to incite aligned partisans.
The partisan stuff doesn't interest me. Various sources will cook numbers differently. One trick is to include entitlements or exclude them from the debt. Rate of increase vs. debt in real terms offers another stunt mode. COVID spending is yet another area for partisan squabbling. When it suits the agenda, partisans will claim, "But congress has the final word on spending". You can even find that in this thread.
The rate of increase in debt has been increasing consistently. Even with Clinton's so called balanced budget, the total amount of debt has increased over the long term.
If Trump were not taking this radical approach in his first weeks, I would assume that his talk about cuts were empty campaign promises. Even with these actions, I'm cautiously optimistic at best.
I'm not a die hard Trump supporter or enthusiastic about any politician. Generally I dislike politicians and the political classes. It wouldn't be a terribly inaccurate to generalize by calling them all looters. These cuts make it possible to consider hope.
>>If Trump were not taking this radical approach in his first weeks, I would assume that his talk about cuts were empty campaign promises.
>You're assigning an awful lot of trustworthiness to a known liar...
Am I? Did you bother to read my above comment?
In my view, all politicians are liars by necessity. They have every incentive to make the most grandiose promises while campaigning. Once in office they can begin looting. The long term health of the polity is of no concern to their particular set of incentives. They need only worry about the next election campaign. Bankrupting or exploiting the public is almost a foregone conclusion. Individuals may differ, but these are the incentives inherent to the political game.
>... for someone who claims not to support him.
These are my assessments of politics and politicians. I've even been explicit about them previous to spelling them out in more detail here. Despite that, you insist on projecting your partisan nonsense onto my views, as if you have some kind of crystal ball that allows you to read my mind or another telepathic power which would preclude you from engaging in good faith.
Take another look at this discussion. You've gone off the deep end here.
"You'll believe what I accuse you of believing and defend the straw-men I attribute to you", isn't a strong argument here. It is entirely personal and divorced from the original thread.
>> Certainly, there is no precedent in US history for an authoritarian, law-flouting executive takeover centering illegal purges of the executive branch as a whole (and a particular focus on illegally purging federal law enforcement and internal government accountability officials), racial scapegoating, and massive "deportation" efforts that rapidly encompassing setting up massive concentration camps, almost all done by executive fiat, with the tacit support of a Congressional majority that is ideologically aligned with both the policies of the executive and the decision to execute them without regard to existing law rather than through legislation.
Description of facts
> The hyperbole is a bit much for me.
Your assessment.
Then you respond to every calling out as "I'm neutral"
Why is your perception of my views even on the table? Argue the topic, not the person.
>there is no precedent in US history for an authoritarian, law-flouting executive takeover centering illegal purges of the executive branch...
As I've attempted to illustrate here repeatedly, authoritarianism is in direct contrast to cuts in state power. Especially as it concerns the specific comparisons to National Socialism made on this site. Totalitarian statists seek to increase the power of the state, not cut it. Your assertion is a non-sequitur.
>...purges of the executive branch as a whole...
The president is the head of the executive branch. With other administrative agencies, there is some dispute over the extent of presidential authority.
Deporting illegal immigrants is not comparable to Dachau or the actions of the National Socialists. Making this comparison trivializes genocide.
>I can only laugh at this point.
I don't find it funny in the least.
You would be right to say that mass deportation will probably involve violations of civil rights and profiling in practice. I hope we can agree in our opposition to this. However, illegal immigration is illegal. Circumventing immigration law by funding NGOs with taxpayer money is a greater expansion of state power. We should be more concerned with the victims who have been trafficked, including women and children. The incentives of the "amnesty" program's abuse led to the exploitation of minors. The abuse has to stop.
If partisans want immigration reform, they should pass the laws. Until then, enforcing the existing laws is not an expansion of state power. Circumventing the laws via NGOs is an expansion of state power. It is an usurpation of the democratic process you claim to value.
I worked at a national lab for 11 years, including all 4 years of the previous term and through multiple government shutdowns. This is much, much more disarray. I no longer work work at a national lab, but am well connected with those who
do
Your article summaries already reek of bias. The article link was truncated but I found and read it. It claims conflicts of interest and makes the assumption that it poses national security risks without knowing how DOGE is accessing the data or how much access Elon himself has.
I for one am curious how this turns out. I give it an 80% chance of failing spectacularly, 20% chance of 'wow, we were wasting that much money?'
The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
Well, now someone decided to just sledgehammer the whole thing. I'm both horrified and hopeful at what comes from that.
The thing is, clumsy attempts to save money by randomly shutting down departments or firing staff can easily end up costing much more, by creating expensive problems that the departments were in charge of preventing. Or when a couple of years later it turns out you needed those things, and it's very expensive to try to start up a thing again, replace all the lost knowledge and institutional experience etc.
It's not an accident. The whole point is to destroy these institutions, they've made no secret of that.
I get that there's plenty to not like about the Federal Government (and by plenty I mean a lot), but the answer to addressing that is to fix the problems rather than burn everything to the ground.
Sure, by 3M votes. Fact is that no, most of the country did not ask for this.
In fact, Trump explicitly lied about project 2025 during the campaign. So many may have been swayed to vote Trump, with the understanding that project 2025 was not on the table. Those people did not ask for this.
Inaction by the other majority of non-voters is accepting that this route wasn't any less desirable than Harris's plan. So yes, most of the country at best didn't care.
Oh, but they did.
Trump has been spewing out his plans for 10 years. His inability to understand complex situations, lack of world knowledge, ignorance of history.
The voters knew exactly what they were voting for.
Just like economics has been found to have far from rational actors, it's clear that there are millions of "low information voters". Many of them likely voted for him because he's that actor on tv who entertains them.
But yes, plenty of his voters heard what he had to say and liked it.
Tangent: in the United States, more people believe in angels than in evolution (69% vs 60%).
The US Federal government is 36 trillion in debt and trending deeper; with ratios to GDP reminiscent of WWII where the US established the global not-an-Empire that it currently enjoys. I'm not sure "this could be expensive" rises to the level of anyone caring. The situation is already well beyond the limits of what anyone who cares about cost could cope with.
"failing spectacularly" to me looks more like collapses of the international monetary system or generalised large scale riots. Which could easily happen, the US government is responsible for about half the US economy; look at the USSR for what can happen when that sort of system gets dismantled too quickly. Mere large monetary amounts are not a factor these days.
Unfortunately, none of this DOGE bullshit will do anything to the spiraling debt.
The majority of the US budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid and defense spending. This is about 60% of the budget.
The billionaires are in control of the US now as oligarchs and defense spending is how they suck up money.
So that is never getting cut.
Social security and Medicare will be untouched even though they talk about cuts, because that's how they keep a good chunk of their voting base placated.
The cost of medicare/medicaid will continue to spiral to the moon as the Trump admin killed the governments ability to negotiate drug prices again, because this is good for the oligarchs. But even ignoring pharma, the cost of services is still growing out of control.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if Medicare ends up spending more per enrolled member because they'll force CMS to be more heavily reliant on Medicare Advantage plans administered by private insurers.
>Social security and Medicare will be untouched even though they talk about cuts, because that's how they keep a good chunk of their voting base placated.
There are plans in place to cut medicaid to reduce the corporate tax. Trump is in full DGAF mode, he's not running for president again so his mask is off. Heck, at the speeds he's going he may get everything he wants in place before Midterms anyway.
That means we’re virtually redirecting funding from many agencies to medicare/medicaid (and military, sadly). Not a bad thing, if it requires every other govt agency to be shutdown, that we prioritize health.
Axing research grants and datasets has a lot to do with faith-based medicine. Why would one value cancer research, for example, if they believe illness is punishment for sin?
> The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
In terms of "growth", the number of federal civilian government employees has basically never been lower as a percentage of the population.
It's all consumed by the military industrial complex, which no doubt will have a continual budget increase as it does every year regardless of the administration.
Military analyst Ryan McBeth argues the military industrial complex is nowadays a lot smaller and less influential than people think - he even uses a mental shortcut "military industrial complex does not exist" [1] - make of it what you will. His arguments seem pretty convincing to me.
In the big picture I'd probably mildly agree with his view that the defence industry proper isn't the US's biggest problem right now and railing against Military-Industrial complex is using the wrong term. But his arguments are a bit weird.
He classifies the Tech companies as not part of the military industrial complex, which seems like a mistake. The US tech industry is integrated with the US intelligence establishment and is effectively part of their military presence. Musk, for example, was making a very visible contribution to the Ukranian war effort with Starlink. Google & Facebook are a bigger threat than the US military when it comes to governments being taken out in my opinion and the US military is probably more of the same mind than they let on.
He's also very focused on earnings which is a headscratcher. He has revenues right next to that, and revenues are what matter. Earnings just say the US weapons producers are an inefficient industry which isn't a matter of controversy because it doesn't matter much. He seems to be confused about what figures to look at.
Yes and no – I do believe that the MIC, explicitly stated, doesn't exist now as it has before: he illustrates it by noting the fact that the top five legacy arms and defense manufacturers don't earn as much, or have the same market cap, as the top five in other companies (say, tech.)
But arguably a lot more companies that aren't on the face of it defense and arms manufacturers are getting a larger and larger piece of the pie. Tech companies rely on defense – and "national security" – spending as key revenue streams, and they've built the connections with the government to match. (I think both SpaceX and Oracle are very much obvious examples now.)
So, perhaps the definiton of the MIC has to be updated for the 21st century to include "national security" spending and other significant technical suppliers.
Well, there's actually a HUGE historical downsizing that happened; this is actually something that really caught people off guard with Russia's invasion of Ukraine - the US MIC is a tiny fraction of the size that it used to be, and honestly isn't prepared to supply a "peer conflict" where two industrial powers are in a stalemate that they can't seem to break, so they're throwing as much ordinance as they can produce at the enemy to try to break through.
Thank god, this also hit the Russians incredibly bad, but yeah; people's perceptions of the production capacity of both countries is wildly, wildly overestimated.
The MIC basically had its budget slashed by ~80% or so after the cold war. Thousands of factories were permanently shuttered, hundreds of companies more or less ceased to exist - sometimes some of their engineers were aqui-hired by other firms, but by and large they just stopped working for the MIC in general.
This is what they called the "Peace Dividend"; when the Soviets collapsed, we no longer felt we needed a military that could repel a conventional assault from the Soviet Union (with all 700m citizens, and the heartland of industrial Europe (i.e. Germany, Poland, Czechia) backing them). We just, worst-case, needed to stop Russia and their 140m citizens.
They called it that because it unlocked a huge chunk of the budget that previously went to the MIC. A literal dividend of money.
in 2024, the US Fed collected 4.9 Trillion in taxes and spent 3.8 trillion (78% of revenue) on the following programs: Social security, Medicare, health, and income payments like disability.
It also had 1.8 Trillion dollars of deficit spending, bringing the total to 6.7 trillion with welfare taking up (57% of total spending). The fed spent 0.9 trillion (13%) paying interest.
Is it not mostly social security and military spending? I.e. not bureaucracy, but what is essentially a savings program and massive wealth transfer to the MIC, neither of which are being affected so far. All this, plus reckless tariffs starting trade wars with the US's closest allies do not inspire confidence that this will have good outcomes.
Note that including social security in the budget spending is misleading. It's essentially a trust fund (albeit under funded) so you can't cut spending in it. You could cut contributions and payouts (essentially privatising retirement even more), but the effects would only be noticed in decades.
I am 62 years old. What is the number 1 discussion topic with my retired colleagues?
How to minimize taxes in retirement. (the RMD causes panic because if forces taxation). Many get a pension, social security, have a 401k, paid off house, and savings. Not everyone needs social security.
As a side note, federal employee salaries themselves (*) account for less than 8% of the federal budget. What that says about the intent of slashing the workforce is beyond me.
The intent is to remove anyone that may get in the way of the upcoming grift. And with most of (social|traditional) media wanting to be part of the grift, they will happily help him convincing the masses there’s nothing to see here.
I don't believe there is really any interest in balancing the Federal budget or saving money. It's a flimsy pretext for purging every person and program not ideologically aligned with the incoming administration.
Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?
God, if it's a purge, I hope someone has a "corrupt government contractor" index fund out there I can throw whatever severance I'll get in so I can at least hope to have a retirement.
How is #metoo equivalent having a series of private citizens sideline officials in every government department, including the Treasury, to get access to federal administrative and financial databases to unilaterally conduct mass layoffs [0] and give the president ammunition for whatever funding fight he's going to have with states next?
And promise to suspend normal conflict-of-interest rules in a completely unfunded deferred resignment offer?
And forcing senior civil servants to resign throughout all departments and agencies, including firing checks-and-balances mechanisms like Inspectors General while they're at it?
[0] It looks like OPM is targeting at least a 30% reduction in workforce this year.
That's certainly the country (or at least the stock markets) as a whole. I'm not sure whether individual agencies – like the FBI(*) or the Inspector Generals – will ever get what integrity they had back.
(*) I say this as someone who thinks COINTELPRO was a key example of a law enforcement agency getting high off its fumes and shredding human rights, of which the list is endless.
The 'brand' of the FBI is worthless. For half of the country it was investigating the criminal.
For the other half of the country it is the result of the purge.
No-one will trust the FBI from here on out.
Need to delete it and re-create the function with a different name.
Anyone who thinks the government should be "run like a business" does not deserve to be given an ounce of serious consideration in any sphere of intellectual discourse. A business does not get to print profit.
Aristotle explained (in Politics) why running government like a business is a bad idea. Sometimes it feels that we are forgetting what we have learned and have to re-learn it the hard way again and again.
Most of my interactions with government take place with state and local governments and they are definitely not allowed to print profit as far as I recall.
Public schools, police departments, parks, streets - I interact with these more than any other government service and no of them can print their own money and most of them work really hard to be run like businesses that care deeply about budgets and managing costs.
This is what we call a strawman in the business, as I'm clearly referring to the federal government. Yet, none of your examples should be run as a business either. They should be run as nonprofits. Not many nonprofit CEO oligarchs wreaking havoc in the government these days are there?
The same people who think it should be run like a business are wholly opposed to running it as a planned economy, even though each company in the US is a little totalitarian state with a completely planned economy.
Federal discretionary (non military) spending in 2023 was around $917 Billion. Of that, $131 Billion was Veteran Benefits, and $100 Billion was Health related. That leaves $686 Billion. [0]
Total US GDP in 2023 was $27.3 Trillion...so around 2.5% of total GDP.
GDP grows (inflation adjusted) around 2.3% per year.
US Health Care is 17-18% of US GDP.
So while federal discretionary spending is important, it's not nearly as important as keeping growth up, and getting a handle on health costs.
I give it a higher chance of succeeding in saving money while at the same time destroying a lot of things and creating problems that will take decades to fix.
>The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic.
That's not the case really. In the last 50 years there was no trend in federal spending vs GDP, with widest movements being a growth from ~19% in FY2001 (which ended with 09/11) to almost 25% in 2009, with subsequent decline to the same average as before. Nothing catastrophic. In the immediate postwar era of course, the spending has been much lower at around 15% but that was when the population was 9 years younger and no Medicare or Medicaid existed, i.e. old or poor sick people were just left to fend for themselves.
In 2024 out of 6.8T in federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid was 1.9T. Remove that and you are back to a typical 1950s level of 16-17% federal spending to GDP.
In theory, it should grow faster than GDP. Because government spending is inefficient but it is able to do things that the free market can't, so poor/less developed country should try to minimise it to enable fast, efficient growth, while a rich country should try to achieve the best results for everyone and that is done through government spending (fast growth is impossible anyway because it's done by adopting someone else' technology and when you are already the richest it's not possible as yours is the best one - fast growth is a catch-up growth).
In addition, it becomes inevitable because with high per capita GDP there is a lot of excess income which people want to invest because their needs are covered, and varying outcomes of those investments (even if purely random, by chance), tend to compound, which results in entrenched, systemic inequality, that might even crystallise into caste system. Only way to counteract it is more taxes and more government spending, so that there's less excess income left to invest, and outcomes of those less lucky are compensated by gov spending.
Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal
Step 3: It's a good thing, actually
I feel like this thread has fast tracked the steps.
I don't mean this to be insulting. I think you actually bring up interesting points. But perhaps could have not led off with step 1 and started with this.
Well that was more or less my initial point. Yes from 1950, spending has increased but it did so by introducing beneficial things like Medicare or Medicaid, and vastly more people under Social Security because of demographic transition. So it wasn't a bad thing. And after 1975, spending didn't increase much or at all. While it could and probably should have, to bring in more equality and improve quality of life for everyone.
But why should taxes scale GDP per capita? Growth means more production, controlled for inflation. Are citizens getting several times more services and goods from the government. It certainly doesn't seem like it. We dont have 10x more teachers per student, 10x more police, or 10x more public roads per capita.
Because if GDP per capita increases cost for services as well as number of required services increases.
Take a car analogy, if the GDP per capita increases such that the number of people who can afford a car doubles, the government will have to invest more in roads. Moreover the expectations to the quality of the roads will likely increase as well. In other words if more stuff gets done in a country your more likely to night more infrastructure and services to support it.
how does that make sense. My claim is that the government is collecting more taxes than ever. 1,000% more than in 1940 (controlling for inflation). I ask why we are getting so little for that.
We should be demanding more from our government! Instead, one side is trying to tear it down, and purposely fights to make government worse so people want to tear it down.
I think that framing is close. One side doesn't think the government can do better. I'm usually in that camp. I don't think the federal government can do better. It is too far from the voters for oversight. The country is too big and diverse for what it is trying to do.
My dream government is that of Switzerland, which keeps the purse close to the people.
>Secondly, why does the government need to spend to match GDP? The more productive we are, the more the government spends?
I have been harping on this for years
Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars.
If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.
Is the government providing 10X more services per capita? Do we have 10X the schooling? 10X the police? 10X the roads?
These numbers are already scaled for both inflation and population, so it should actually productivity.
Musk et al.'s plan has been out in the open for a while. Lots of interviews and opinions from them the last few years, so I wouldn't even consider it an open secret.
Even if they managed to find 100% savings in the spending they are targeting, they will not make a dent in the budget. Doing that and cutting all military spending would not balance the budget. Most Federal discretional spending is on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
I'm all for cutting this, reducing benefits to current recipients to bring spending to sustainable levels, but to date I haven't found a politician to vote for who endorsed this position.
> Even if they managed to find 100% savings in the spending they are targeting, they will not make a dent in the budget. Doing that and cutting all military spending would not balance the budget. Most Federal discretional spending is on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.
How is social security discretion spending? It's tied to what has put into it, i.e. much more like a trust fund as I understand it.
> The average SS recipient receives more in benefits than they contributed. (including reasonable interest).
This is unsustainable. The people running it know and have known this for decades, instead of fixing it they have been at work finely tuning everything to ensure that the boomers receive full benefits just before major overhauls are require, significant additional taxes and/or reductions in benefits are 100% a guarantee at this point, but they continue spending and even increasing benefits all the while. A quarter century ago, Al Gore suggested putting a small amount of money aside to fund the program in the future and everyone laughed at him, on both the left and right. Instead they cut themselves stimulus checks and went to the mall, kicking off a decade of indulgence that ended with the 2008 global financial crisis while spending 7 trillion pounding sand in Iraq and Afghanistan with no particular goal and little to nothing to show for it.
This generation has acted like overgrown children their entire adult lives, they've spent and borrowed and kicked every can in sight down the road. They rigged this program along with every other as another massive transfer of wealth from the generations with the least money to the one with the most. As a final FU to future generations, they are as we speak in the process of dismantling the global world order that has protected and enriched them for their entire lives. I hope in the near future they will at last see some retribution for all of this.
I'm sure I've already made tons of not so friendlies in this thread, why not more.
Why not just cut and run on social security? I've paid in my whole life and probably won't even take a cent from it. We realize it's a mostly unsustainable ponzi scheme dependent on huge population growth that nobody wants, why not just tell us 'sorry, your money is gone, we're ending the program'?
Single payer I'm all for. Just in case you thought I was picking a side :).
There's no appetite for this for the exact same reason social security was created in the first place. Without it you have a bunch of senior citizens out on the street unable to work and unable to afford basic necessities.
For all the gnashing of teeth on "entitlement spending" the reality without it is pretty unpalatable to most.
There is a disconnect with how big we are and what infrastructure is needed to support it. Let's say we cut everything but Senate, House, President, VERY basic defense. Our military is larger than probably anything else. I think the naivety is hilarious. Our employees and government bloat is big because our nation is big. There is no way around this. It's time to impeach, Trump. Good night.
but with sledgehammer comes the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I mean, i understand the need to remove unnecessary costs like DEI etc, but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
What i dont like is how trump is looking to (or is being manipulated to) move a lot of public spending into private entities. For example, the recent ai stargate announcements. How is the public spending meant to benefit all americans, rather than the few that own those companies?
> I mean, i understand the need to remove unnecessary costs like DEI etc, but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
So you don’t believe there should be an attempt to reckon with the structural forces in play since the beginning of the country that have systematically lowered the wealth for Black Americans, trans and queer Americans, disabled Americans, neurodiverse Americans, and immigrant Americans?
>What i dont like is how trump is looking to (or is being manipulated to) move a lot of public spending into private entities.
Hey you finally found the Bailey. The DEI arguments were just to win your vote. Aka the Motte.
He woulda said he'd fix whatever you hated to get your vote. Now we gave him the keys to the castle and gets what he's always wanted. What the richest people who donated to him always wanted.
> but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
But it seems to me that DEI has so pervasively infiltrated the academy and scientific community, that excising them is extremely hard without drastic measures.
There was an open letter in 2020 summer from a lot of "prominent scientists" that claimed that suddenly social distancing didn't matter because BLM. I think that any such people that are viewing the world trough this lenses shouldn't touch federal money on account of being idiotically political or egregiously stupid.
>While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid, there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes.
Does it?
>White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.
>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.
Do you think that anyone that has put his name under such idiotic sentence deserves state money in any form - except payments under ADA?
This administration is taking down public websites and resources at an alarming rate. Including scientific documents, health surveys, project research documents that are referenced daily by government staff, contractors, and US international partners.
I recently became aware of this issue and this post made me interested to know if there are any comprehensive datasets tracking these take downs. Also would be interested to know what other efforts exist to archive at risk government websites.
Partial list of removed pages and entire websites I'm compiling:
- USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse (stores 50yrs of international aid records) https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/
DoJ also removed all information about January 6th. We’re watching 1984 in real time. If it wasn’t happening in my country it would be interesting to watch the outcomes and how supporters contort themselves to say it’s ok.
It's not happening in my country and the contorsions I see only make me weep for humanity. This whole thing is horrifying, and it's happening to cheers.
> But librarians and archivists and citizens should use this current crisis to demand more than short-term solutions. A new distributed digital preservation infrastructure is needed for digital government information.
Probably the library of Congress is the right place for it to go?
Hypothetical question: imagine the president ordered troops to evacuate the library and then burn it down. Who exactly would be held accountable, and how?
Yes, immensely. Checks and balances and stated elected representatives have a lot of push back against the president.
>Hypothetical question: imagine the president ordered troops to evacuate the library and then burn it down. Who exactly would be held accountable, and how?
Beats me. There's a lot of processes needed for the president to organize the national guard. Lots of chains of command would need to fail to have them burn down a domestic building with no signs of sabatoge.
Sabotage? He could do it blatantly publicly without repercussions, it seems. I wish what you said was true but my reading of the SCOTUS ruling is basically that impeachment is the only option, and the party in power is not going to convict its own president (especially for something a few would support).
I think that the answer is yes, but, it seems like the current administration is trying to push against the boundaries of what they are and aren’t allowed to do, and it’s not clear where they will and won’t find pushback.
My point wasn't about giving up, but merely an assessment of the current power dynamics, and it's uncontrovertibly.
Americans have been told what makes the country strong is that there are balances of power and we're watching it unfold in real time. I dearly hope to be proven wrong in my worry.
Best you can do now is not give up. Spread the news wherever you can. You won't convince everyone, but every crazy story will make people start to question. There's a lot of crazy to share.
That should all add up to a midterm that starts to turn the tide.
Also, definitely don't be afraid to call your congress reps and be loud about this stuff.
For now. But they're ambitious and have a lot of enablers.
Project 2025 is real, and now that he's gained office he and his enablers are going to try to follow through with all of it. They're going to change the rules they want and ignore those they can't.
You're right – we'll see what the Republican majorities in Congress decide to do. You'd hope they wouldn't trample over the Congressional Research Service (of the LoC), but given the level of political debate I think it was getting short shrift already.
The right has been waging a war on libraries for a long time. The LoC is obviously much different than a typical library, but given trumps lack of understanding of pretty much everything, library in the name puts it in danger.
The power of the purse is explicitly under the pervue of the Legislative per the constitution. The executive does not have the discretion to not spend or redirect funds assigned by Congress (there's some interesting history with Nixon on that if one is interested), yet this administration doesn't seem to see that as a barrier.
You mean like the law that was passed overwhelmingly by Congress banning TikTok that Trump told businesses to ignore or do yoh mean like unilaterally trying to block all spending when that is suppose to be controlled by Congress?
Congress is letting the President take their power. Even Republicans in 2016-2020 wouldn’t have done that.
The library's functions are overseen by the librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the architect of the Capitol. The librarian of Congress is the head of the Library of Congress, appointed by the president of the United States with the advice and consent of the United States Senate, for a term of ten years.
So yeah, Trump could fire the librarian.
Interestingly, the head of the Architect of the Capitol is appointed by a vote of a congressional commission for a ten-year term. Prior to 2024, the president of the United States appointed the Architect upon confirmation vote by the United States Senate, and was accountable to the president.
This is what I don't understand about these types. Wouldn't you want to spend your last years doing - not this? Like whatever you like, model trains, watching star wars, golfing.
It is because we haven’t achieved consensus on these issues or there is a faction that believes they can get a better deal by holding out and continuing to fight.
It’s more futile than this, my parents are big Trumpers. My father watches a ton of Fox News and rants about how immigrants are flooding the cities. When shown data and statistics and pointing out Trumps blatant lying and the hysteria about it, my father will move the goal post, change the subject and say things like “I don’t like Trump but Biden is too old.”
Okay I said, if Biden is too old who is chosen when he steps down? Kamala, who while qualified was chosen to gain vote. Is that the alternative you want? Silence. Trump is also too old and definitely showing his age but it doesn’t matter anymore because the goal post moves again.
It’s pure radicalization and anything that can be labeled as a negative is rationalized to avoid regret.
My mother remains 100% silent about politics. Which is equally as hard to have a conversation.
So when you have people so radicalized they only put ear plugs in their ear, because they’ve been trained to want a war at home. They are too deep, what do we do? Wait until they die? What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
These are tough questions in a world where people can’t be proud we even have any kind of infrastructure. People feel they deserve better when we already have the best circumstances to be alive.
There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
I don't understand the underlying presumption that data and statistics are how you deradicalize people. People become radical when they really want something they feel they can't get, and the most effective way to fight that is to offer some of what they want. There's no argument that can prove your father isn't allowed to want less immigration, even if you and I might prefer more.
It's a genuinely hard problem, of course, because there are lots of people in the Democratic coalition who are radicalized the other direction. They feel - equally genuinely, and equally strongly - that excluding or deporting an immigrant is a grievous moral wrong which we can't tolerate for mere political expediency. That's what it means to say that there's not a consensus on immigration.
That’s kind of sweet that you think radicalization is about policy preferences. Like the GP, my elderly parents have turned into Trump partisans. They listen to Fox News all day and night. It’s constant exposure to and participation in Two Minutes of Hate. My dad’s actually a sweet guy, and when I can address some of the crazy shit he’s clearly hearing from somewhere else, and ask him to take a step back and talk to me, not at me, we often get to a place where he’ll acknowledge that what he said/repeated really doesn’t reflect his own thoughts or feelings about something, but then it’s just right back into the vortex of propaganda, lies, and hatred spewing out of the TV, and it’s like we never talked at all.
I sometimes wonder if Fox goes beyond extreme partisanship and into a sort of pavlovian training of their audience. I've watched Fox before and whenever there is a negative or scary story they follow it up with a story about Democrats. At what point does that association get burned into the audience so that Dem\Prog = bad?
The issue is it’s not just Fox News. It’s all right wing media from almost 24/7 AM radio (which is what radicalized my dad) to basically all organized social media pipelines to local broadcast television and even YouTube. Spotify drives you to Joe Rogan who drives people to right wing radicals. It’s pervasive. You have to literally insulate yourself from it or it creeps in from every direction.
It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.
My radicalization came from an incident a few years ago where some brownshirts yelled "trump won" and emptied a clip into my sister's friend's house party. They were uninvolved with politics, and had no obvious "marks" like gender shit, ethnicity (white); just anything that conceivably would have made them a target. Just normal, innocent 20-somethings.
I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him.
Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats.
All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say.
-
It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.
I don’t think people assume violent crime doesn’t happen or isn’t bad but this is a country that’s normalized gun violence mostly because it means the right to bear arms is secure if you minimize it. You’re bumping up against propaganda. You’re bumping up against intentional indifference. The example of my mother who is totally silent on issues and discussing these hard topics, it’s not because we disagree but instead it’s how she pushes out the terrifying aspects of it. She votes red because that’s what she’s always voted and her pursuit of happiness is limited to her self. Maintaining that void and disconnection is how she maintains that safe state.
Don’t let the radicalization turn you into lashing out at society because people have insulated themselves.
I'm a from england where we don't have mass shootings an this seems so fucked up to me, I'm so sorry for you that must be terrible even to be close to that. I've heard of shootings in america but this description just makes it so real.
I wasn't there and I don't know your parents, so I can't claim to know for sure what was going on.
I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.
Your parents remind me of a former colleague who completely changed his political views after frequently listening to AM talk radio every time he drove between Goldstone and LA. Many of us (me included) are like a "sponge", we take on characteristics of those we surround ourselves with (virtually or in real life). I try (and I don’t always succeed) to associate myself with individuals that I admire and possess characteristics worthy of emulation. I have to be careful and have the discipline to avoid those with characteristics that I don’t want to unconsciously assume.
Most people are sponges in that way. There's a say that 'you are the average of the 5 people you are closest with'. Birds of a feather do in fact flock together.
> There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
I heavily agree on this, people have nothing to look forward to, and nothing to be proud of. In fact, the state of the US is more embarrassing than anything. Every other country has free healthcare, high speed rail, free education etc... On top of that, there is no upwards social mobility. I know a lot of people my age are literally gambling everything on crypto and hustle culture because they have no future prospects or hope.
> This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
but I have to say that this is beyond naive. A single payer healthcare system is broadly popular, it has had the majority of support for decades at this point. We can't have it because it goes against the profit motive of the people running that industry. We already pay more than we would in taxpayer money than we would if healthcare was free across the board. Its as simple as that. Blatant corruption.
And this circles back to the last point, people see this, they realize this... and they don't believe that they can change this. This is exactly why, across the world, Luigi Mangione is hailed as a Saint. Thats exactly why the response was, "I get it." and people should try to examine that more. Its honestly not very complicated.
Fox News and such, are the only ones providing answers and giving people a place to channel this anger. But it is at the expense of marginalized groups, and truthfully, everyone. The Neo-Liberal order has failed everyone, and the Democrats have nothing to offer. I mean, we have corruption and oligarchs controlling the government. People feel hopeless, and powerless.
I mean that's not really what that says. There's multiple polls or multiple different groups ranging from Rich liberals to Hardline conservatives of which it's pretty much split down the middle plus or minus 5%.
And even then, I'd say that this is not really a good marker for like the general sentiment of the entirety of the population. But it's likely somewhat close as things currently stand, but you have to also recognize the current political climate, as well as that there has been no real counter narrative against trump's framing of politics. Democrats have done a horrible job of presenting any counter narrative whatsoever. And on top of that, a lot of people don't realise yet what these things are going to entail. I mean of course rich people want to downsize the government of course and of course they oppose tariffs. It's completely expected that trump supporters are going to be supportive of mass deportation. Boom my projection is that once people see how violent and cruel this is that a lot of them are going to be like. That's not what I wanted that I didn't know was going to be like this yada yada yada and quickly realise how a horrifying and stupid this is.
I do think you can change the corruption situation though, if that became the major topic of discussion. I liked this plan, although the presentation doesn't feel bipartisan enough:
The blatant corruption keeps people putting healthcare at priority 2 (or 10 really) by making them believe immigrants are coming for their sovereignty.
I disagree that people feel powerless to get healthcare, they are distracted. If you look at either party it is the one singular commonality between the two. Really it should be the flag ship of a 3rd party with the radicalized ideas second.
What we have to do is offer a hopeful vision of the future that rings true to a majority of people. This starts with breaking away from the current party lines that deny what most people know to be true. For example, almost everyone can agree that health care is too expensive, corporations have too much power, housing is unaffordable, Trump is too extreme, Biden was too old etc. yet neither party is willing to state the obvious. If we can get a major party to do this, or to at least support candidates that do, we can get out of this hole.
Edited first response since it was too reactionary on my part.
> hopeful vision of the future that rings true to a majority of people
77+ million Americans don't want a "hopeful vision of the future". They want to be angry. They're addicted to the anger. They want to hurt people. Present them any vision you want; they are not ever going to pay attention to it.
They want populism. That requires an enemy. It doesn't, however, require hurting anyone. If you're doing populism, you can either identify a set of scapegoats to slaughter or identify the actual impediments to solving the problems people experience in their lives. No party will identify such impediments, though. It would be very bad for business.
Most people don't want to be angry. But it's easy to be angry in times like this, and people just need to point to a target to justify the anger.
The answer is to ignore the theater and focus on improving lives anyway. The few truly hateful ones will be resolved quickly once people aren't worrying about rent, groceries, and making a living wage.
I think your right for some. I think there is also some aspect of identity. "I identify with <these set of ideals> and that's just what we do" kind of thing.
Everyone doesn’t agree that health care is too expensive. That’s the problem.
The other issue is that a significant portion of the country is not guided by logic. But fantasies like if we don’t save Israel it’s going to prevent the second coming of Christ and all natural disasters are caused by “legalizing gay marriage”.
> Everyone doesn’t agree that health care is too expensive.
Like a lot of the US, the gap between the haves and the have nots has grown. Many people on HN probably have great healthcare. Many seniors, often reliable voters, also have good healthcare through government programs that look a lot like single payer. This leaves poor people and those in the lower middle falling further behind.
It’s just the opposite problem. The Have nots - especially poor white America are some of the biggest opponents of “government run health care” and ironically enough, many of them are on Medicare.
Their fear is that their taxes will help “illegals” and “those lazy minorities”.
They are no more being “manipulated” than people were manipulated in the south during Jim Crew when people thought the world would come to an end if Black people drank from the same water fountain they did.
You’re assuming these people don’t have active animosity. Besides a large majority of the base are “evangelical Christian”. By definition religious people don’t appeal to logic.
How can you convince someone that Israel isn’t perfect (I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion either way) when they think that saving Israel is the first step in the second coming of Christ?
You are never going to convince these folks that Trump isn’t literally sent by God to save America?
What's wrong with the voting system? As one of the first and arguably greatest democracies (until perhaps recently?), the voting system is one thing that stands out as equal and fair when considering populations of different densities.
It’s literally the mechanics of the vote and how it encourages voting not for your favorite candidate, but the candidate most likely to win that isn’t the worst candidate for you.
The two party system makes negative campaigning far too effective. If there are more parties and one spends its resources making another one look bad the others would also benefit from it.
>> For example, almost everyone can agree that health care is too expensive, corporations have too much power, housing is unaffordable
I would argue that most people don't agree on this. Firstly housing;
For decades Americans were told that owning your own house was an investment. To keep home owners happy prices have to go up. Clearly the message was flawed, but no home owner wants to see that number go down. The arguments that rely on "this will reduce of home value" us a strong one thst gets lots of support.
If you ask folk they'll tell you Health Care is too expensive. But equally they'll push back on any approach to make it cheaper. Obamacare made it cheaper, the public voted dems out of office. Biden put price caps on pharma, and got voted out of office. In both cases Trump (with massive support) tried to, or did, wind it back.
Many states didn't take up expended Medicare. Now, we could argue that doesn't make health care cheaper (overall) it just moves it to a different payer. But apparently folk dont want that.
Corporations having power is completely because we give them power. If we truly believed in that excess we'd behave differently.
Truth is we mostly like our corporate overlords. We rail against Musk and Zuck, but we carry on using their platforms. Fox has power because they amplify people's fears and gives them a scapegoat.
Currently DEI is under the spotlight. It's a very convenient scapegoat to every unsuccessful white male. As long as we have someone to blame, we can avoid our own failings.
>If you ask folk they'll tell you Health Care is too expensive. But equally they'll push back on any approach to make it cheaper
As a game developer: people are great at telling you what's wrong in their experience. They are awful at giving solutions.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar thing here. There's another phenomenon where lowering speed limits is an unpopular decision. But once it's made almost all complaints disappear in a few months. I think this is one of the cases where we just need to do it and deal with any fallout as it comes.
>Corporations having power is completely because we give them power
Not necessarily. Especially not for Healthcare. That's an industry of people leaving the consumer almost completely in the dark and having businesses battle with businesses in how much money they can extract or save. And it's not the kind of thing you can just cancel and find a competitor for.
In other cases I feel many are frustrated. But most aren't frustrated enough to give up concinience nor security. So yes, we do give powerto Musk, to Zuckerberg, etc. Those are in our control but nothing has hit at a scale to really hurt them.
> If you ask folk they'll tell you Health Care is too expensive. But equally they'll push back on any approach to make it cheaper. Obamacare made it cheaper, the public voted dems out of office. Biden put price caps on pharma, and got voted out of office. In both cases Trump (with massive support) tried to, or did, wind it back.
Vague memory here: IIRC, alongside Obamacare came a requirement to have healthcare, and if you didn't get it you'd be penalized on your yearly taxes. I'm fairly sure I remember that being a big part of the issue with it, people didn't want to be forced into it.
Yes it was the mandate that the GOP lost their minds on. The “don’t tread on me” crowd. The problem is that an insurance like program can’t work if the only people paying are sick people.
I don’t disagree but do you have a hypothetical or real example of what that looks like? I am stumped from trying over the last 20 years. It is important to realize that there is a mythos to your parents. My Trump voting father also voted for Obama because he hated Bush for the wars. I originally thought he saw the Hope. Stuff like that keeps you seeking the non-existent Hope person. You’re negotiating with the subliminal-y terrorized.
Wait what? I’m asking about how you have a conversation with people who refuse to discuss their point of view. It’s me? I don’t know what you mean by that.
Are you saying I’m in denial about my perspectives? I never advocated that an election was stolen or that Biden or Trump did nothing during their terms like my parents have. I am the one in denial?
Can you point out this different perspective. A lot of commentary after the election was that “there’s a lesson to be learned here” and I hear that a lot from Trumpers. What is this lesson I need to learn about lying and hating? Why am I expected to take the lying side seriously? Won’t the answers be more lies?
See this what I don’t get, these opinions my father has are based on lies and bad data. So I’m just supposed to look the other way and shrug my shoulders?
You’re allowed to have opinions and there is actual reality and history. You don’t get to just throw out ideas because you think the idea is wrong. Back up the wrongness with data so I can see what you are talking about.
No I’m not here to debate specific political topics, I’m here to question the unreasonable silence. The conversations that end in silence are not hostile or angry. I don’t think that reaction is healthy or reasonable to reaching consensus.
You seem itching, however, please feel free to provide your own example of arguments where you think my father agrees and I am wrong if that is your perogative. This is the moving the goal post, I was referencing in my original comment.
I am not diving into it because this thread is not about immigration laws. Again you’re moving the goal posts. My silence is not unreasonable but a refusal to digress from the conversation. You have a larger point that I’m just ignorant but we need to debate immigration to prove that? If I am so obviously ignorant please reply with these possible qualities or realizations I may need to have.
Is it that I’m not afraid or panicked when numbers shift higher or lower in regards immigration, crime, etc? Often I find citing a number is used to instill shock and fear in the topic, even if the under lying systems are still effective regardless of the number.
That’s hysteria to imply that is a common every day occurrence. There are going to be awful people trafficking humans whether you lock down the border even more or not. You’re also baiting. You already show signs of disinterest in a discussion about it.
I also want to say “millions have his same opinions” doesn’t mean you speak for the entire country and those opinions are reasonable. It is not silent agreement. It doesn’t even mean you speak for your entire party because you’ve corralled together. A good portion of the voters flipped and a lot of people didn’t vote.
Opinions like illegal immigration are well polled.
It was a main platform of Donald Trump's.
Millions voted for him for that reason.
Those opinions on the border closure are reasonable, ranging from wanting to stop fentanyl deaths, ending human trafficking, reducing gang violence, property security, ending labor exploitation, reduce economic costs and more.
No they aren’t reasonable, because most of those things won’t change because you close the border. We know this because we have plenty of rigorous studies to show us that.
So trafficking comes from other places so no point in reducing it in places we can control?
We monitor ports of entry. It's easier if you don't have to monitor the entire border, you can focus more on ports of entry for other trafficking sources.
To be frank, yes. Arguing with most single individuals is pointless anyway. If we were able to focus these conversations on congress we'd be in much better shape.
>What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
You have time to stop them. It's just scientific fact that younger brains are more malleable and open to information. It won't always work, but there is some hope there.
>There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
Maybe we shouldn't have let a few hundred rich guys beat us in an argument about Healthcare. Which is a bipartisan issue but they divide us with politics.
It’s hard for a number of reasons. Many people are struggling, and people’s tendency to bike shed means they look for and grasp onto the explanation(s) they think they understand. Propaganda takes advantage of this fact. Whatever the problem, it’s Biden/immigrants/DEIs fault.
Are we to agree the parties and their PR mouth pieces do not speak for the people? A lot of blue did not want Biden the first time. The mouth piece said he was a bridge to 2024 when they’d have a better candidate ready.
Do not blame the voters for PR mouth piece unless you hear the lies are being repeated by the voters. If you don’t avoid this then it turns into a goal post moving contest.
FWIW, the algorithm people use in politics is usually to find someone who is on the same emotional wavelength as they are, then copy their actions. Trying to reason with people about political matters is generally futile because they don't take a particularly close interest in real politics and rationally don't make decisions based on arguments because they don't understand or remember any of the issues in detail. Although arguing is a lot of fun if you like arguing; and it can help sharpen the mind.
Your arguments are going to be wildly unpersuasive because your parents don't understand why they're voting the way they vote. They just know that their emotional state is represented at Fox & Fox suggests voting for Trump. The same dynamic is true for pretty much everyone except the rare souls who like to actually look up how & why politicians vote in practice (which most people don't have time to do).
Try figuring out what emotions your parents are feeling and why. Even if you don't change their minds you'll probably get to a better spot in the relationship than if you're trying to convince them Kamala was a strong candidate (which, given her record, tough sell - how does a strong candidate lose to Hitler, we might ask to annoy everyone).
I definitely have my radicalizations and biases but in my effort not to repeat the silence, I am definitely trying to aim away from what I view as mistakes. But heck I could totally be wrong and maybe I’m just a dumb asshole who wants healthcare.
rants about how immigrants are flooding the cities. When shown data and statistics and pointing out Trumps blatant lying
What? You are more misinformed than your father if you don't know that illegal aliens are flooding into the country. Trying to choose a neutral source for you.
Since January 2021, when Joe Biden came to office, there have been more than 10 million encounters - about 8 million came over the southwest land border with Mexico.
Under the Trump administration, there were 2.4 million encounters on this border.
When basementcat was CTO, software engineers closed 2.4 million Jira tickets. When WillPostForFood was CTO, 10 million Jira tickets were closed. Is this sufficient information to determine who was the more effective CTO?
Yet somehow has immigrant mayors for nearly all major cities, had a couple of immigrant PMs, and currently has a PoC immigrant-origin leader of the CONSERVATIVES? Please enlighten me for I'm utterly confused /s.
That data isn't sufficient for the claim you're making. Another interpretation could be that one President's CBP was approximately four times as effective.
The truth is harder to discern when each administration redefines encounters, but for example, the Trump administration deported fewer per annum than the Obama administration. I don't know what to make of that, myself, but I think that would come as a surprise to many voters.
So Biden was 3x more effective at catching illegal immigrants than Trump was? This isn't the argument you seem to think it is. Was this due to Trump directing CBP to not bother watching the areas "guarded" by his scrap metal project or something?
And what makes you think the Biden administration wasn't just doing a better job? Or Trump administration wasn't underreporting to make him look better. If you don't test, it isn't there!
While I can recognize the sentiment, I do err on the side of caution moving into the post-COVID world. Once you start assuming "the other side could be lying" then its going to be pretty difficult for you to ever accept whatever truth is. You begin to doubt anything and everything in favor of whatever makes you feel right.
Except Trump lies if it makes him look better as easy as he breathes. It's not that he "could be lying" -- he lies all the damn time. No concern for the truth, only for his image. Then he sends his propagandists out to push the narrative and make excuses for what he says. "They're eating the cats and dogs." -Trump, and "Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what's happening." -Trump; It's ridiculously Orwellian.
Believe me, I get it. BUT, and even I hate saying this, if both sides continue to resort to "the other side is lying" - aka people claiming 2020 was rigged and people claiming deportation/crime numbers are under-reported.
I'm not saying believe everything without due diligence. I'm saying everyone calling everyone else liars is not going to end peacefully for anyone.
I'm just saying, if you insist Trump is telling the truth, you should have evidence. Because there is rarely evidence to back the assertion he is telling the truth. I'm not calling everyone a liar. Just Trump and his cronies. Most people don't realize they are repeating lies for Trump because they believe the lies. I'm not going to sit back and give that guy the benefit of the doubt after he has lied over and over again. All benefit of the doubt goes to those he has deceived.
Obama had a super majority and could've done single payer, but he let the insurance companies write the ACA while letting Citibank choose his cabinet. Such is life when you give Democrats the power they need to make change.
They'll fight back against the power structures by ceding control to them, and taking massive bribes. Every time.
Even Bernie Sanders is a Big Pharma lackey, accepting millions.
> Obama had a super majority and could've done single payer, but he let the insurance companies write the ACA
Ah, a low-information voter, I see.
_Obama_ didn't write the ACA. It was written in Congress, and it passed only because Democrats had a once-in-a-lifetime filibuster-proof majority. Not a single Republican Senator voted for the ACA.
In particular, Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) blocked the public option. Obama tried to push for it behind the doors, but the ACA was as far as the Blue Dog Democrats were willing to be pushed.
And then, of course, Mitch McConnell happened and the Senate ground to a halt. ACA basically has not been amended since its passing.
The ACA was written by and for the benefit of insurance companies. It solidified their strangehold on the industry, and has resulted in rapidly skyrocketing prices.
Lobbyists, such as AHIP, were instrumental in structuring the law to benefit insurance companies -- including the removal of the public option.
Also, your argument was a strawman, as I never said he wrote it. If you re-read my post, you'll note I said "Obama [...] could've done single payer". As president, laws get enacted based on his signature and as the figurehead of the Democratic party he has significant leverage and sway over laws, so much so that he took credit for the ACA in its entirety. It's irrelevant whether he wrote it or not, nor did I make that argument.
Claiming that ACA is an insurance company handout because it hasn't been amended is a very interesting argument. The Democrats had a super majority. They could've done anything!
The Democrats are a party by and for lobbyist interests. Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
> The ACA was written by and for the benefit of insurance companies. It solidified their strangehold on the industry, and has resulted in rapidly skyrocketing prices.
That's incorrect. ACA was a mostly-consensus project, and insurance companies absolutely hated the 20% profit margin limit in the ACA.
At the end of the day _someone_ has to pay for the care. It has to be either the state (like in Medicare), or private insurance companies. Both approaches can work just fine. We need more regulation of the insurance companies, and we need to decouple them from employers.
> Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
Republicans could have stepped in and offered a public version. Just _one_ Senator would have been enough. Yet Republicans decided to stonewall the ACA completely.
There isn’t a universe where insurance companies didn’t write the ACA under Obama. The lobbied to hell Congress and Senate write the laws, Obama pushes through the best we get from them.
The ACA as a single payer totally supportive law would maybe have passed back in the early 1800s when communists headed West.
Obama did not have a supermajority. He didn’t even have 60 Democrat votes, hence having to compromise heavily on ACA, which passed in the 6 months (out of 8 years) that Obama had enough votes with a few independent Senators.
Stop 'both-sides-ing' it. Only one party has been pushing for minority rule (by their own party) authoritarianism for over a decade, and now having gained control is running roughshod over all checks & balances and corrupting all institutions to service their executive(s).
This is the big-standard authoritarian playbook. In functioning democracies the three branches of govt (executive, legislative judiciary), and the branches of society, industry, business, finance, press, academy, religion, social groups, sports, etc. are all independent. Under authoritarian regimes, they are corrupted & coerced (threat of prosecution or ability to pay & serve to avoid prosecution, or ability to raid the country's coffers) by illegitimate use of the power of govt to serve the executive.
That is where we are now, and will be until the people make it stop.
Have we ever not been in political purgatory? Some fundamental political issues such as federalism have been fought over since the founding of the republic. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I don't think it's crazy to say politics now is different and more disfunctional than the past. Congress can't pass anything substantive and needed to change their own rules to even appoint judges, the Supreme Court has overturned many precedents, and it seems like a lot of the actual policy is executive orders (and also what the executive branch chooses to enforce or not). And that ignores things like accusations of election fraud and a million other different points of nonsense that are shockingly mainstream.
The fact it's always been a mess doesn't mean it's not significantly more of a mess now than many times in the past (not that right now is the worst ever, it's hard to beat a civil war, but it's pretty bad).
> In the era in which government information was published in paper formats, preservation of that information relied on libraries. The information was distributed to FDLP libraries based on the needs of the communities that those libraries served.
[...]
> In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.
An important lesson here.
Which I guess was already known - see how the Library of Alexandria burned down, but random receipts on clay tablets / papyrus were preserved.
That's not the worst I saw this week. I saw a floating dialog box that cannot be closed, that was on the right hand side obscuring the form that it was hassling you to complete. You had to only scroll down a third of a page at a time in order to complete the form.
You…you do realize that your country was ruled by a Trump devotee for YEARS and barely escaped that, and while that was happening, he destroyed the economy of Brazil, yes?
The current disarray moves well beyond the precedented events like government shutdowns and rapidly screw things up across the board.