Reply With QuoteSee? We DESTROYED the satanic lobbies! God is with us!Originally Posted by Starker
Yes, give the billionaires direct power over regulations and government agencies... what could go wrong? Why not get rid of the Department of Education while you're at it... oh, wait.
I guess this is the new era where billionaires just openly buy direct access to the government to shape it for their benefit. No need for all that pesky lobbying and trying to pretend otherwise.
See? We DESTROYED the satanic lobbies! God is with us!
Not a new government agency, but an outside group that's more like an advisory panel, so Musk won't have any regulatory authority. His business interests prevent him from being in government. Musk as NASA administrator would be interesting, but he owns SpaceX, so that doesn't work.
We've had government efficiency initiatives before. Reagan created the Grace Commission during his first term. It had limited effect because most of their major cost saving recommendations were ignored by Congress. During the Clinton administration, Al Gore ran the National Partnership for Reinventing Government which was likewise only marginally successful.
I kind of doubt that Musk is really going to sink his teeth into it given the other things competing for his time, but honestly this is probably Trump's best pick besides his own chief of staff. The dog shooter as Secretary of Homeland Security is depressing. During his last administration, he went through a half dozen acting secretaries and made DHS a shit show. I thought he'd have a strong pick this time given his immigration focus. DHS needs continuity of leadership, not a media circus. But the biggest head scratcher is Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. He's a Fox News TV presenter.
Predictably, Dogecoin trading volume just went up. Reality has nothing on satire, per usual.
The entire list is a who's who of who brown-nosed the hardest. Also, it is not a list of the picks for the positions, but rather a list of positions to be given out as rewards.
I get that. Musk obviously bought himself a seat at the table. Trump passed over Kristi Noem for VP and wanted to give her something for her support. But I'm still trying to figure out what Hegseth did to get the job. Yeah, he was a supporter, but so were a ton of other voices in the conservative media. I guess the point is that he's not a general or a bureaucrat, so he doesn't have relationships with other DoD leaders and a sense of loyalty to the current system. And maybe he's a results over ethics kind of guy, like Trump himself, and ready to go on a witch hunt for liberals in the military. But still, why Hegseth when he has other loyalists who already know how the department works? Makes me wonder if he buried a story or something.
I mean, from the last time we know that he changes his cabinet more often than he changes his underwear, so it's not like it's necessarily a hugely consequential decision for him. And more than anything he worries about how people look in front of the camera.
Money, fame, amount to nothing if you don't get appointed to some government position.
I wonder what music star is going to be named later for a position somewhere.
Musk He mentioned how there are 428 federal agencies which is "too many" thus he thinks 75% of them could be done away with since "nobody has heard of them"
I read an interesting analogy to Musk's claims of all the (so far unnamed) things he thinks he can just cut - video game reviews.
Many aspects of a video game are a required and essential component of the game, but they're never going to get mentioned in a review because they just ... work. If the main menus and save system are being mentioned in the review at all, it's probably because something is horribly, horribly broken thus the reviewer saw it as necessary to highlight the issue in the review. If it's not mentioned in the reviews, the feature probably works exactly as expected, it doesn't mean it's an unimportant feature that can be just yoinked out of the game without causing any problems.
So if there's some small government agency that does exactly one function and nobody has ever heard of them, then it's probably some vital yet unsexy function that has to be done, but nobody else wants to do it. This office does exactly one thing, they do it well, they have a set budget that's easy to disentangle what the money is being used for. Trying to merge these offices into a bigger department that now does 20 different at the same time is likely a fool's errand, and if it made sense, would probably have been done years ago.
Finally, Musk has said he's going to put all the waste up on the internet to be named and shamed. He really is very, very stupid. There's no other way around this. If there was that much low-hanging fruit, then it would already be well publicized. The fact that he can't actually name a single example of what he's talking about says all you need to know.
The point of cutting costs is that you DON'T highlight exactly what your cuts are going to cut. You just give the big figure "Department of X spends $500 billion a year" then demand a 5% cut to end "waste" and you just lie about what actually got cut. That's how the cost-cutters do things in real life.
Musk's idea of making an internet leaderboard explaining what exactly is being cut goes against the logic of cost-cutting neo-liberalism because it wouldn't allow him to hand-wave away what exactly is being destroyed. So the idea of them being extremely transparent about the effects of the cut, it's definitely going to blow up in Musk's face, or be quietly shelved in favor of making broad, opaque cuts, then ignoring the real-world results.
Last edited by Cipheron; 13th Nov 2024 at 17:45.
But...doesn't this kind of explain how we've gotten to 40 trillion in debt or whatever the amount is now? Why not try something different?The point of cutting costs is that you DON'T highlight exactly what your cuts are going to cut. You just give the big figure "Department of X spends $500 billion a year" then demand a 5% cut to end "waste" and you just lie about what actually got cut. That's how the cost-cutters do things in real life.
We've got all this debt because Republicans loooove unfunded tax cuts for the same reason Cipheron mentions - when you have to actually cut something real, that's going to be unpopular. Ultimately, it's pretty clear that the "huge amounts of government waste" is more fantasy than reality. Where it does exist, it's exactly the sort of corruption that Trump wallows in, e.g. overcharging the Secret Service to stay at his properties to protect him (poorly, apparently). And there's a lot of existing law to mitigate that sort of thing, which Trump and his administration will surely once again do their best to ignore, find loopholes around, or overturn.
Remember Trump's last term, where Trump's Energy Secretary was a guy who famously advocated abolishing the Depart of Energy and had no idea what it does?
And these chuckleheads and their supporters have the chutzpah to accuse Democrats of "Diversity Hires" while Republicans staff up with the least qualified candidates in history.
Not only are there major tax cuts to the rich that increase the wealth inequality every time a Republican gets into office, there have also been two massive wars that weren't billed directly to the US taxpayer, but actually got funded by debt, so as an end result, not only does the debt have to be paid off some day, the US tax payers spend a lot of money servicing the interest to that debt.
Most of the spending is in two places -- social services and the military. No Republican is going to cut anything going to the military (and a lot of Democrats are loath to do it as well). That leaves only a few areas -- medicare, social security, veteran's benefits, etc.
I'm not exactly cheering for these picks but "qualified" means very little when the "qualified" people have run this country into the ground over the last 40 years or so.Republicans staff up with the least qualified candidates in history
Putting the most incompetent and unqualified people in charge is only a view you can afford to take if you don't care a lick about the future of your country and want to burn it all down and live in the ashes and rubble.
And it's not like it's particularly new, as recent US history has shown where it leads -- long expensive wars with nothing to show for it, flooding the politics with dark money, massive wealth transfer to the rich via tax cuts, mismanagement of disasters etc.
Last edited by Starker; 14th Nov 2024 at 07:39.
Last time, Trump tried filling his cabinet with competent people who were experienced leaders. He purged them. I don't think he liked being told he couldn't do something, or being corrected, or always being the dumbest guy in the room. So this time, he's filling his cabinet with intellectual equals. I need to watch Idiocracy again. It feels like it's coming true. Rubio isn't such a bad pick though.
Last edited by heywood; 14th Nov 2024 at 10:06.
WHOOSH. My point was, all that stuff happened while the government was staffed with the usual "qualified," "serious" people.And it's not like it's particularly new, as recent US history has shown where it leads
We're already headed for a collapse and a whole lot of rubble. These are the "good old days" right now. Everything is going to get much, much worse in the next couple of decades and will keep on getting worse and worse, and worse. Decisions made over the last 50 years have guranteed it.Putting the most incompetent and unqualified people in charge is only a view you can afford to take if you don't care a lick about the future of your country and want to burn it all down and live in the ashes and rubble.
Care to explain what is causing you to have such an apocalyptic outlook? I don't agree that the country been run into the ground over the last 40 years. In every measure but debt this country and the people in it are doing far better than in 1984.
EDIT: I realize the gains have been unequal and created a new gilded age.
Last edited by heywood; 14th Nov 2024 at 14:40.
Save Intel!
Buy it or merge it, but do something!
Anybody that was around in the 70's knows that even with inflation we are doing better now than in the 70's and even the 80's. When's the last time anyone has waited in line for hours for gas (excluding areas where natural disasters have occurred)? The stock market is at an all time high. The rich are getting richer, The middle class is disappearing, and we are on the brink of global war. What more do people want?
As a percentage of the population, the size of the middle class has shrunk from ~60% to ~50% over 4-5 decades. Meanwhile the rich are pulling away. The richest aren't just amassing wealth, they're also amassing the political power their wealth can buy, just like the late 1800s. And we just voted to advance that.
I also think we are on the brink of global war. But in order to stop that from happening, I think we need to handle it like we handled the Cold War and not repeat the mistakes that led to WWII. But we just voted for the opposite.
Another headline issue these days is the cost of living. Inflation was high after COVID, it's back down to a historically normal range now, but prices increases from 2 years ago were still a huge issue during the campaign. Despite that, we voted for a guy whose policies (tax cuts and tariff hikes) will raise inflation!
I guess my question is, if you think the US is headed for collapse, what do you think it's going to look like and what policies would prevent it?
Last edited by heywood; 14th Nov 2024 at 17:21.
WHOOSH indeed and for the past 20+ years, I might add. Who exactly was it that started massive wars that added trillions in debt? Was it the serious, qualified people? No, it was George War Criminal Bush. Who was it that mismanaged a pandemic, flaunting all safety precautions and holding superspreader events even as he was insisting it would soon go away and there's no reason to worry about it? Hmm, as it turns out, it was the guy who thought injecting disinfectant might be a great way to cure a virus.
On the other hand, who saw to a massive reduction of uninsured US citizens by putting a band-aid on the gaping wound that is your healthcare system? Who was it that made massive investments into the crumbling US infrastructure? Oh, would you look at that, it was the serious, qualified people.
And that's just some of the big picture stuff. The government takes care of so many things that are invisible to the people. It provides services that the private sector can't or wont do, such as timely tornado warnings. It manages risks that keep ordinary people from harm, such as ensuring food and product safety. It provides assistance to people in need, such as nutrition for children in deep poverty. Incompetent people being in charge makes all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen. The incompetent will try to sabotage all the things that are unprofitable and/or unimportant in their eyes, but can have massive impacts on the quality of life of ordinary people.
Also, even if US government collapse is inevitable, what kind of landing you get still depends a whole lot on the people piloting the plane. People who have no interest in governing, but instead want to burn down the government and destroy its institutions can only make it worse.
Last edited by Starker; 14th Nov 2024 at 17:31.
I don't think we have the same situations around the world that we did pre-WWII. Sure there are problems out there but it's not like countries like Japan and Germany are trying to take over the world. Also, what led up to the US involvement in WWII is a very complex thing so it would be difficult to compare then to now.
Inflation may have slowed to what is considered normal but prices for many things are still high compared to earnings.
What sort of collapse are you referring to because there are so many to choose from?
The stock market is healthy and there are tools in place to slow any kind of crash. Raw materials like fuel and building materials are holding up well. If you are referring to educational collapse we have been seeing that coming on more and more in recent years. The rioting from the left could come back again even worse than the first time.
Society changes over time and we are all in a different one from before the ending of the Cold War, then 9/11, the 2008 housing boom bubble bursting, and then again from Covid. Pulling the bulk of our troops out of the Middle East also creates an unstable atmosphere in that region that has far-reaching effects.
Times, they are a changin'...
Russia is literally chain invading and annexing neighbor after neighbor as we speak.
Overall wages are up more than inflation, especially at the lowest income levels, and unemployment is way down. Inflation as a cause of things being unaffordable is overstated - although depending on where you live, housing would like a word. Harris had a plan for that (inadequate and mitigation, but there's only so much the Feds can and even should be doing in what is ultimately a regional NIMBY problem), Trump claims it'll magically go away because tariffs somehow.
Trump could do nothing and nothing could change economically and the Trump Pets in this thread will turn on a dime and be all like "BEST ECONOMY EVER BECAUSE TRUMP". As far as I'm concerned, that's the best case scenario, because if Trump does a fraction of what he's claiming he'll do, the economy will suffer, and y'all are still going to claim "BEST ECONOMY EVER" as it plummets. Hopefully he'll just find a handful of criminals to deport and slap a targeted tariff here and there and declare "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED". Hopefully.
Last edited by Pyrian; 14th Nov 2024 at 21:40.
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