After all, now that the Democrats aren't in charge any longer, increasing the debt limit is no biggie - we'll just grow ourselves out of the hole! Once we enact those tax cuts, it'll be hard to justify even more debt spending on such silly things like "education" and "research". We've got to pay the interest on the money we borrowed to provide those tax cuts after all.
They claim to want to reduce the deficit, but are also committed to pretending that the best and least-painful ways to do that just don’t exist. So. Kinda hard to actually do it.
They only care about deficits when a democrat wants to pay for sick children’s medicine or something.
Public sector liabilities are private sector assets. GOP is the party of billionaires and billionaires want more money, so they demand lower taxes and greater deficits.
Two birds with one stone.
If that works, the incentive to be a representative is reduced and there won’t be people who make it into a profitable career against the interests of the people.
That switch was in the 1960s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Pre-1960s the racists were mixed between the two parties to a varying degree. In the 1960s the GOP decide to actually go after / court the racist voter.
Having said that, Americans seem to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to voting, not ruling out someone for being a terrible human being if their policy proposals make sense to the voter. I wish Americans would be more ideological and principled in that situation.
Interesting. Coming from a country where most people vote purely based on their ideologies, I wish they would vote more for policies. Grass, green, etc, I suppose.
This has not been true since Reagan. The US political right has been selling economic bullshit since the 1980s:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[21][22] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[23] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[23][24][25]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
It's the same snake oil as "shareholder value" being most important thing:
We all would, but given that Russia, Iran, China, and NK are aggressive states and all actively claim that the US is the enemy, and that the relative world order expired in 2022, we cannot have nice things. The peace dividend expired years ago
But back then it didn't look like Russia was the primary risk to the free countries of this planet.
It's up to the people supporting him and about who talks to him just before he issues actual orders. Recently, it has been people like Putin which is reflected on his output. Others wilö talk to him too.
The insane rhetoric of Biden and Zelensky and specifically entertaining the idea of Ukraine joining NATO is what led to this tragedy.
It’d be like Mexico joining the USSR. Do you think the USA would simply let that happen?
For fucks sake, who gives a shit about what Russia thinks? They suppress democracy and political opposition. They poison journalists outside of Russia. They jail and kill public interest figures. They kidnap and jail Americans on false pretexts.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577439/zelenskyy-has-cons...
>They poison journalists outside of Ukraine.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/6/us-intelligence-say...
>They jail and kill public interest figures. They kidnap and jail Americans on false pretexts.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/24744-the-tragic-end-...
Food for thought.
I'm sure Russia feels the same when considering the prospect of a neighbor joining an nuclear armed international alliance constructed specifically to oppose it's power and existence.
My goto analogy for this is the hypothetical of Mexico joining the USSR. Sure it sounds far fetched, but how do you think the USA would react to that type of situation?
NATO is a defense pact.
The mere fact of your defending Russian invasion of Ukraine is enough to completely discredit your opinion on the matter.
Oh lordy. I only ever hear this on the internet and I always find it bizarre. Who is telling people this? University professors? Where and in what subjects? Prime time news programs? Again, in what countries? I've been in the military for 20 years and I've never heard an NCO or officer utter these words. Because it's nonsense. Defense pacts don't conduct totally-offensive air campaigns against countries that none of their members are at war with.[1] There is no formal legal mechanism for NATO as an organization to act as an enforcement arm for UN Resolutions, by the way. If there was, NATO probably should have been bombing Israel since UN Resolution 497 in 1981.
Second, you have shown us three examples of Ukraine fending off Russian aggression.
I dont know why you are advancing Russian propaganda, but the fact that you are provides moe than enough justification to completely ignore your claims.
The purpose is to demonstrate that the complaints have no morally universal application. Despicable actions by Ukraine are given a carte blanche. I find it bizarre that people hold it up as some sort of beacon of liberal democracy.
>Second, you have shown us three examples of Ukraine fending off Russian aggression.
So the ends justify the means? Anyone who feels they are "fending off aggression" can kill civilians with carbombs and fatally abuse American citizens in their prisons? That's your position?
>I dont know why you are advancing Russian propaganda
Are you saying that NPR and the Helsinki Times are Russian propaganda outlets? That strikes me as completely irrational, but nevertheless a very common viewpoint among European warhawks. It's no surprise that Europe wasn't invited to the peace talks in Saudi Arabia.
> Ukraine only exists as a post Soviet country because we agreed with Russia that they (Ukraine) would never have nukes nor be a part of NATO.
Key documents:
* Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Helsinki_Final_Act
* Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1994): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Securi...
* Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation (1997): https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm
* Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (1997): https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
> In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.
Whether they were written down and signed is nowhere near as relevant as whether they were actually promised. The word of the counterparty is what makes and enforces a diplomatic deal, not some piece of paper.
All top Soviets have refuted this. When the German ZDF channel asked Gorbachev about it in 2014 when Russia used this as a pretext for invading Crimea, he directly called it a myth on camera. So did his minister of defense Yazov and minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze.
Gorbachev even explained that claims of such promise make no sense. Elected leaders of democracies cannot promise what their successors will or will not do. Voters set the direction. Trump is not bound by what Biden, Obama, Bush or Clinton allegedly promised someone in private decades ago. "Had we had an agreement, we would have written it down", he summed it up.
Shevardnadze went further and explained how this myth misrepresents the actual talks they held in 1990 regarding German reunification. The talks were about placement of foreign troops in East Germany before the Soviet forces had left East Germany. They agreed that only West German Bundeswehr would enter East Germany and take command alone to avoid getting multinational foreign NATO forces intermixed with Soviet forces. This was to prevent any potential misunderstandings that could spiral out of control during the handover. Germans upheld their part and everything went as they had agreed.
Shevardnadze said that during his tenure (1985-1991), the question of Eastern Europe joining NATO was not discussed even once with Western representatives, Warsaw Pact countries, or in the communist party circles in Moscow. Why would they discuss it if they didn't expect Warsaw Pact to dissolve? It came as a surprise. Nobody expected that the USSR itself would disintegrate, and parts of it would declare independence and join NATO.
Gorbachev, Yazov and Shevardnadze have passed away, but Shevardnadze's successor who was in charge of Russian foreign affairs from 1990 to 1996 is still around and active on social media. If you're not convinced, you can contact him directly and let him explain this myth personally: https://x.com/andreivkozyrev/ Putin's senior advisor from 2000 to 2005, who departed over disagreements with Putin's increasingly authoritarian style, is also active and recently published a video where he tears the myth apart (in Russian, sadly): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCNwGjko54
This myth is rather unique because three different generations of officials have refuted it: the Soviet representatives (late 1980s / early 1990s), people from Yeltsin's tenure (1990s), and people from early Putin's admin (early 2000s). Rarely do myths get so strongly refuted. No paper trail exist either. Western countries make a huge military commitment, but it doesn't get mentioned anywhere in internal Soviet meeting notes, private diaries, or other sources? That's hard to believe.
I find this myth a very good subject for a case study of a hoax. It is internally coherent and derived from an actual fact (the talks about German reunification), but doesn't connect to anything else. It floats around in isolation.
As rhetorical questions go, that one's not great.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang&pp=ygUOc2FsYW1pIHR...
as long a they believe you would nuke them for taking a single town they wont do it, so you won't have to.
Putin considered using new, smaller tactical nukes on Ukraine and that set off huge international opposition. The mere mention of nukes is extremely counter productive to whatever a state is trying to accomplish.
By some estimates Israel dropped 4 Hiroshimas worth of explosives on Gaza.
https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/the-israeli-destruction...
The US dropped far more destruction on Bagdad in 2003 than on Hiroshima.
Modern conventional bombing is far more effective and just as hideous.
It’s a simplisic view, I know.
Also, it assumes they can get to those locations in time from wherever they happen to be.
If the rumours are true, he's had no option but to support Russia since the 80s.
Worst case, it'd be a little reminiscent of the very first Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Anthem_(Black_Mir...
For someone who is (I would suggest) a malignant narcissist / borderline sociopath like Trump, "suffering personal shame for someone else's benefit" is not an option because it just wouldn't occur to them. Even if you sat down and patiently explained it, the concept just doesn't make sense to them, like, eg., the concept of a flat earth doesn't make sense to non-lunatics.
Can you find a source where the Chinese government or even a Chinese official has stated the United States as an "enemy"? I've heard "economic competitor" or "strategic rival" before, but never "enemy".
On the contrary, I have heard many U.S. politicians (as well as social media commenters like yourself) claim that China is an enemy. However, I do think the official U.S. government view towards China is "strategic rival" as well.
it might not longer be able to be the "undisputed global power" but, as someone who has lived abroad most of my life and seen American foreign policy from the other side, I don't know that's a bad thing
If they hadn't wasted the resources they'd just be better off with no downsides.
It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.
It's budget is around 600 million a year. So yeah, it probably recovers a little over double what it costs to operate.
That sounds okay, but bear in mind the recovered funds are... taxpayer dollars that we unfairly paid. And when you factor in the cost in taxes we pay for CFPB, that means... we're only getting a little more than half our money back. That's certainly better than not getting anything back, but I'd hesitate to call it "efficient".
If the benchmark is perfection, no one can meet that standard. On top of the 20B in recovered consumer relief, they’ve levied another 5B in fines. It’s also important to look at their progress [1] where they’ve taken > 350 enforcement actions since they started. They were on track to be quite successful at enforcement actions until Trump’s first term when he started trying to cripple them. Same with penalty relief btw. Most of the dollars returned were under Democratic presidents.
No agency within the government can do well when the administration is purposefully trying to cripple you in the first place.
> https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...
- the legislative (Congress): both chambers have a Republican majority, and all Trump critics in the Republican party have long since been eliminated or have retired. Democrats are currently debating whether they should use the upcoming funding bill to force the Republicans to make concessions via inducing a government shutdown (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/15/democrats-co...), but many fear this could backfire (e.g. Trump could say something along the lines of "these bad Democrats are forcing me to fire even more people because I can't pay them anymore").
- the judicial: some courts have ruled against some of the actions of DOGE (as well as other executive orders), but Trump is mostly ignoring them. It remains to be seen how the supreme court (with its 6-3 conservative majority) will decide when these cases (eventually) bubble up to them.
Courts are doing their thing, but they are slow. Republicans are already starting campaigns against judges and threatening impeachment against those that rule against them, and we're still all unsure at what point the Trump admin will defy courts and go full rogue. I think it's inevitable.
It's basically up to us now. If you have any Republican politicians representing you, blow them up on the phone, emails. Confront them in town halls and public appearances. They need to feel the backlash. We're seeing a little bit of this the past couple of days:
https://www.ajc.com/politics/mccormick-confronted-by-angry-c...
the federal workers union? they got told they don't have standing in a recent court case only the workers can bring a case despite the fact that the whole point of the union is to represent said workers.
the workers well being fired and told by the court their union can't help they are pretty much out of luck they don't have the money as they had paid it to the union that isn't being allowed to do its job.
the courts? maybe some but thanks to Mitch McConal leading the republicans to block filling many of the open judicial seats as possible they were left unfilled for much of the Obama administration allowing Trump to pack the federal judicial system with supporters during his first administration.
we are in the middle of an auto-coup
at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections and having a 1 vote majority then having no defectors in any consequential vote. but even then that will only allowing the to block legislation not pass any as the republicans will still control the senate.
The two Florida congressional districts holding a special election in April are Trump +34 and Trump +37 from the last election. So yeah, that’s not happening.
DOGE is an 18 month project. Confidently asserting the end result after a few weeks is bold.
I get your point, they are still active and there will be more to evaluate.
"Move fast and break things" was an early FB motto, that they abandoned in 2014. Pretty sure Musk has never said it.
> Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies.
Me: Has Elon Musk ever used the phrase "move fast and break things"?
ChatGPT: No, “Move fast and break things” is a phrase famously associated with Mark Zuckerberg, not Elon Musk. It was Facebook’s internal motto for many years, reflecting their approach to rapid innovation and iteration, even at the cost of breaking things along the way.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has used phrases like:
• “The best part is no part” (referring to simplifying engineering designs)
• “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
• “Move fast and fix things” (sometimes attributed to Tesla/SpaceX as a counter to Zuckerberg’s phrase)
Musk does value speed and iteration, but he tends to focus on engineering precision and iterative improvements, rather than outright breaking things recklessly.
DOGE cut all the easier stuff first -- such as firing employees on probationary status, shuttering USAID. To achieve any meaningful cuts they have to gut Social Security/Medicare, Medicaid or the Military. SS/Medicare is off limits. Cutting Medicaid would not only break Trump's promise to "not touch Medicaid", but would directly hit his prime voter base. And cutting the Military won't be allowed by Congress (who as I mentioned, wants to raise, not lower, the defense budget).
Having said that, of the three, Medicaid is the most likely to get cut and in fact the GOP is already proposing this, which is abominable.
In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
Is there evidence that this is what’s actually happening?
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/31/elon-musks-x-fidelity-valua...
"Fidelity has again marked down the value of its shares in X Holdings, which the mutual fund giant helped Elon Musk buy for $44 billion when the company was known as Twitter.
By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).
* This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to "go f*k yourself" during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
* In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%."
I personally think X is worth at least 10x that evaluation as it is now state-sponsored disinformation network which is worth much more than $44bn. it is best investment Elon has ever made
This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
Sure, but you would at least do the due diligence to confirm that the case for Mrs Shelby before you YOLO it and wish for the best with her life on the line.
There really isn't any upside for anyone in this whole thing except for Trump, Elon and their buddies. And they are breaking the law.
The farce of this whole thing is that none of the destructive cuts they've made will amount to a hill of beans compared to federal spending. They're jumping over hundred dollar bills to chase pennies.
(That's b/c none of this is actually about making government more efficient)
Un-reforming the civil service:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies.
They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity.
The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world.
To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].
It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.
Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.
Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...
We're software engineers. If anyone should understand the difference between domain complexity and added complexity, it should be us.
More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube
Anyway, the topic of this tread, DOGE, is reading the books and asking questions and then recommending areas where fraud/waste/abuse can be cut. They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit. This whole sub-tread feels like it’s on a different set of tracks headed a loosely similar direction. DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
>DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Let’s follow up in two months to see where this statement stands.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-aides-search-medicare-...
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin NiemöllerI mean, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? First thing they did was boast about shutting down entire departments at the weekend. Then they started mass layoffs of anyone on probation, with grudging acknowledgement they might have been a bit hasty in firing nuclear safety operatives without asking the question of whether they'd been promoted or recently hired because they were useful. And the subject of this entire thread is them publicly demonstrating lack of basic understanding of the books
Firing and then trying to rehire nuclear safety employees: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o.amp
Firing employees at the CDC and other health agencies: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/17/nx...
(But not the “disease detectives” as originally reported: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/cdc-disease-detectives-doge...)
Laying off IRS employees: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/irs-layoffs-trump-doge
A list of cuts and firings: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2025/02/a-co...
Additionally, many of the claims by Musk and others being made about the agencies being cut are false: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/19/here-are...
This is absolutely outrageous.
What "is happening" is that Republicans in the mid-2000s ensured that Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to negotiate drug prices by baking that into the law. Insurance companies can negotiate drug prices.
I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
could you say a few words on how you think dodge making it harder for anything to happen without going through them is going to make it cost less to spend on the useful things?
A single payer healthcare system is, by every measure, more efficient than private healthcare. There's 1 system. You don't need hundreds of billing analysts. You don't need administrators on top of administrators. You don't need constant tug of war.
Part of the reason Medicaid is so inefficient is because there's other things that are not Medicaid.
Also, to adjust market dynamics to shift things toward long-term good when short-term incentives won't necessarily produce the same result.
I would rather not spend taxpayers money on any of these and especially on military.
Source?
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-finds-the-...
https://www.fedweek.com/fedweek/share-of-veterans-in-federal...
While there is certainly a wide range of individual viewpoint in the military, compared to the general population I would not describe it as "overwhelmingly liberal".
.
There is evidence that DOGE has targeted Federal agencies perceived as "liberal":
https://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/ideological-purge...
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-finds-the-...
> about cutting services in order to fund two things
Gutting the administrative state. Then restaffing with loyalists.
This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit the rich).
With cuts to other parts of the federal budget, the defense share of the budget will be even larger than 50%.
I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).