Over 20 million lives are at risk after the PEPFAR program was suspended. Within a few weeks viral loads will return to pretreatment levels again. This is a human caused public health catastrophe.
What would the hypothesis even be? "If we stop providing aid, will people die?" That's outrageous and generously gives them the benefit of the doubt that they're being ignorant rather than greedy.
Because you want people to pay in US dollars, buy US goods and pharmaceuticals.
You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
Not quite so simple. The United States has many different internal interests that disagree on many things between them, but align in spreading American influence globally through programs like this and many, many others.
However, it also has other factions, especially since Trump and his often bizarre, even irrational takes on what's important, basically took over the Republican Party, making a number of Republicans now also shun programs that previously, they wouldn't have so much as blinked at. This is cowardly of these people, but it's also par for the course with ideological shifts in political leadership.
One could claim that this is the current state of the American aristocracy. For all of the wealth inequality, I see very few instances of "Zuckerberg Theater", "Gates Hospital", or even a "Brin college".
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment, but one of the largest hospitals in the Bay Area is quite literally called Zuckerberg Hospital: https://www.zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/
Gates has given many billions to public health initiatives as well
What, $40b for a dying social media company that no one will remember in 25 years vs literally anything useful and enduring? My post office is 130 years old!
I think that the Gates foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on malaria initiatives alone. When I lived in SF, Zuckerberg Hospital was pretty close and it was pretty gigantic. Mark Benioff has spent hundreds of millions on Childrens hospitals in Oakland and SF as well.
Because you want people to pay in US dollars, buy US goods and pharmaceuticals.
> Ah yes, the desperately poor are notorious for pulling the strings of global finance. Best to stay on their good side.
You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
> The American dream has nothing to do with giving our money away to foreigners, actually.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
> focus
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
> Our standing is derived from our success--from our military, financial and cultural dominance. Your opinions as to our generosity have no bearing whatsoever on our standing.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
Ignorance us bliss, until physical reality sets in.
Aka you probably should he worried about exceedingly damaging deranged behavior on the part of an individual who is bent upon expanding the powers of the already most powerful office in the land.
It will cause lasting damage.
Trump has already managed to unify all of latin America against him. Bullying will have consequences, and creating enemies out of friends is a very foolish path.
If cost savings were the true concern, there are many less harmful ways to effect them, so don't give me a story of necessity. The belligerence and cruelty is intended.
In contrast to 2016, I am seeing an incredibly focused, well-planned Trump machine executing hard on the goals the President set during his campaign and reiterated in his 2nd inaugural address.
The Latin America stuff is not bullying. Look at Colombia, Petro's government collapsed after his stunt because even his own government knew he was stupid and picked a bad fight.
Cost savings is just one of the concerns here. A lot of bad things happen downstream of these US Taxpayer funds, including NGOs who use those funds to enable mass illegal immigration.
Well planned? That they shut down so many critical government functions yesterday with their executive order took the WH by complete surprise. They had no idea what the order did or didn't do. The top headline yesterday about it was the mass confusion it sparked because the language they used in the order was sloppy, inarticulate, and vague. That's not focused or well-planned. This is a throw everything at the wall, fill the zone with shit Steve Bannon strategy.
The post-WWII world order has been slowly falling apart over the last decade or so. America is a bit late to wake up to this reality. We're now in a pre-WWIII world.
The post-WWII world order fell apart when the Berlin wall fell.
That order was defined by the tension between the east and the west during the cold war, and it can't be overstated what an existential threat communism was perceived as by the west during this period.
Half a century of American politics were based on the premise that if the US did not win against the Soviets, the entire world would live under a world wide oppressive communist regime. Freedom would be a historical footnote.
This meant that the US urgently needed to have its shit together at all points, not just function well, but also look good. The war against communism was fought in the hearts and minds of the world's population.
Since the Soviet union fell, and with nobody to keep the US honest anymore, it's arguably let itself go.
In part it's metaphorically stopped sucking in it's stomach, to hide its flaws and present itself as flawlessly glamorous. Some of the American decline is problems that have existed for a long time that have now been brought to the surface; but I think the lack of competition is also just as big of a factor.
New powers have emerged in the vacuum left behind the Soviet union, yes, but these are all knock-on effects, and I don't think they're perceived as the sort of existential threat as the communists were. Some are trying to paint them that way, but it's not nearly the same.
Because it's enlightened self-interest. I personally love paying taxes that go to these functions because they keep people in homes and off streets, they keep people from dying early.
You may like the stench of death and despair all around you - I sure don't want to live in that world.
If Congress voted for 50% taxation and could somehow prove to you that it was all going to care for those less fortunate than you, would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?
What quality of life are you aiming for the recipients? Do they each get a cot in a shelter? Their own room? Their own apartment or house? Do they get it with no strings attached or do they have to try to improve their own lot while the taxpayer helps them?
How long do we want to extend lives for? Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children. Should a 95 year old get hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend their lives for 6 months?
These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
> Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children.
That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.
> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.
It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.
Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.
The "grand debate" happened, Americans voted, and now the guy who won is delivering on his campaign promises. Whether you agree with Trump or not, this should not be a surprising outcome. He told us he was going to do this.
>Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending
This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
But he isn't. This isn't framed as a "we need to bring down costs and stop paying for things and that's just going to be hard" initiative. This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.
In the US spending is controlled by Congress. The Congress was voted on by the people. The idea that Trump throwing bombs into the federal budget is democracy but following Congress' passed budget isn't is ridiculous.
The idea you have is nice, but congress doesn't pass real budgets any more. That means that there is a lot more ability to make the money slosh around.
We are wildly far beyond strict constitutionalism. This has been a trap for conservative causes for a very long time. We are now playing the game the same way the left does: win and govern.
Laws have never encumbered humans. We're governed by social norms and those have been destroyed: massive immigration, sexual mutilation of children, and wanton spending of US taxpayer dollars.
>This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.
Did we watch the same campaign? Trump absolutely campaigned on ending DEI too. The electorate hates DEI programs. Cutting spending and DEI programs is what got him the popular vote.
Fox brainwashed viewers hate DEI.
1% (vote margin of win, roughly)
electing a person to an office does NOT equal a popular mandate for any particular policy and its silly to claim that the voters hate what you apparently hate.
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>His first act was eliminating institutionalized racial practices with employment, aka "DEI" initiatives.
The purpose of the narrative that DEI is "institutional racism" and the goal of its elimination is to normalize the belief that non white straight male and able-bodied people are inherently less qualified for any position, and to allow legal systemic discrimination against such people.
Which is racist, yes. And sexist, and homophobic and transphobic and ableist.
Right, but that's not what this order does. People were locked out of Medicaid payment portals today because of this, how is that shutting down DEI? It seems that they really had no idea what they were shutting down with this, order.
Maslow's hierarchy would tend to suggest that when you shut down the trough to progressive leaning aid recipients they and their reps will tend to negotiate away other mere desires. Not saying you should do that, but Trump is transactional and not above using blunt tactics.
>> Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending
>
> This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.
I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.
tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".
Defense spending is absolutely a priority of this administration. SecDef Hegseth's whole thing is about reorienting the Pentagon back to American defense as the priority. Remember that getting Hegseth confirmed was a major push for the brand new admin.
So spending won't go down but will hopefully be spent more effectively.
I would gladly pay 75% taxes if they went to the right thing.
I’d rather be at the mean income wise in a society with low inequality than in the top percentile of a society that has large inequality. I’ve been both.
I can agree that overspending is not a good thing, but I don’t think the solution is cutting out public programs altogether, I think we should focus on making those programs efficient, eg not making them a charity for multinational corporations that are in great part owned by the very states we consider our “enemies”. Maybe we shouldn’t be lining the pockets of the oil and gas industry, big pharma, etc and instead be lining the pockets of the American people with value through education, opportunity, etc.
What's the right thing? Are you sure that you and I agree on that? Do you and Elon Musk agree? The tax pool is taken from everyone. In practice, I believe you would find a 50% tax distasteful because it's pretty much guaranteed that it's not going to be spent exactly as you direct.
What used to happen before vast income tax regimes and welfare states arose was that people who were wealthy would donate huge amounts of money to charities that did what they thought were the right thing. Even the working class donated 10-20% of their income to charities that did the right thing. The way you guarantee that money is spent on the right thing is by having the power to spend it, which means lower taxes.
I'm referring to much of the Western world prior to 1950, and you see this behavior in the middle east today (obviously, they disagree with you about "the right thing"). This is usually enforced socially, by communities and churches.
The social safety net that governments provide today used to be a function of community charities and churches. Even modern healthcare has an analogue here.
These are questions with long standing answers arrived at iteratively over decades. Should those answers continue to be questioned and iterated upon? Absolutely. Is throwing the baby out with the bathwater all at once while crying "taxes bad!" likely to be an iteration that results in net improvement to American society? Probably not.
It's not like we rolled dice to get the spending we had. Decisions were made based on information available. There are detailed explanations available for all sorts of spending.
Refusing to seek that out isn't the same as it not existing.
That's not to say the decisions were perfect, far from it. But thinking we can arrive at better outcomes by just throwing it all away and ignoring all we've learned is the height of insecurity and arrogance, not a sign of strength.
Edit:
> that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending
The number of people that voted as they did that would switch their vote if only someone would explain where their taxes went in more detail is extremely small.
I'm sure this what your gut told you. Why don't you explain the plan to the rest of us, using facts. This is a technical site. Last time I checked, 25% of the current debt is caused by the current guy conducting the largest wealth transfer in history from the young to the old. But somehow that translates to "Fed government too big." Try selling that to people that don't read, anyone here can read the CBO reports.
Good point, here are the technical details of the plan:
1- Campaign on promise of mass deportations and massive cuts to Fed gov
2- Win the election
3- Begin presidency
4- Deliver campaign promises to cut spending & deport illegal immigrants <--*We are here*
Why ask about raising individual American taxes while turning a blind eye to Trump gunning at lower corp taxes even more than he already had? And we know it will happen because he gets it done, for America *cough oilarchs*
I would be okay with Trump raising the corporate tax rate, instead of saving some 296 of the largest US companies $240B in taxes between 2018-2021[0]. Though this time should be even more, right? He's going to take it to a whole new level of lowest tax rate for Corporates than "any nation on earth". Can't wait for him to lower the tax burden on Big Corp even more, Those C-suites, investors, have such a hard life scrapping by the way they do. No wonder they can't afford better wages for the workers. Let's keep the tax burden on the middle class where it belongs so we can Make America Great Again.
Americans are already paying far more in privatised taxation - tribute - to healthcare companies, landlords, fossil fuel companies, and loan sharks of various kinds - than they would pay with higher federal tax rates investing in R&D, infrastructure, education, clean energy, and public health.
There's nothing hypothetical about pointing out that the billionaire economy is massively distorted and extractive, and is caused huge public harm which will literally remain visible for geological timescales.
>I personally love paying taxes that go to these functions
An issue with this is that it isn't just current tax payers and tax revenues that are paying for this federal spending, but a ballooning debt due to a budget deficit. The brunt of this debt's interest burden is going to fall on the future tax payer.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not passing judgment on whether this pausing action was warranted. I'm only responding to the part of the user's comment implying that federal spending is being paid for by current taxes, when it is not necessarily. As a decent chunk is paid for by debt, some of the current federal spending will be the responsibility of future tax payers, including those who cannot yet vote, as these future tax payers will be the ones paying off the interest.
Create an emergency that wasn't there (cut all the fed aid and grants, muck up the government, etc)
Make a solution that will fix it (the soon to be tax bill, also the secretary positions and other stuff)
Stuff that solution with every policy candy you can (pro-life, tax cuts, guns for tots, funding catholic schools, etc. It's going to be a conservative jelly doughnut)
Due to the emergency, we must pass this bill (ram through the tax bill asap, no need to read the thing, blame the slackers, etc)
Declare victory, hope that helps reelection
EDIT: To be clear, I don't think that's what is going through the new admin's heads. At best, I think it's more of a 'pull things out of the engine until it stalls, then put things back in and hope it runs again' kinda thing. But more likely, it seems they really haven't a clue what they are doing. All those people in the first admin that put country in front of self are gone this time around, and it shows.
The government is accountable (in theory). The government is a different kind of entity with different behaviour to a single human, or even a corporation.
Your argument is a semantic one and was not made in good faith I think...
But if the government acted more selfishly , like a corporation (it's heading that way), then yes you are also competing with the government in certain areas. It partly depends if the billionaires in question and your semi-fictional idea of government are colluding directly. In which case you would be competing with a n-trillion dollars of capital for things like housing, some of which is controlled by billionaire beneficiaries. Essentially government monopolies are what you might be worried about, which do exist.
In reality the government also spends some of its money on infrastructure and other common-goods, which creates common wealth. The government (with central banks) also creates money so the idea of direct competition (which makes no sense to me outside of something like sovereignty over large amounts of land / mineral wealth / taxable subjects ) isn't so relevant.
Didn't that drive the 1950 & 1960s in the USA? Taxing the rich and giving to the working class to build bridges, schools, GI homes, ... Isn't that classified as the most stable economy in their history? The only decades where the stock market was stable?
How do you know your taxes are not going where they should? Do you wish for them not to be used to help the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable?
Was DARPA's tax payer investment in ARPNET worth it or DOD with GPS?
I'm not saying there is abuse in the system, any should be found and dealt with. Nor saying spending should stays the same, money needs to move improve the health, well-being and wealth of non-rich.
The biggest boom and gains in the US arguably happened after the Civil War and before WW1, during which federal tax burden was something like 2% and there was no income tax.
Not on a per-capita basis. Real GDP growth per-capita rose 2.2x* between 1866-1913. That's smaller than say, the period starting after WW2, 1946-1993 which as 2.5x.
Even post-WW1 1919-1966, it went up by roughly the same as post-civil war, 2.2x - and that period includes a depression and heavy income taxes.
Given how much easier it is to double a small economy than a large one, the fact post-WW2 period beat it is doubly impressive.
Also one should note there was actually an income tax from 1861-1872.
That is strong evidence post WW2 is a competing nomination. At 2.2 vs 2.5 it is probably down into the noise if they are estimates, especially ones from 1800s. This why I did not provide any quantitative comparison.
Down into the noise on a winner, I think I'll take the one with much lower taxes and far lower incarceration rate as my preferred template to break the tie.
There is no reason to believe that they would have achieved the same growth rate had they started with a larger economy.
As I stated, it is much easier to double growth when you're small and ultimately, growth rate doesn't matter as you can't spend growth rates. Nominal growth matters. The economy increasing by $5.5k per capita (2011 $) in the period after the civil war is a lot less impressive than increasing by $23k after WW2.
You think it was our social investments that brought us wealth in the 50s and 60s and not our massive military spending winning a world war which destroyed every other advanced economy?
Didn't that drive the 1950 & 1960s in the USA? Taxing the rich and giving to the working class to build bridges, schools, GI homes, ... Isn't that classified as the most stable economy in their history? The only decades where the stock market was stable?
Part of the hilarious hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party is that they long for the glory days of the 1950s...but are completely opposed to the tax policy required to pay for it or the economic and social policies to implement it.
The dissonance resolves itself when you realize the "glory" they are talking about is not how our society uplifted Americans economically in that era, but how racial and religious hegemony was maintained.
I think these particular people would be happy to forego all economic progress made in the last 70 years if it meant they could return to a time when being male, white, straight, and Christian was all it took to be at the top of the social order.
I've put these points up many times on online forums and it is a sure way to get ad hominemed to oblivion, and if that doesn't discredit you then you're banned or flagged. It's simply not allowed opinion.
I remember when everyone was calling for public daycare/preschool. I posted an address for anyone who felt it was their duty to pay for daycare of others to send the money for my child. I received nothing but curses. What they really meant was everyone else would pay and they would receive.
No, it’s that welfare programs reduce crime and improve the livelihoods of the entire population, and they have flow on benefits to the economy by increasing workforce participation and lifting education levels where more advanced products and services can remain on shore (subsequently also increasing government revenue).
Instead, the US does not invest in its people, and fears the immigrants that will do the jobs they aren’t willing to endure or study for. Compare to Asia, where universal education and healthcare are valued at the cultural level and it’s clear why they have sophisticated economies and why jobs have shifted there. The US only holds its position as long as it holds it’s hegemony on global capital, but it also holds record amounts of debt vs GDP, and disruptions like Deepseek are a reminder of where most of the talent in the world comes from. Capital and geopolitical dominance alone isn’t going to save the country. To make America great again, you have to invest in the people. (And if America isn’t the people, what exactly is it to you?)
> And if America isn’t the people, what exactly is it to you?
Not grandparent commenter, but I wanted to make the snark comment that maybe America is now just the blustering violence, at home and exported, and that even bullets are more protected than kids.
what's your transparency mechanism? theres plenty of such things that get sent around and get money, but theres very little transparency and accountability for how those funds are used
Isn't this just saying taxation should be optional? Should paying for the military, police or roads be optional? Or are you suggesting the amount you have to pay is fixed and then you get a choice to allocate it to different budget areas you favor.
Because their duly elected representatives, senators, and president agreed on the bills that included this money. Even if everyone said "We elected the new president to specifically stop all health funding," the Constitution doesn't let him do that alone. Congress has to do it. We can't even get to debating the merits of bills until people agree on a system for the government to write, debate, agree on, and carry them out.
American soft power enables a multitude of benefits to US taxpayers, but as a higher-order effect. Leaders who only apply first-order thinking will disrupt complex systems without understanding them.
Why are you not questioning the defense budget then? Aid like this is mutually beneficial. Countries get free medicine, US gets favorable trade deals, the money spent stays with US companies and flows down to US taxpayers in terms of wages and taxes the companies making the drugs pay back. But if you think that’s not beneficial, then why do we need trillions every year for defense?
a naive guess would be about negative 33 trillion dollars cost to US taxpayers, the current debt.
but whats the costs overall of changing the official US name of "gulf of mexico" to "golf of mexico"
or the cost to everyone of all this disruption?
whats the costs ive had to pay from Turmp bungling the covid response? how many bungled responses am i going to have to pay for because trump doesnt want the US to have a leading role in the WHO?
the cost of all these deportions? both immediate and future? why am i paying for this RTO mandate that Musk wants to run?
whats the cost of all these tariffs trump's about to put in? wheres my opt out?
Stop asking about the costs and think of the benefits, you as an American, being the center of the world your whole life has received from US influence and economy power?
Strange thing to be asking honestly.
America is home to over $750 billionaires who would be paying zero income tax. Personally I think that should be what changes.
I don't know why you're asking me to answer questions that are clearly personal to you, and have no objective answer.
All I can say is, probably not none.
And maybe a note on diminishing returns, in that we might want to reflect on the eradication of smallpox and the near total eradication of polio, and what it has meant to you and to your community to not really have to worry about those diseases.
If it is clearly personal and you do not have an objective answer then let this be a cause we can choose to donate to based on our personal assessment.
How much are you willing to pay for screening a very long list of diseases - both in administrative costs and traveler time wasted? Will you be quarantining citizens too, as some infections have an incubation period before they can be detected - who will pay for all of that? How many tourism dollars will be lost due to this additional friction?
Now that we have established you're willing to pay to prevent diseases spreading to the US, why do you think that screening at the border is superior to reducing the worldwide incidence, or eradicating them and never having to screen for them ever again?
There is no upper bound here. The eradication of smallpox is money saved and suffering prevented every day for as long as humans are around.
Border screening clearly has a high failure rate, our recent experiences with this should be fresh in your mind. Besides threatening public health domestically, outbreaks in foreign nations are nevertheless a major economic liability. If COVID had never left China, we would still have seen a huge worldwide disruption, for example.
And anyway, screw them, we got ours is a shit perspective. Empathy should be part of the conversation when talking about so much suffering and death.
This may surprise you, but US citizens travel. And US citizens get sick in other countries. Unless you want to argue that we should take away rights from US citizens and either prevent them from entering the country, unlawfully detain them or prevent them from leaving.
You sure know the concept of incubation time. Barring infected persons from entering if they have no symptoms is not possible.
And quarantining every single person who enters is also not possible.
I'm not going to pay for quarantine. I'd like my tax dollars to go elsewhere, per your recommendation. Maybe you can make a charitable donation instead?
With RFK you're going to see huge populations of unvaccinated, border control won't help in that scenario with how contagious it is, but immigrants will provide a scapegoat. RFK is probably going to push for removing MMR vaccine requirements for legal immigrants too. His organization got many killed in American Samoa from measles.
The US is the wealthiest country in the world, and the US got to that place by having these programs in place.
Who makes shoes/other goods, mines the earth, or other dangerous work? The people in those poor countries. These programs are often the stepping stone that western countries use to enter countries and "develop the economy" in these areas to the benefit of everyone. Developing the economy brings jobs then brings peace. Then the cost of goods stays down.
Fewer orphans. More experience treating diseases. More stable economies to exchange goods and services with.
Very likely these programs pay for themselves via your taxes via price of goods and services. Entirely ignoring the moral good
America won a world war because Europe, Russia did a lot of the early heavily lifting of and because the USA was already an economic and industrial power?
Assuming you’re an American, approximately 0.2% of your income goes to healthcare and similar assistance for people outside the US if you pay 20% tax rate.
It's turtles all the way down. 0.2% here, 0.2% there, do it 100 times and you save a lot of money. Gutting foreign freebies is an easy starting point, not the end.
How much would you pay to not get Ebola or another haemorrhagic disease, should it find it's way into your community? How much are you willing to pay to hedge against that risk by squelching outbreaks near the source?
Absolutely willing to pay for this. What % of the budget goes to that? Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?
> Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?
It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums.
Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.
Um yes? I am convinced you’re a child with how you think everyone can line pick their own items and only those and somehow that works or would provide enough for the causes lmao. It’s like the people who only wanted 1 or 2 channels and they then realized how much those actually cost without everyone subsidizing.
Yes it's called private services. For instance there are no public roads for miles where I live, so I rented backhoe and made them. There is no police, so I learned how to defend myself. There is no water, so we drilled a well. The whole of public services can be privatized into line items.
Cost is a fundamental part of the human experience. We need to ask that question on every single human action (singular or collective). There are no free lunches.
You being alive right now is very likely a cost that the collective we could have decided to do without. Clean water, the suppression of diseases that'd wipe out entire populaces... Without those, you should likely have died before you were 5. You know what, I think you're right, you should have died before your 5th birthday.
Of course they didn't know the exact policy mechanism, basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters). We voted for Trump because he promised massive disruption to the status quo.
> basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters).
The policy mechanisms that are coming into play today were the ones proposed in Project 2025. We had been talking about this for months before the election.
> Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good.
Considering the Covid lab-leak theory has been confirmed now, we can confidently say that paying for disease research in the world causes more disease.
That's just making things up without the numbers. You'd have to compare all research and all benefits from it to the single event of COVID. Even in the COVID context, Paxlovid effectively came from a British scientist.
A major reason why foreign aid happens is to stop problems growing which will affect you in the USA.
Unless you want to lock down the USA, stop all international travel and trade then you need to help other countries or else you will also suffer.
It's like society refuses to read history so we need to go back to 1920's every few decades to understand why we have the things we have. Which is sad.
With all the megabrains in here, how can some of you not see what's coming? China is making friends at the rate that the US is making enemies. Think about it for a second... Which new friends has the US made? I am talking solid, willing-to-give-you-the-middle-finger-and-go-with-the-other-guy friends (yeah, I know). Now contrast this to the friends China has made. China has secured the most powerful nation in each contested territory. South America, Africa, The Middle East and obviously, it is, itself the biggest power in Asia.
Now for effect, The US cannot even keep Europe aligned with them, and the fallout will be that much sharper in the next few years. You have bought cash money the sinking territories of Micronesia (great for UN votes, but not much else) What you have left is The English Speaking Conglomerate of USA, England (Not the UK - because I don't think you can count on Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And of these "Five Eyes", in a Sino-American conflict, two of them will be felled very quickly by their neighbour China (Australia and New Zealand) and Canada will have to fend off a massive assault by it's neighbour Russia (China's BFF) That leaves the original "greatest friendship". The enduring Anglo-American powerhouse.
Now I would think that England has not done itself any favours with Brexit. How is that going for them? So Europe is not a certain ally for them either. The EU is Europe, ask Turkey :-)
What you have left is an Anglo-American vs Sino-Russian battle for the future of humanity. The thing is the rest of humanity has already decided who they are betting on. Hint - It's not Anglo-America.
You Anglophones have managed to take control of 3 of the 6 continents. Is that not enough? And if it isn't then expect that there will be hell to pay, because at this point, the world will rather die on it's feet then endure more suffering under your boot.
Additionally, raising the import customs for the EU is just going to alienate them even more. Some of the EU countries are already not favorable of the US, while others currently are but might no longer be. The whole Greenland thing is also not helping.
As a Canadian, with the amount of unprovoked aggression coming from the USA and the turmoil being caused by even the threats of tariffs (yes, companies have to take into account that there might be tariffs and that causes chaos) let along if he actually does levy them, I would not count on Canada to be as close of an ally any longer. The writing is on the wall that we need to do everything we can to align away from the US. It's going to be hard and take time but even if Trump is gone 4 years from now we know how capricious and vindictive the American public can be.
Most Canadians would like to strengthen our bonds with the EU, but unfortunately I think it's going to mean getting pretty cozy with China as you said. No I don't think China is better than the US but the world is getting a wakeup call for how stupid it was to put all our eggs in one basket. From now on having any one partner dominate to the degree the US has is going to be seen as a huge weakness.
HN is just another social network, with a bias for programmers and tech enthusiasts. I enjoy it and believe it does a lot right to promote good discussion, but let’s not kid ourselves: there are no “megabrains” here, certainly not in any meaningful way. There are a ton of misguided people who think being passable at coding reveals some type of deeper understanding for how the world works, but that’s just hubris. HN is filled with flawed humans which, if anything, may have a bigger blind spot for their own limitations than most. Don’t idolise HN frequenters, we’re all just people here. People in a community who rightfully gets relentlessly made fun of in other corners or the internet precisely due to using terms like “megabrain” to describe its members.
i took it less as OP idolizing and more as a way to question the expertise of those in question. more often than not people who frequent this site are full of themselves due to being in these fields and living among those who are not, so referring to someone like that as intelligent while proving them wrong is necessary world view shattering statement
I believe this knowledge is more common in Europe, less in US. People have no idea what all those populist powermoves by Trump actually mean. I see the US as a fallen country.
To strengthen your statement, people in the US also seem to forget that China has done some major investments through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It has secured influence in 150 countries through massive infrastructure projects (roads, railways, ports, digital networks).
The US is excluding itself from the world. Quite literally.
> It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities
I'm all for reigning in government spending and our unprecedented deficit, but not sure throwing a stick of dynamite into the grant office is the best approach.
> It looks like the majority of voting Americans don't care about anything as long as they get to own the other side.
I think that's overstating the case. There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt, and many voters on both sides plug their noses and choose what they believe to be the lesser evil. They might or might not be empirically wrong in their beliefs, but don't mistake voting for enthusiasm.
And "the majority" of voting Americans is technically 49.8%. With 63.9% turnout, that's only 31.8% of eligible voters.
> There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt, and many voters on both sides plug their noses and choose what they believe to be the lesser evil.
Even if both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt to about the same extent there is still large variation among individual politicians in both parties.
P.J. O'Rourke, a well known conservative author and journalist, said it well in 2016 when he announced this:
> I have a little announcement to make ... I'm voting for Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary.
> I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place.
> She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.
In 2016, normal parameters would be to increase military and intelligence gathering spending and start a war somewhere in order to establish democracy and reduce oil prices. Things could have been much worse than a US that had conflicts inwards rather than outwards.
People don't want "normal parameters" though. The normal parameters may have worked well for P.J. O'Rourke, a rich and famous dude, but they haven't been working well for normal people. For better or worse, they want to shake things up.
People do want a kind of chaos agent. Just look at all of the love for Luigi Mangione. Is Mangione the right chaos agent? Rationally speaking, no. Is Trump? Rationally speaking, no. But the desire for fundamental change is palpable.
Those who pearl-clutch the "norms" will continue to lose, and continue to be perplexed about why they lose.
> "I never thought the leopard would eat MY face" sobs man who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
One of the all time great tweets. People might well want a chaos agent on their TV, because politics has become wrestling. They absolutely will not like it when the chaos comes back to them, which they have assumed it won't. Look at how many people were complaining about the price of eggs before the election; now watch how the US responds to avian flu with a nonfunctional federal government.
> now watch how the US responds to avian flu with a nonfunctional federal government.
What makes you think we had a "functional" federal government before the election?
You appear to be ignoring how both Democrats and Republicans have consistently, completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades. When the people are desperate, they make desperate choices. There's a reason that Biden was extremely unpopular at the end of his term. Don't ignore that.
> You appear to be ignoring how both Democrats and Republicans have consistently, completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades.
False equivalence or just false.
By many measures the Democratic Party is still an ordinary political party that tries to enact particular policies to address particular problems based on facts and a cost-benefit analysis. The ACA is one example. The IRA is another. There are many. While in power they diligently seek to pass legislation addressing priorities they ran for office on. You may disagree with these priorities, but the majorities who elected them do agree with them. And in fact, typically a majority of Americans, including many who vote against Democrats, also agree with these priorities.
The Republicans also run on platforms but are much less successful at converting their positions into legislation, largely because their coalition contains a fractious contingent that is motivated by attention more than policy goals, but also because in the event they get cold feet: they realize in the event that repealing the enormously popular policy they ran against would have enormous blowback for them. Repealing Roe is one example. The repeated attempts to repeal the ACA is another.
What you're reacting to, I think, is the failure to pass policy due to checks and balances -- you need both houses of the legislature, the executive, and, increasingly, agreement of the courts. But even if the policy passed, nearly 50% of the populace would think they had been failed by its passage.
I hope you and I don't have to learn how functional the government was before the Republicans broke it. The avian flu is a great test case. International trade is another. Here's hoping the mass layoffs Trump intended to set into motion and the collapse of state and local governments due to sudden budget shocks doesn't set off another Great Depression. That would be another interesting test case. What happens when ram the ship of state into a granite cliff?
> The ACA is one example. The IRA is another. There are many. While in power they diligently seek to pass legislation addressing priorities they ran for office on.
The IRA?
The ACA was more or less Romneycare, a Republican idea, but ironically passed with zero Republican votes. The ACA was a permanent government subsidy to the very health insurance companies that people hated and continue to hate, as evidenced by the recent celebration over the murder of a health insurance CEO. The ACA has not resulted in universal health care. It has not ended medical debt and bankruptcy. It has not ended the practice of claim denial. It has not controlled health insurance premium costs, which have surpassed the inflation rate despite bad inflation in recent years.
In any case, the question of the extent to which candidates keep their promises is not particularly interesting, because even their policy proposals are contolled by their campaign donors. Fundamental changes in the system are rarely on the table. The disparity of wealth in the US has continued to grow unabated over the past 50 years, through Democratic and Republican presidencies.
> they realize in the event that repealing the enormously popular policy they ran against would have enormous blowback for them. Repealing Roe is one example.
Um, they succeeded at that. Roe was overturned by Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents.
> The ACA was more or less Romneycare, a Republican idea, but ironically passed with zero Republican votes...
I agree with much of what you say, but the ACA is popular. Its popularity is growing. Passing the ACA was a matter of getting half a loaf rather than none. It was an attempt to do something. The rest is just goalpost moving. You set out an extreme position: "completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades". They passed the ACA. The ACA is popular, has brought the cost of healthcare down, brought health coverage to millions of people, etc., etc. I wouldn't have preferred this system, but it obviously is not a complete failure.
> In any case, the question of the extent to which candidates keep their promises is not particularly interesting, because even their policy proposals are controlled by their campaign donors. Fundamental changes in the system are rarely on the table. The disparity of wealth in the US has continued to grow unabated over the past 50 years, through Democratic and Republican presidencies.
Sure, and this sucks, but "the Democrats are as bad as a Republicans" is a recipe for cynicism and resignation, not revolution.
> Roe was overturned by Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents.
I pointed this out precisely because they did succeed at it. They succeeded at it and then struggled in the next two elections, and arguably the third as well. In every national election this year around the world the ruling party was thrown out. This is the first time since ... well, since the chart I got this fact from begins, that no election was one by an incumbent party:
> Passing the ACA was a matter of getting half a loaf rather than none. It was an attempt to do something.
This is the kind of Sophie's Choice I hate. Single-payer health care was proposed in the US in the 1970s but was killed by Jimmy Carter, inspiring Ted Kennedy to primary challenge him. We could have had it, and still could have it.
Polling doesn't tell the whole story, because single-payer was taken off the table for decades. It wasn't part of the public debate, because hardly any political leaders advocated for it, not even Democrats. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, almost single-handedly resuscitated single-payer. Regardless of the polling, single-payer is demonstrably superior, as shown by nearly every developed country in the world besides the United States. The reason we don't have it is massive corruption, the health care industry buying off opposition. Buying Democrats as well as Republicans.
> "the Democrats are as bad as a Republicans"
I didn't say that. I said they're both corrupt.
> They succeeded at it and then struggled in the next two elections, and arguably the third as well.
Third? What third? Dobbs was decided in 2022. To say that Republicans "struggled" seems like an overstatement. Perhaps they won fewer seats in Congress than they could have, but they still took control of the House in 2022, adding the Senate and Presidency in 2024. If only Democrats experienced such a "struggle".
> My point was that when they take the power they have won and attempt to enact their policy positions they start losing. This was an example of that.
Republicans gained full control of the federal government a mere two years after Dobbs. That's winning, not losing.
> Those people have a severe lack of imagination, because they fail to see how much worse they can make it for themselves.
It's interesting that in this entire thread following my original comment, not one comment has defended Democrats by describing how they do good things and significantly help the public. Talk about a severe lack of imagination.
That the choice is always phrased in terms of harm reduction just proves my point about the duopoly and corruption. Why are better things never possible?
> They send the same reps and senators back over and over and over.
> If they truly wanted a chaos agent, they should be turning over all the offices.
I'm primarily talking about the swing voters, who can swing elections only when they're close. Large groups of partisans also exist who vote Democrat or Republican no matter what, no matter the candidate, so it doesn't really matter to them whether the candidate is a chaos agent or not. And of course the House of Representatives is heavily gerrymandered precisely to avoid close elections.
Moreover, an individual member of Congress, 1 out of 100 in the Senate, 1 out of 535 in the House, doesn't have much power to change things. Their primary function is to support the President's agenda. That's why people focus more on the Presidential race, because the President makes a lot more of a difference than a member of Congress.
In any case, though, Congress does tend to change hands according to how the public feels about the President, especially the House, the entirety of which is up for election every 2 years.
> There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt
Are you KIDDING? You’re talking about overstating, following with a huge understatement.
Trump sells fucking bibles to schools. Trump launched a shitcoin right before his inauguration. Trump took 1 million dollars per CEO for his inauguration. The corruption scales are off the charts with Trump. You can’t talk about "the lesser of 2 evils" when one of them is a literal wannabe dictator / mafia boss / cult leader. Come on.
No it doesn’t. Popular vote just thinks these are good qualities for their president. One of the failures of democracy is letting people vote themselves into an autocracy, and forgetting that democracy must not become the tyranny of a majority.
You didn't actually dispute my claim. I notice that you offered no defense whatsoever of Democrats, or other Republicans for that matter.
I wasn't trying to argue about who exactly is the lesser of evils. As I said, the voters might be wrong about who that is. My point was merely that not everyone who voted for Trump, or voted for Harris (or Biden or Clinton), was enthusiastic about their choice. Not everyone was trying to "own the other side". In fact, many people vote primarily based on their beliefs about their personal economic prospects. As a famous 1992 campaign slogan said, it's "the economy, stupid".
Unfortunately, you appear to be missing the point. You're focusing on personal corruption, when the main issue is policy corruption. The fundamental corruption of our privately funded political system is that politicians mostly do what their wealthy campaign donors want them to do, and what their wealthy campaign donors want is mainly to rig the system in their favor. This is not "low stakes small ball". It affects everyone. In our system, the voters are mere tools for acquiring power; the power is rarely exercised in their favor. That's why people become disillusioned, and yes, it is "both sides".
If a politician happened to enrich themselves while simultaneously helping the public, then shrug, I can live with that. But the latter part, the most important part, isn't happening.
> Democrats doing insider trading and other low stakes small ball shit
Er, plus supporting genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and repression of peaceful protest of the same with our tax dollars. Not what I would call "low stakes small ball shit", and not something I will ever overlook or forget.
Democrats had four years to find a strong candidate to beat Trump, or to find a way to hold him accountable. It didn't seem to me like they even tried very hard to do that.
Even after all their 'mistakes', if that's what they were, they could still have handily won the election simply by promising to enforce an arms embargo. They had lots of polling showing this fact very clearly. Over 30% of 2020 Biden voters in battleground states said the lack of an arms embargo would probably affect their vote!
You - and every 2024 Dem voter - might ask yourselves why Democrats would rather hand the Presidency to Trump than stop supplying the bombs killing Palestinians.
I don’t know why so many people fall into this line of thinking. Supporting genocide is bad. If a person draws a line at supporting genocide, they likely won’t appreciate the difference between Democrats who support genocide while pretending to be sad about it or Republicans who support it with a smile. Genocide is happening regardless of which person they vote for so they decided not to vote or throw away the vote on a third party. It’s really not complicated.
If the Democratic Party leadership were capable of learning, they would ask themselves what they could have done differently to turn out the folks who stayed home. Instead they will blame the left, put their head in the sand and run the same losing strategy next election expecting different results. The fact that democrats are our best defense against authoritarianism means this country is pretty much toast.
"Kristin Welker, NBC’s moderator, noted to Ms Ocasio-Cortez during their interview that some activists on her party’s progressive left flank have started using the derisive moniker “Genocide Joe” for the US president." https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
You can Google the term and find articles referencing it, and a quick search on any social media platform will show usage as well. You can even find it used on HN. You can buy "Genocide Joe" merch on Amazon. People called him that to his face[0].
> “The Biden administration isn’t just giving a green light for ethnic cleansing — it’s bankrolling it,” said DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson. “Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
> A year ago, Joe Biden supported ethnic cleansing, and now Trump supports it.
How many residents of Gaza ended up in Egypt or Jordan? I rememeber that kerfuffle and basically Egypt and Jordan said absolutely not, and it didn't happen. Trump is a loudmouth, so it's unlikely that he'll follow through on this (fortunately) but personally I count the chances of him doing something like this much, much higher than I did for the other US party (both of whom's policy on Gaza/Palestine has been really bad).
Every time the republican party does something we do not like, it is both sides are the same. However, when democrats or even progressives not related to democrats do something wrong, it is "liberals are bad and awful".
There is no equivalent of Trump or JD Vance on the democratic side.
I think that many of them genuinely want the chaos and destruction. Unrelated to that, they see this as a rational money saving measure. If you look at intentional harm and destruction that saves nothing but only harms, Trump voters love it too.
This is what happens when an entire nation votes for a pure agent of chaos who has a highly questionable moral code and is easily proven a liar over and over again if he speak for more than 2 minutes. Now only check and balances in the US government can hold back the worst of it. I would have loved to have a new government auditing/ROI office open up and start review departments, instead they started using a sledgehammer to fix the leaks in the plumbing.
I recall the steve jobs method of figuring out if people are good employees... He tells their coworkers "I heard so-and-so is shit", and if the person is loudly defended, he might be ok. If not, he might not be that good.
Maybe this is a way of doing the same thing. If people defend funding something strongly, it might deserve it, and if not...
Is the title true, though? I thought OMB paused funding to NGOs, foreign governments and large discretionary contracts, but the pause explicitly excluded all aids and benefit programs.
And how many NGOs have become too powerful and too meaningless and even detrimental to the US? I simply don't see aligned incentives. For instance, the more homeless are on the street, the more funding an NGO gets. Then how will the NGO have any incentive at all to truly help the homeless? Similarly, the more illegal passing at the border, the more funding NGOs will get. Then, why would they help close the border at all?
> I simply don't see aligned incentives. For instance, the more homeless are on the street, the more funding an NGO gets. Then how will the NGO have any incentive at all to truly help the homeless?
That assumes the NGOs, like for-profit corporations*, are motivated solely by funding. Have you ever worked for an NGO seeking to help the homeless? Do you know anyone who does? I assure you they are differently motivated from a big-tech CEO. They typically work to achieve a sense of purpose, not power boats.
* And of course for-profit corporations almost always have more motivations than just profit. Sometimes they even describe them to shareholders. Cynics label official motivations for a corporation other than profit as "virtue signaling", as though the corporation has both true and feigned feelings, but it has neither. And if the feelings of the officers, employees, and owners of the corporation align with its official "feelings" is immaterial, only whether progress towards the goals they motivate is measurable.
Also, why is this not on the front page? This has over 110 points while a post about OpenVMS on the front page has 34 points.
While I agree that OpenVMS is cool, I think the fate of over 20 million lives (due to the suspension of PEPFAR) deserves more weight than an obscure 50 year old operating system.
> why is this not on the front page? This has over 110 points while a post about OpenVMS on the front page has 34 points.
This question, phrased in the general case, is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. (Look for "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?")
Simple: many (perhaps even most?) visitors take the name "hacker news" literally and are not interested in discussing socioeconomic news. At least not on this forum.
Whether we like it or not, US federal budget decisions impact NASA, Fermilab, academic AI researchers and the health of over 20 million people suffering from AIDS (among many many others).
> Overall as a non-american HN to me is a technical forum.
As a non-American, this is massive on its own, and could be absolutely world-changing depending on how it evolves. The US are where they are thanks to a great brain drain, powered by both industry and government money. Messing with this will have consequences, particularly coupled with visa restrictions. Or not, if Trump flip-flops once more. In any case, this is very important news for any technology- or science-adjacent field, including health and medicine.
The general gist of it is "well, everyone else likes this so you should be okay with it too". Usually the person arguing in that direction is one of "everyone else".
I've never found it super convincing.
Personally, I don't actually think that the technical discourse here is super great- occasionally I see things from highly knowledgeable folks, but a lot of the time it's just hacks out a hackin.
HN is a forum run by venture capitalists and folks who are tied to that either aspirationally or professionally.
I get a lot of information about how that group of folks thinks from this site, and I find it helpful in understanding their affect on the world I live in.
You're welcome to have whatever preferences you have for the site, but it's not how I have been interacting with it for the last decade.
To the point about flagging, I am always surprised how willing folks are to believe that every other social media algo is gamed, but just assumed that there is no manipulation going on with their own media consumption.
I mean, go write a bot to flag stuff using ghost accounts, I don't care- I get my "HN front page" from a set of search terms, which will show a lot of dead and flagged content. It's pretty trivial to see what happens if you're looking to know that kind of thing, and other folks have written at least two tracking systems I know of for killed HN content.
I can totally buy that the reality of empire and its internal contradictions are uncomfortable enough for the tech bros that seem to make up the most of the site. The idea that they reflexively repress anything "political" sounds reasonable.
That doesn't seem like a great premise, but I buy it better than the idea that I should be beholden to that same ideal in my use of the site.
I flagged stuff like this because there's no real curious conversation to be had, it's not interesting in a technical way, it's unrelated to hacking and startups, and basically just incites lazy dog-piling that, while I don't disagree with it, is not interesting to read for me. I will go to reddit if I want to read that sort of commenting.
We can only guess why users flag things, but in those cases I'd guess it was because they were follow-up indignation pieces with lots of inflammatory energy but little intellectually interesting information. It could also have to do with the titles being flamebait (which of course is related).
You guys do get that HN is not a site for arguing angrily about the hottest political controversies and/or divisive personalities? If so, it shouldn't be a puzzle why community members flagged those posts: that kind of thing is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> HN and YC as a whole are all in on this administration[1]
You made it sound like you were linking to evidence, but it’s just another post by yourself making the same unsubstantiated claim. That’s worth nothing. If anything, dang has shown over time they avoid silencing these discussions, it’s obvious users are the flaggers.
As someone that is in that cohort I think you are alluding to, I see just as much "anti-right" or "anti" or "anti Trump" type actions when it comes to flagging and downvotes. It's not at all obvious to me that one side owns the narrative here and only one set of ideas / directions are promoted or censored.
I have to be very careful in my support for the "wrong" side in touchy topics lest I be down-voted and flooded with low-effort jabs by frankly very smart and knowledgeable people. These people can bash me with their "intelligence" despite them many times being wrong or not understanding my point or seeing that we have simply have different principles manifesting in different views. This transcends tech, politics and any other realm we regularly discuss here.
> Given the spending that is now on hold was apportioned by Congress, it is likely this will face legal challenges about the scope of presidential power.
This assumes that they are the only party with standing to sue, which is not likely the case. (Previous rulings on the lack of the authority of the executive to withhold appropriated funds have come in suits by intended recipients.) Both private parties (nonprofits and businesses) [1] and a group of 23 states [2] have already filed suit over the order.
Supreme court is in Trump's pocket. You can bet it will be appealed, all the way up, with some new legal theory invented to say that Trump can do whatever he wants.
It would be, but they are a rubber stamp for Trump now. Now only judges can stop the madness. Hopefully SCOTUS will actually do their job and make sure that Trump sticks to the law, which does not allow him to just defund programs set up by Congressional vote. Otherwise we wouldn't need a Congress. He's pushing at the walls to see how much he can tear down.
Anyone who's supposed to receive that money has standing and a federal judge can quickly rule that the status quo must remain while the case proceeds. The Trump administration can appeal that ruling but I think it would make it's way through the available steps relatively quickly.
The next steps are probably to cut funding anyway. I have a gut feeling that this is part of a larger power play that demonstrates that (this specific) President has no limitations on his power.
We hired someone to manage our obligations who was famous for signing contracts and then stiffing his contractors. It makes perfect sense that, once freed from underlings who were loyal to anyone or anything but him, he would continue this practice.
All the entities that were receiving those grants and aid have already obligated it. They have rented office space, hired employees, purchased equipment. And all of the entities they have contracted with using this money have done the same. If they have to dissolve, they won't be there to start up again if the courts manage to compel the administration to execute the laws as written. (And Trump is also famous for protracted lawsuits which he wins by default when some deadline has passed.) Closed storefronts don't tend to open with the same business.
I don't mind when rich fools learn hard lessons. Their self-esteem drops but their quality of life doesn't. It sucks when poor people are the blackboard on which this hard lesson is written.
> Plus it’s not like there are Democrats doing anything to fight it.
Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do, given recent actions have all been Executive Orders, which is the prerogative of the Executive branch.
Unless things start happening in the legislature, where perhaps things like filibustering are an option, what options do the Democrats have against purely Executive actions?
> Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do,
Biden had a very long time to do a lot of things. You can get a lot done with a bit of creativity and a willingness to cause a few constitutional crisis'.
What things do you think the Democrats should do but aren't doing? Your "anything" suggests you think there are many such things. A list would be helpful.
Exactly. There is no need for fascism because there is no left opposing him. That is what people do not understand. We have corporate government that will be dictating your lives and you are focused on Trump and not the Oligarchs that control everything.
What would a hypothetical "left" do differently than the current Democrats? Assuming this "left" is similarly handicapped like the Democrats are, having just lost control of the House, Senate and White House?
I should have said I'm hopeful. I'm always hopeful people can behave like adults and see the long term consequences of their action (and inaction) over others as well as themselves.
If you don't have power you can't do shit. Just ask Harris/Biden/Clinton.
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” ― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
At this point, at least in the US, ideals are for suckers and losers. You can have ideals once you're in, but being effective is more important before that.
Standing up to Trump is dangerous to one's political and mortal future. He's removed the security details of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, two Republicans who served him during his first term. Trump is a spiteful man with no care about the lives or safety of others, and that's partly what got him elected. The remaining Republicans know this, and will toe the line. Speaking out against Trump, even if one retires, is dangerous.
So the Executive and majorities in both houses of the Legislative branch are all aligned? How does that make them "accomplices" and not just a valid government doing governance?
"Accomplice" means a confederate in a crime. If the executive violates a law and the legislature, among whose duties is to catch and prosecute such acts, allows him to do so, they are accomplices. If they work together to achieve ends through the normal, legal process, they are not accomplices.
What is a crime? At the end of the day, laws and legal processes are just social norms. To quote The Onion: "Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole"[0]
Since it isn’t clear what exactly will be stopped here.
Some of these could hurt the districts with republican representation the most. Like food stamps, unemployment, and similar. So maybe something this stupid will wake people up?
A lot of other policies could be twisted so trump isn’t directly blamed. This is… pretty cut and dry if you suddenly stop getting money you rely on.
So presumably he wants this to go to the Supreme Court. If the court rule against him, then Congress's authority is preserved, so I doubt they will impeach him. If the court rules in his favor, then I doubt they'd impeach him over something the court agrees with him on.
Absent context, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made. Remember, though, that we're comparing a JD Vance who was recently impressed with the importance of following the rules with a Trump recently impressed by the opposite.
Donald Trump could do truly terrible things that I will not list because I would be accused of hysteria and the GOP would not impeach, let along convict him. The only sin I can imagine they would not forgive is to raise taxes on the wealthy. It's going to be a long, strange four years, and perhaps more.
do you think Trump is playing this by ear? this term is unique because he has an experienced team that has already served one term, they are aware of what comes after leaving office, they had 4 years to plan ahead, and they can blame the previous administration for a lot of stuff.
if Trump was going to serve two terms anyway, this is the worst-case scenario for democrats.
Even if he was impeached (he won't be), then its DJ Vance, who will just continue the playbook. Looking at the next 6 people in the presidential line of succession, everyone on of them would be fully onboard with keeping this up.
Not giving money to researchers is hardly a criminal matter. Of course some congressmen could propose impeachment anyway, pretty sure some already have, but they don't have the numbers to kick him out of office so it's just posturing for their constituents.
It's not immediately clear to me how we should read the Constitution on that question, but the Impoundment Control Act seems to explicitly include "delay" alongside "withholding" in things that it might be forbidding.
His disregard with what Congress already signed into law is troubling, but he might find sympathy from members who were not in Congress before, as well as members who didn't sign the legislation he's overriding.
Awesome conversation. Saner heads prevailed in this one. This is going to backfire very badly on the American people if it becomes the norm. Happy that supporters of this madness got their asses kicked out of here today.
It is not what he campaigned on, nor what the majority of voters wanted. Not once did I hear “we are going to shut down clinical trials so your loved ones die.” I did hear a lot about grocery prices, which certainly aren’t going down because of this.
Then you weren't paying attention. There were plenty of clues that this is precisely what was going to happen. There were many of us sounding the alarms and too many people scoffed. If you want to see what comes next, take an in depth look at project 2025. It's all there. It's the plan. It was always the plan.
I'm astonished that anyone believed things would unfold any differently than they have. We were told exactly what will happen by everyone in power. And the kissing of the King's ring before inauguration should have been a clue.
Shit is going to get awful. It's already to the point that, when I'm on reddit, I can't distinguish between r/news and r/collapse headlines.
Folks think I'm saying "I didn't expect this" when what I'm saying is "Donald Trump didn't campaign on it." That's relevant and people need to be reminded of it every single day.
But I mean, it was part of the campaign. You can't be forgiven for not being able to read between the lines. The campaign went like this:
- Kamala: He's going to do Project 2025.
- Trump: No I'm not ;)
- You: Well he said he wasn't going to do it, he lied!
You missed the wink and the fingers crossed behind his back, but the rest of us picked up on it. Sorry you weren't paying attention to that, but Kamala pointed it out to you, so you can't say you weren't warned.
Trump did in fact explicitly say he “hadn’t heard of Project 2025” repeatedly during his campaign. Bullshit obviously, and his supporters were warned many times of this, but I still think it’s fair to say this specific set of actions isn’t what he explicitly campaigned on.
Being a dictator is absolutely what he campaigned on. He literally said it, and signalled it in every way possible. Those that didn't see that coming either weren't paying attention or wanted it to happen.
AFAIK there was information about Project 2025, so this was not secret was it?
And lot of people still support this as you can see it even here (as this thread is already flagged).
There are enough people who will reactively flag anything that touches the lines between politics and everything else, usually under a misunderstanding of the guidelines, that it's hard to infer intent behind a flag kill.
Project 2025 was getting grassroots attention & was becoming rabidly unpopular.
Trump denied any affiliation, claimed he didn't know these people. (Even though many are folks he's already worked with.) The media accepted that unquestionablably & regurgitated Trump's obvious lies.
Then frankly you weren’t paying attention. This was all laid out in Project 2025 and there were plentiful ties between it and Trump despite his deflection.
Communism? This looks like the end stage of capitalism affirms horseshoe theory. It was the capitalists who were sitting front row at the inauguration, not communists.
This is the most disheartening part of it all. I have immense respect for the ideals that formed the United States, but I'm increasingly in doubt about the actual implementation.
Anyone who wants freedom and to control the excesses and abuses of the people in power would support the ideals of the Constitution. Just because white people created it does not mean that non-white people may not want to also be free and protected from abuses of the powerful.
Considering how non-white people keep streaming into white countries that have benefited from these white created Constitutional limitations on power, it seems they too desire freedom and liberty even if they are being used and manipulated by the powerful in the white world to essentially break those shackles on the powerful by a kind of civilization fracking, pumping so many people into a system until it collapses and those shackles on the powerful can be removed and the powerful can once again act just like the powerful act in all the non-white countries that have not implemented the white created constitutional limitations on power.
People may not realize they are a tool of the rich and powerful to destroy the very freedoms you currently enjoy, but this has never been a white vs non-white issue even though the jealousy has been used to further the aims of the rich and powerful. It has always been a rich and powerful vs the middle class and poor, with the rich and powerful manipulating the middle and lower classes to act against their own interests and in the interests of the rich and powerful. The saddest thing is that people on the “left” and often the poor, are just useful idiots for the rich and powerful, no different than some gang leader uses and abuses people to commit more abuse and crimes to get richer and more powerful.
I’m not sure what people imagine will happen when white people, who essentially created everything we all enjoy, including freedoms from tyrannical violence and oppression, have been eradicated, but there is no indication that it will end well.
And no, I’m not white since that seems very important to you.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to "the ideals that formed the United States". They're not nearly as admirable as we like to believe.
Some of the worst atrocities are no longer in practice -- though it took the bloodiest war in US history to achieve some of them. But that's not the same as fixing the ideals, and many of those problems are still woven through the fabric of the law and the society.
Imagine what those "ideals" might have been if women, blacks, native Americans, poor people, and others had been in the room. Giving them the right to vote after the basic framework is laid down does not accomplish that.
> I’m not sure what people imagine will happen when white people, who essentially created everything we all enjoy,
Just... No. Not only non-whites created a lot of things we all enjoy (money, algebra), that are also foundational for our civilization. Also, white people also invented a lot of things we all should vehemently reject (such as fascism).
> including freedoms from tyrannical violence and oppression, have been eradicated, but there is no indication that it will end well.
Very hard NO on this one as well. Nobody is eradicating white people and nobody is even considering it.
He wouldn't be refusing to execute laws passed by Congress, he would argue he is exercising his own power that Congress is trying to restrict unconstitutionally. Incidentally he believes his own power is limitless, and it appears SCOTUS does as well.
> Given the spending that is now on hold was apportioned by Congress, it is likely this will face legal challenges about the scope of presidential power.
He's immune from prosecution. He can still lose court cases that say that he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do X, though, for many values of X.
At that point he can order his subordinates to ignore the ruling. If his subordinates claim that the court ruling overrides his orders then he can fire them. Court orders are purely advisory after the Trump v. United States decision.
Well, if he goes that route, there are still three things that could stop him:
1. Federal employees could refuse, even at the price of being fired, in enough numbers that there isn't a functioning government if he fires them all.
2. Congress could impeach for ignoring the court ruling.
3. The people could decide that, if he is going to ignore the constitution, then they're going to ignore him (and the whole federal government), since it's only the constitution that says that they need to listen to the president. If the president tries to enforce it by force, then it becomes a civil war; if not, then the country just collapses into the states.
(Keep in mind that the military's oath is to the constitution, not to the president. If the president is giving them orders contrary to the constitution - and contrary to a court order stating that the orders are against the constitution - it is far from clear that the military will obey them.)
But if none of those happens, then sure, the president can order whatever he wants.
> in enough numbers that there isn't a functioning government if he fires them all.
Sounds like it would be small enough to drown in the bathtub at that point. Mission accomplished.
> Congress could impeach for ignoring the court ruling.
Only if Democrats have a 60 vote majority in the Senate. Not happening. In the last impeachment, Trump argued he was allowed to extort a bribe from a foreign ally by holding up congressionally appropriated funds to benefit his reelection campaign, and as long as he did so with the benefit of the USA in mind, it cannot be grounds for removal via impeachment. The Senate agreed with him and acquitted him of all charges. Why in the world do you think that would go any differently a second time? And who is going to bring those articles? Republicans?
> The people could decide that, if he is going to ignore the constitution, then they're going to ignore him (and the whole federal government), since it's only the constitution that says that they need to listen to the president. If the president tries to enforce it by force, then it becomes a civil war
And herein lies the problem. This appears to be the only path forward if Trump keeps going in this direction and Republicans don't relent. Note he has already argued he has the right to use the military against US citizens.
I do think that congress would impeach if he said "I declare martial law and cancel elections". He'll have to get there piecemeal without creating a single moment for opposition to coalesce.
It'll be much more subtle than that: simply deploy ICE personnel at polling stations who will arrest any non-white person who cannot prove their lawful residence on the spot. They'll be let out, but only after the election is passed.
Why though? Why wouldn't the Republicans just go along with the new dictatorial regime, as they have been every step of the way? If they really had the character you imagine, they would have held the line at the insurrection. Instead they whitewashed it and put him back in power. I am in no way confident that group of people would check his power again.
He's not immune from prosecution, but prosecution requires evidence. But he controls the evidecne and witnesses, and there's no way to compel him to produce evidence, witnesses to testify, or really conduct any substantive investigation. So, how does one prosecute that case? And who prosecutes it? The DOJ he controls? Or the Congress who are in his cult? And who rules against him, the SCOTUS and judges he appointed? Who would enforce the decision, himself?
"immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate"
Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), is a landmark decision[1][2] of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate[1][2] such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch.
That's argument is easily contradicted by plenty of worldwide examples of opposition trying to use the courts to combat dictators. Dictators often ignore court decision they dislike because they have the ultimate power of enforcement.
The playbook is to slowly destroy the limits of power. First step is to bombard the opposition with a flurry of orders that will need to be questioned. Some will be, but some will stick. Rinse and repeat and, the next time, orders could be more extreme. By then, they'll be harder to stop, either because you are still fighting the first round, or because there is no one left to question the next.
> We gain more ground holding to truths than these easily debunked falsehoods.
Then you should display more candor in describing these situations rather than be reductionist about it. He was acquitted not because he was not guilty of those things, but because his political allies determined the things he was guilty of were not impeachable.
Trump argued:
"If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment"
The "thing he did to help him get elected" in this case was holding up Congressionally appropriated money to gain leverage over a foreign nation (Ukraine), which he used to to attempt the extortion of a bribe (opening a pretextual investigation against his political opponent, Joe Biden). That they acquitted him does not mean he didn't do those things. It was conclusively proven he did that. It's just that Republicans think that's legitimate political behavior, and refused to remove him.
As for the second impeachment, this is what Mitch McConnell said:
"There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day... We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one... I believe the Senate was right not to grab power the Constitution does not give us."
Many of the Senators had the same reasoning, which is that while they blamed Trump they didn't feel they had the power to impeach him at that time, so they left it up to the courts. So no, they did not really acquit him, and yes, they did lay the blame at his feet for what happened (found him guilty).
As a final point, McConnell mentions that we have a criminal justice system to hold him accountable, but Trump argued that impeachment is the only tool that could, and indeed the SCOTUS agreed to a large extent. So if he can't be held accountable by impeachment, and not by the courts, he's above the law.
"He was acquitted" and nothing else matters. That is how the law works. Do you now want to get rid of the rule of law?
"practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day" does not make the thing he did illegal. "so they left it up to the courts", which again is the rule of law.
"So if he can't be held accountable by impeachment, and not by the courts, he's above the law." If the laws does not find someone guilty then that is the rule of law working. Being above the law would be being found guilty and then not having any consequences. He was not found guilty. Period.
Do you want mob rule? Vigilante justice? Or the rule of law?
Let me make it clear, I do not like Trump in the smallest bit, but acting like an authoritarian does not make me a better person.
First, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. He was proven to have committed extortion and bribery by the House prosecutors in the first impeachment, and his defense was he was allowed to do it, not that he didn't do it. That to me screams "above the law", because what he was proven to have done was extort a bribe, and that is in fact an enumerated impeachable offense. You can't square that circle without using his party affiliation to elevate him above that clause of the Constitution. If he were a Democrat he would have been impeached and removed, but then again he would never have been elected as a Democrat.
As for the law, the legal process did not fully play out. We were promised courts would be the appropriate venue by McConnell when he voted to acquit despite saying that the evidence shows he is guilty. That's not really an acquittal in the way you're trying to portray because the only reason the acquittal happened was because McConnell felt the case deserved to be tried in court, not in the Senate.
But where is that trial? It was curtailed due to Trump's election as POTUS, and it was stymied by people he appointed to the court. So how are you going to talk about the rule of law, when justice has been denied to the American people for the crimes committed against us? Where is our trial? It was cancelled because... what's that? He's above the law until he's actually demonstrably bound by it. So far that demonstration has been elusive.
What I want is a trial, with evidence, a judge, and a jury. That's not mob rule.
I'd hate to compare Trump to Hitler, but many forget that Hitler and the National Socialist Party came to power completely by legal means - truly a feat of political engineering.
And furthermore, they were on the brink of total failure many, many times - but always managed to get a lifeline by the actions of indifferent politicians and statesmen - many whom could have stopped them, by simply saying no. They (NSDAP) could not believe what they managed to get away with, and the sheer luck they had.
What we're seeing now is sort of parallel to that, in the way that the people that do care, simply do not seem to take action. Maybe it's the fear of being primaried, maybe it's the fear of personal retribution, maybe they just don't want to rock the boat.
You could disagree by saying how or why you disagree, for example maybe you feel a dictatorship must have a singular dictator and not be a group of elected officials.
I don't like Trump, but many of the things he is doing technically could have been exercised a long time ago. Fortunately (or unfortunately) decorum was generally a thing, so said powers were not exercised.
Now we will see the extent to which these powers can, and should be used. The way the USA is supposed to work is a balance of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The problem mainly is that the legislative branch refuses to compromise and do anything. The judicial and executive branches seem to be taking the lead, with the executive, that is the president, at the helm.
I expect even the conservative Supreme Court to rule against most of the recent activity, though. Especially the 14th amendment stuff.
My cynical take on this is that he's shaking everything up on "day 1"-ish because that's what the people who funded him want and giving them what they want right after the election hits big and will secure more funding. I wouldn't be surprised if he's expecting all of these changes to be shot down and whatnot but doesn't care because they'll have forgotten all about it soon enough but they will remember this last week or so.
The most important detail (the amount) is being left. Is this just a few dollars (in terms of the US budget) or a sizable portion? How is the money split between the different categories?
Have you read it, it's downright insane. "Marxist", "woke", etc. it carves out an exception for Medicare and Social Security, but that's literally it. Even things like Pell grants, food stamps, and Medicaid are up in the other because the wording here is that bad.
So, as of this order, the US just had an ~$3 the trillion drop in GDP. Much of it to research and nonprofits.
Not literally: "Medicare and Social Security benefits will not be affected, nor will any programme "that provides direct benefits to individuals", including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, the White House said."
Ignoring the legality of this, I don't really see what this is trying to accomplish. Even if the spending is not in line with Trump's priorities, it's not like he can unilaterally change the budget (of course, that's not stopping him...).
One silver lining of this madness is I expect bipartisan support for clarifying and codifying the scope of executive power into law at some point in the future (sadly likely after Trump is long gone, though).
We'll see but I believe you're probably wrong. This particular action, e.g. federal aid pause, will affect people from all states. The constitutes will be rightly angry and threaten their congressmen, which will result in the outcome I mentioned earlier.
I just think that politicians have figured out how to spread whatever lines they want into the public consciousness better than ever.
I don't see Republican constituents blaming Republican politicians. They'll find a way to spin it to fit their existing world view. Democrats as well; same story, different words. Division is the name of the game.
These discussions never seem to answer important questions.
If we never question taxation. And never question spending. Where do we end-up?
It is sustainable?
Why is it that we can never question either one of these things?
Are these things like fundamental laws of gravity?
Are politicians never to be questioned for their spending or desire to tax us more?
Or how they use our money?
Is it wrong to periodically evaluate the results obtained by every dollar spent?
If so, why?
Does that mean we should allow politicians and agencies to spend as they wish and without supervision or accountability?
Is there ever a good time for oversight?
Etc.
Today it was revealed that we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms. What? This is insane. And, I suspect, likely the tip of the iceberg.
C'mon folks. Questioning how our money is spent and how much money is taken from us by government is what we should be doing all the time. It should not be the exception. Without accountability, politicians (from all political angles) will take and spend as much as they are able to.
I have this hypothesis: If the government did not take taxes out of your paycheck every week and people had to write them a check every month, there would be riots in every city of this nation. People are blind to taxation and the related spending because they never see that money, it's magic money. You don't feel the pain. If you did, you'd be up in arms when you learn that $50MM of your dollars are going towards buying condoms on the other side of the planet.
And, BTW, those condoms are likely made in China. If they are needed, why doesn't China donate the condoms? Why do US taxpayers have to foot the bill and likely support a healthy profit margin in the process?
We are not going to end-up in a good place if we do not clean-up our attic and bring the house to order. I trust Elon/DOGE and, by extension, the current administration, to do just this. Enough is enough.
Put a different way: We DESPERATELY need to invest this money on internal growth, education, security, health, etc. We need housing, better health outcomes, much better education and myriad other things. Money is not unlimited. Instead of spending $50MM for condoms in Gaza, we should put that money to work where it will do the most good at home.
In order to know where and how much we are wasting, we need to put a microscope on everything and, perhaps, put a number of things on hold while we sort things out. It's a necessary part of the process.
Unrelated to this thread, what do you think about BQN and especially Uiua? For a decade, you lamented that APL was dead and nothing further developed notation qua tool of thought. I am curious if you see hope for the APL way today.
> we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms.
This is a patently obvious and gross mischaracterization. The US has been providing a broad spectrum of humanitarian assistance addressing urgent needs such as emergency medical aid, food, water.
Whether or not you agree with that, you undermine our chances at constructive discourse when you exaggerate or otherwise decontextualize a situation.
It's also absurdly disingenuous to claim that "we never question taxation. And never question spending." Of course these concerns are the subject of continuous debate by much more serious people than yourself.
Again, whether or not you agree with the outcome, the assertion that "we never question taxation" is utterly, and completely divorced from reality.
> you undermine our chances at constructive discourse when you exaggerate or otherwise decontextualize a situation.
You are proving my point. You have decided it is absurd to question anything. You have unilaterally decided what I said isn't true and whatever the hell you believe is, in fact, the only truth. Therefore, nothing to see here. Do not question authority. Do not question spending. Do not even bother to engage in any level of forensic accounting to see what's going on.
> It's also absurdly disingenuous to claim that "we never question taxation. And never question spending."
You are also confusing politicians TALKING about taxation and spending with us DOING something about it. For all that debating, we throw money at (likely) millions of things we should not be funding at all. One of those categories is what I call "stupid foreign aid".
At the state level, things are not any better. Here in CA we have been duped by politicians into throwing money at a ridiculous high speed train that went from "We can build it for $10 billion" to now being somewhere over $130 billion and rising. They are saying it will require another $140 billion to complete. Here we are, nearly twenty years after voter passed a $10 billion dollar proposition and got nothing for it. This stupid thing will probably cost half a trillion dollars and will never attract enough riders to even approximate direct and indirect costs.
You have to wonder how many projects like this exist in the federal budget. Crap that is doing nothing but burning cash.
> by much more serious people than yourself.
And then, having nothing to say, you resort to personal attacks. As if that is going to change reality in any way. Good for you.
We must kneel down, bow our heads and accept what we are told. Taxation is OK. Do no question it. Ever. Spending is OK. Do not question it. Ever.
> > we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms.
> This is a patently obvious and gross mischaracterization.
Looks like it hasn't been confirmed yet, but let's not pretend like there aren't really odd and weird and arguably wasteful items in the US spending bills that serve no immediate purpose for US citizens.
Rand Paul releases a yearly report of some of the most prominent ones that he uncovers. I assume they're all hidden in thousand-page spending bills that make it through. These are the results of people that are really un-serious and I wouldn't trust them with our money, they're just drunk on the numbers. To them, a million here a million there is peanuts and essentially bargaining chips in the little games they play in senate/congress.
I'm busy reading the report now, but the summary notes:
"$4.8 million on Ukrainian influencers, $32,596 on breakdancing, $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security, $3 Million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil, and much more!"
Without context, this is meaningless. This may be wasteful, or may create a community space where needed, or sponsor an Olympic team, or... There's many ways that 32k may be an easy investment for a much bigger return.
I appreciate discussions on politics with smart people that don't always agree with me. I don't want HN to turn into an echo chamber. I understand why people would choose not to see news about politics, and I am also frustrated by how frequently discourse about these important issues turns into personal attacks and uncivil discourse.
I second that these developments have immense repercussions in tech and in the lives of many of us (even those who live across the Atlantic such as myself).
> I might agree with you if the discussions were high value, but in the current environment that is essentially impossible.
All the more reason we should keep trying. These are important discussions and this place has some very smart people who can actually make a difference.
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
This was said by Grover Norquist, a thought leader amongst Republicans in the early 2010's. I've always thought that China or Russia would appreciate being able to drown us in a bathtub as well.
He has much more conplete control of fhe Republican Party and, fhrough that, much less practical constraint in both policy and personnel this time, so this Administration reflects his will and intentions much more purely than did his first.
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, and all that.
Like, I've no doubt that Putin is very happy that he was elected, and the FSB and GRU probably put their finger on the scale to at least some extent, but it's probably more a case of a convenient idiot than a Manchurian candidate.
> Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, and all that.
that only applies when you have a flat prior. stupidity should be random - one action moves the needle one way, another action moves it back and you have an average of zero. when every action moves the needle the same way and somebody benefits from it, there's something going on.
I wish people would apply Hanlon's razor more critically. Because the way people apply it allows evil people to act dumb and get away with it all the time. Guess what: evil people don't come out and say "I'm evil!" They don't wear super villain costumes, and they don't look like evil monsters. They look like everyone else, and they say all the right things like everyone else. Evil people rely on plausible deniability and Hanlon's razor to get away with their deeds. At every turn they are called out, they will say "I didn't mean to, I'm really a good person honestly! You're overreacting! I was just joking!" At some point you have to put on your critical thinking skills and stop allowing people to lie to you.
Oh, to be clear (I was the Hanlon’s Razor invoker), I would consider Trump to be, well, evil, but in the amoral monster sense rather than the evil mastermind sense. He is a _profoundly_ bad person, but my view would be that it’s down to a failure to see people as people, rather than an active plan to hurt people (Some of his sponsors/handlers, of course, are type 2 evil, but if nothing else, Trump lacks the _visionary_ aspect that’s required for that.) If he thought it would benefit him, or if the right people whispered in his ear, he’d be a faux-humanitarian; he simply _doesn’t care_ (and, likely, doesn’t really understand the difference.)
> Medicaid and Social Security benefits are not affected
That's disappointing, I wonder why those aren't getting paused? If you want to get spending under control and you're already breaking the law then you might as well stop everything.
Every single democracy in the world is facing the same problem of gerontocracy. The old people (or about to be old) vote the most, they have the most numbers, and they cannot enact any policies that will help the young by cutting old people entitlements.
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that was a rhetorical question. We all know why they don't do it: because a significant percentage of their voter base are boomers who rely on that stuff.
Military spend is less than 20% (combination of “Defense” and “Veterans Benefits and Services”). Some of the Vererans benefits and services are old age healthcare and defined benefit pension, so that can get subtracted from military spend and moved over to social security and Medicare (since it would happen anyway regardless of military spend).
Social security, Medicare, Medicaid m, and other healthcare subsidies are 21% + 14% + 13% = 47%.
Income security is another 9%, like food stamps, social security supplemental income, earned income tax credits, all stuff for lower income/wealth households.
So 60% of US federal government spend is welfare. Less than 20% is military. 13% is interest costs. And the remaining ~7% is for everything else.
Generally Social Security and Medicare are not considered to be welfare.
Speaking of Social Security, I did an interesting calculation. If each year starting with the year I first paid Social Security tax the government had taken that money each month and the matching amount my employer paid and put that money in a one year T-bill, and each year rolled the maturing T-bills over into new T-bills, that would have grown enough that by retirement it would be enough to pay my benefits for close to my expected remaining lifespan.
It was surprising how well it matched although I think it may be coincidence. Benefits go up if you had higher income when working and down if you had lower income, but it is not linear.
Someone with half my income would have benefits lower than me, but their benefits as a percentage of their income would be higher and so T-bills wouldn't have earned enough to cover them [1]. Similarly for someone earning twice as much as me T-bills would have earned more than needed to coverer their benefits. I apparently came in right at the spot where it balances out.
[1] Your benefit is calculated based on the average monthly income for your 35 highest income years. If your monthly average was M, and you become eligible to start collecting social security in 2025, your benefit at full retirement age is the sum of:
90% of the first $1226 of M
32% of the the amount from of M from $1226 through $7931
15% of the amount of M over $7931
For this calculation past year incomes are index for the cost of living. For example in 1986 I earned a nice round $42 000. That counts as $161 537 when doing the calculation of my monthly average.
If anyone is curious you can get the adjustment factors here [2].
I would contend it is welfare since the quality and quantity of the benefits constantly decreasing (due to population histogram flattening out). Benefits received are less and less correlated with what you put in.
Defined benefits need to be reduced, via changes such as raising retirement age, changing the bend point in the benefit formula, and changing the inflation measure.
Also, that left hand right hand change of funds from social security trust fund to US treasuries is not meaningful. At the end of the day, if the government is not collecting enough tax revenue to offset the spend, it is resulting in decreased purchasing power of the currency (which is a form of welfare in my eyes from young workers older non workers).
For Medicare, you have things like having to see a PA/NP rather than an MD, or having to wait longer times for appointments. And people generally get far more healthcare than the accumulated value of their FICA contributions.
It is, mathematically, today’s young workers paying for old people’s healthcare. And they should bet on getting less.
You are right. I never suspected this would be the case.
Still, social/income security and healthcare (and education) should be the last places one should cut budgets.
Also, the US spends more in their military as a percentage of their GDP than any other developed nation. This sounds like an excellent place to cut. The US government subsidizes a lot of weapons research as well, for companies that'll later sell the tech the government helped them develop to foreign countries at a profit. I don't think it's fair to subsidize a private enterprise this way.
The largest amount of the money is in the unfunded liabilities for social security and healthcare over the next 50 years. It is hard to even know what it is, 60, 70, 80 trillion?
Younger people will end up both paying for this while getting old from higher interest rates and inflation and then when actually old? The money has all been spent. Sorry, no services.
If you think the price of things are bad now try some fiscal dominance and debt monetization. I suspect it is already too late to avoid fiscal dominance. At 50, maybe I won't see it though. At 20? A 20 year old probably has a good chance of fiscal dominance, debit monetization and maybe even USD losing reserve currency status.
Fed children that don't suffer from easily treatable diseases contribute back more than the cost. Blanket actions like this are very poorly thought out even under that kind of cold ROI perspective.
It is obvious to anyone that well raised children provide a huge ROI...but not to a large portion of voters due to the shape of the population histogram. Instead, countries are spending tons and tons of resources on 80+ year olds' dialysis, heart bypasses, hip replacements diabetes management, and end of life care. And keeping their property taxes low even though they live in large houses on large lots. Cold or hot, there is obviously no ROI there.
Everything in a society IS politics. From deciding where we order dinner from, to which framework we'll build upon. Politics is how groups decide on issues that affect all individuals in the group.
Absence of politics is an illusion. They'll still affect you regardless of you wanting to see it or not.
Even the assertion of anti-politics and private property is in itself a political statement. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to have non-political dinner conversations or discuss the latest releases on HN.
Not everything is american politics though. It does get tiring to hear about American politics non stop. We aren't talking about general social issues here, but about American politics. I wouldn't want to hear about Chinese local politics non stop either, and I don't think a lot of people browsing Hn would.
This is a good point - not everyone is directly affected by, or interested in, US politics, but, still, I think it's safe to assume most of the HN audience is going to be impacted directly or indirectly by what happens now in the US.
I'm also not interested in all popular topics on HN, but I'm OK with seeing a list of posts where only a few interest me. A different matter would be subjects that can be triggering to people, but I haven't seen complains about that.
I agree that american politics are in a league of their own, as they end up affecting a lot of people outside of the US. (I'm Canadian, so it's especially true for me!). I think the issue is more about frequency. Like, I get that some events are very relevant (elections, foreign policy, etc). But stuff like federal grants or whatever is... hard to understand without context!
Again, I totally get if this was news about civil rights, abortion, or whatever but I just don't see what most people outside of the US can make of information or articles like this.
I wouldn't mind an article that summarised or explained the first 10 days of the trump administration or something like that, but there's been a lot of posts like these recently.
I mean sure... so is asphalt, roads, plumbing, toilets, etc. Most of us here use the bahtroom more often than we think about politics, especially american ones, so do we post plumbing questions here too? I mean... no working toilet would be a bigger problem for most individuals at that moment than whatever trump does.
I agree with you because I'm not from the US. I understand HN is a page from California, so US centric themes.are most likely to pop up.
But I do prefer to consume my US dose of politics circus from elsewhere.
So much of what these grants fund lead directly to a Show HN or an IPO announcement down the line. That line is now cut. If this can't pass the "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" test, what does?
Over 20 million lives are at risk after the PEPFAR program was suspended. Within a few weeks viral loads will return to pretreatment levels again. This is a human caused public health catastrophe.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Would this be some sort of A/B testing of humanity with and without America? Sincerely hope you're wrong.
What would the hypothesis even be? "If we stop providing aid, will people die?" That's outrageous and generously gives them the benefit of the doubt that they're being ignorant rather than greedy.
Why are US taxpayers on the hook for this?
Because you want people to pay in US dollars, buy US goods and pharmaceuticals.
You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
America wants to run an empire without doing the work that is accustomed to it.
Not quite so simple. The United States has many different internal interests that disagree on many things between them, but align in spreading American influence globally through programs like this and many, many others.
However, it also has other factions, especially since Trump and his often bizarre, even irrational takes on what's important, basically took over the Republican Party, making a number of Republicans now also shun programs that previously, they wouldn't have so much as blinked at. This is cowardly of these people, but it's also par for the course with ideological shifts in political leadership.
One could claim that this is the current state of the American aristocracy. For all of the wealth inequality, I see very few instances of "Zuckerberg Theater", "Gates Hospital", or even a "Brin college".
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment, but one of the largest hospitals in the Bay Area is quite literally called Zuckerberg Hospital: https://www.zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/
Gates has given many billions to public health initiatives as well
Yes. ~7.5% of the cost contribution bought them the name on the building.
What, $40b for a dying social media company that no one will remember in 25 years vs literally anything useful and enduring? My post office is 130 years old!
Those were needed because buying politicians and public favor was hard.
Now you just buy media.
I think that the Gates foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on malaria initiatives alone. When I lived in SF, Zuckerberg Hospital was pretty close and it was pretty gigantic. Mark Benioff has spent hundreds of millions on Childrens hospitals in Oakland and SF as well.
Maybe we're converting to more of a Roman- or Mongol- or Aztec-style empire.
Because you want people to pay in US dollars, buy US goods and pharmaceuticals.
> Ah yes, the desperately poor are notorious for pulling the strings of global finance. Best to stay on their good side.
You wanted everyone to admire the US and exported the American dream to be the ideal of the world.
> The American dream has nothing to do with giving our money away to foreigners, actually.
Why is it important for America to enforce freedom in every oil rich country - apparently even Canada now!
> focus
You can take a "mission accomplished" stance and be done with it, but if America wants to maintain it's standing in the world, these sorts of programs will need to continue.
> Our standing is derived from our success--from our military, financial and cultural dominance. Your opinions as to our generosity have no bearing whatsoever on our standing.
Without the US footing the bill for this, China will come in with Chinese aid, and teach these countries how to adopt the Chinese ideology.
> These countries don't matter.
You may be right.
Trump-Americans are indeed rejecting the post-WWII world order. It is no longer serving us.
Trump is renegotiating the deal with the rest of the world. It could blow up in our faces or we could end up in a more favorable position.
You should be more worried about blowing up in your own faces
It won't. 0% worried actually.
Ignorance us bliss, until physical reality sets in.
Aka you probably should he worried about exceedingly damaging deranged behavior on the part of an individual who is bent upon expanding the powers of the already most powerful office in the land.
It will cause lasting damage.
Trump has already managed to unify all of latin America against him. Bullying will have consequences, and creating enemies out of friends is a very foolish path.
If cost savings were the true concern, there are many less harmful ways to effect them, so don't give me a story of necessity. The belligerence and cruelty is intended.
In contrast to 2016, I am seeing an incredibly focused, well-planned Trump machine executing hard on the goals the President set during his campaign and reiterated in his 2nd inaugural address.
The Latin America stuff is not bullying. Look at Colombia, Petro's government collapsed after his stunt because even his own government knew he was stupid and picked a bad fight.
Cost savings is just one of the concerns here. A lot of bad things happen downstream of these US Taxpayer funds, including NGOs who use those funds to enable mass illegal immigration.
Well planned? That they shut down so many critical government functions yesterday with their executive order took the WH by complete surprise. They had no idea what the order did or didn't do. The top headline yesterday about it was the mass confusion it sparked because the language they used in the order was sloppy, inarticulate, and vague. That's not focused or well-planned. This is a throw everything at the wall, fill the zone with shit Steve Bannon strategy.
Can you explain as you see it the rational for the Trump administration's aggressive stance on Canada?
I'm a Canadian so I'm biased on the topic but it seems what Trump is doing to Canada is completely unreasonable.
The post-WWII world order has been slowly falling apart over the last decade or so. America is a bit late to wake up to this reality. We're now in a pre-WWIII world.
While prepping for a WWIII after which, ironically (or not), there might remain no point of a pre or a post prep for a very long time.
The post-WWII world order fell apart when the Berlin wall fell.
That order was defined by the tension between the east and the west during the cold war, and it can't be overstated what an existential threat communism was perceived as by the west during this period.
Half a century of American politics were based on the premise that if the US did not win against the Soviets, the entire world would live under a world wide oppressive communist regime. Freedom would be a historical footnote.
This meant that the US urgently needed to have its shit together at all points, not just function well, but also look good. The war against communism was fought in the hearts and minds of the world's population.
Since the Soviet union fell, and with nobody to keep the US honest anymore, it's arguably let itself go.
In part it's metaphorically stopped sucking in it's stomach, to hide its flaws and present itself as flawlessly glamorous. Some of the American decline is problems that have existed for a long time that have now been brought to the surface; but I think the lack of competition is also just as big of a factor.
New powers have emerged in the vacuum left behind the Soviet union, yes, but these are all knock-on effects, and I don't think they're perceived as the sort of existential threat as the communists were. Some are trying to paint them that way, but it's not nearly the same.
i also enjoyed the cold war documentary on netflix.
Excellent analysis, thank you for contributing
Yes! America needs to adjust our spending to reflect this new paradigm
You mean the first time Trump took office and Brexit? Yeah, all the same nefarious forces.
“I’m worried WW3 is coming… best we destroy our alliance between the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet first!”
Brilliant strategy.
America's standing in the world is maintained through military force, primarily targeted at Europe.
The rest of the world is in competition with China. They are trying to sell, not buy.
Cool story though.
You're both right. You just are talking about completely different things.
No idea why you're being downvoted. You are mostly right.
Because it's enlightened self-interest. I personally love paying taxes that go to these functions because they keep people in homes and off streets, they keep people from dying early.
You may like the stench of death and despair all around you - I sure don't want to live in that world.
How much are you willing to pay for this?
If Congress voted for 50% taxation and could somehow prove to you that it was all going to care for those less fortunate than you, would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?
What quality of life are you aiming for the recipients? Do they each get a cot in a shelter? Their own room? Their own apartment or house? Do they get it with no strings attached or do they have to try to improve their own lot while the taxpayer helps them?
How long do we want to extend lives for? Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children. Should a 95 year old get hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend their lives for 6 months?
These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
> Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children.
That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.
> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.
It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.
Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.
The "grand debate" happened, Americans voted, and now the guy who won is delivering on his campaign promises. Whether you agree with Trump or not, this should not be a surprising outcome. He told us he was going to do this.
>Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending
This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
But he isn't. This isn't framed as a "we need to bring down costs and stop paying for things and that's just going to be hard" initiative. This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.
In the US spending is controlled by Congress. The Congress was voted on by the people. The idea that Trump throwing bombs into the federal budget is democracy but following Congress' passed budget isn't is ridiculous.
The idea you have is nice, but congress doesn't pass real budgets any more. That means that there is a lot more ability to make the money slosh around.
Like it or not, the budgets passed by congress are budgets from the perspective of the constitution.
We are wildly far beyond strict constitutionalism. This has been a trap for conservative causes for a very long time. We are now playing the game the same way the left does: win and govern.
You'll have to excuse me for being mortally terrified of "we are unencumbered by the law and will do whatever we want with power."
Laws have never encumbered humans. We're governed by social norms and those have been destroyed: massive immigration, sexual mutilation of children, and wanton spending of US taxpayer dollars.
This ends with you shooting me in the head.
deeply weird of you to say this.
>This is framed as a mechanism of eliminating DEI programs.
Did we watch the same campaign? Trump absolutely campaigned on ending DEI too. The electorate hates DEI programs. Cutting spending and DEI programs is what got him the popular vote.
Fox brainwashed viewers hate DEI. 1% (vote margin of win, roughly) electing a person to an office does NOT equal a popular mandate for any particular policy and its silly to claim that the voters hate what you apparently hate.
Keeping thinking this way and keep losing elections.
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>His first act was eliminating institutionalized racial practices with employment, aka "DEI" initiatives.
The purpose of the narrative that DEI is "institutional racism" and the goal of its elimination is to normalize the belief that non white straight male and able-bodied people are inherently less qualified for any position, and to allow legal systemic discrimination against such people.
Which is racist, yes. And sexist, and homophobic and transphobic and ableist.
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Right, but that's not what this order does. People were locked out of Medicaid payment portals today because of this, how is that shutting down DEI? It seems that they really had no idea what they were shutting down with this, order.
Maslow's hierarchy would tend to suggest that when you shut down the trough to progressive leaning aid recipients they and their reps will tend to negotiate away other mere desires. Not saying you should do that, but Trump is transactional and not above using blunt tactics.
Yeah but red states and his own voters are the biggest beneficiaries of Medicaid so...
Their sacrifice is one he's willing to make.
>> Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending > > This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
sigh
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59729
Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.
I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.
tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".
You clearly wrote "non-discretionary". Now I see you meant "discretionary", but even so you're still wrong. It is not even a simple majority.
805/1722 = 0.467
Ah, indeed, I was sloppy in my wording in that prior message.
I should have said is that defense is the largest single category of discretionary spending, by a large margin. The thrust of the point remains.
Okay, addressing the main thrust:
Defense spending is absolutely a priority of this administration. SecDef Hegseth's whole thing is about reorienting the Pentagon back to American defense as the priority. Remember that getting Hegseth confirmed was a major push for the brand new admin.
So spending won't go down but will hopefully be spent more effectively.
You are ignoring the Veterans Benefit part to skew your numbers. Its 55% when you lump that in. You don't get to simply write that off.
That's a definition of defense spending that no one except you uses, so no I don't have to use your made up definition
I would gladly pay 75% taxes if they went to the right thing.
I’d rather be at the mean income wise in a society with low inequality than in the top percentile of a society that has large inequality. I’ve been both.
I can agree that overspending is not a good thing, but I don’t think the solution is cutting out public programs altogether, I think we should focus on making those programs efficient, eg not making them a charity for multinational corporations that are in great part owned by the very states we consider our “enemies”. Maybe we shouldn’t be lining the pockets of the oil and gas industry, big pharma, etc and instead be lining the pockets of the American people with value through education, opportunity, etc.
What's the right thing? Are you sure that you and I agree on that? Do you and Elon Musk agree? The tax pool is taken from everyone. In practice, I believe you would find a 50% tax distasteful because it's pretty much guaranteed that it's not going to be spent exactly as you direct.
What used to happen before vast income tax regimes and welfare states arose was that people who were wealthy would donate huge amounts of money to charities that did what they thought were the right thing. Even the working class donated 10-20% of their income to charities that did the right thing. The way you guarantee that money is spent on the right thing is by having the power to spend it, which means lower taxes.
What specific time period and location before "vast income tax regimes and welfare states" are you talking about? And who gave money to what?
I'm referring to much of the Western world prior to 1950, and you see this behavior in the middle east today (obviously, they disagree with you about "the right thing"). This is usually enforced socially, by communities and churches.
The social safety net that governments provide today used to be a function of community charities and churches. Even modern healthcare has an analogue here.
Okay campaign on that and let the electorate decide. When you win you can tax all of us at 75% and spend it on "the right thing"
These are questions with long standing answers arrived at iteratively over decades. Should those answers continue to be questioned and iterated upon? Absolutely. Is throwing the baby out with the bathwater all at once while crying "taxes bad!" likely to be an iteration that results in net improvement to American society? Probably not.
These questions have not been answered, that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending
It's not like we rolled dice to get the spending we had. Decisions were made based on information available. There are detailed explanations available for all sorts of spending.
Refusing to seek that out isn't the same as it not existing.
That's not to say the decisions were perfect, far from it. But thinking we can arrive at better outcomes by just throwing it all away and ignoring all we've learned is the height of insecurity and arrogance, not a sign of strength.
Edit:
> that's why Americans just voted for someone who vowed to decrease spending
The number of people that voted as they did that would switch their vote if only someone would explain where their taxes went in more detail is extremely small.
New information is available, we've incorporated it and decided the spending isn't worth the cost.
We will find a new equilibrium. It will likely not be 0 spending and will hopefully not be the spending regime we have today.
I'm sure this what your gut told you. Why don't you explain the plan to the rest of us, using facts. This is a technical site. Last time I checked, 25% of the current debt is caused by the current guy conducting the largest wealth transfer in history from the young to the old. But somehow that translates to "Fed government too big." Try selling that to people that don't read, anyone here can read the CBO reports.
Good point, here are the technical details of the plan:
It's not more complicated than that.Yep, and we could have gotten there with a lot fewer people being hurt in the process.
In theory, maybe? In reality, no it has never worked before.
You don't have the data nor the right to claim WHY 1% marginally preferred candidate x to candidate y.
I don't have the right to make a claim on an internet opinion board?
> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
No they’re actually not. You made those questions up as absurd examples, and they’re absurd.
Llama! I was wondering when you'd show up. We comment on all the same stories
<3
> would you be okay with that? 75%? 90%?
Why ask about raising individual American taxes while turning a blind eye to Trump gunning at lower corp taxes even more than he already had? And we know it will happen because he gets it done, for America *cough oilarchs*
I would be okay with Trump raising the corporate tax rate, instead of saving some 296 of the largest US companies $240B in taxes between 2018-2021[0]. Though this time should be even more, right? He's going to take it to a whole new level of lowest tax rate for Corporates than "any nation on earth". Can't wait for him to lower the tax burden on Big Corp even more, Those C-suites, investors, have such a hard life scrapping by the way they do. No wonder they can't afford better wages for the workers. Let's keep the tax burden on the middle class where it belongs so we can Make America Great Again.
[0] https://itep.org/corporate-taxes-before-and-after-the-trump-...
These FUD arguments are ridiculous.
Americans are already paying far more in privatised taxation - tribute - to healthcare companies, landlords, fossil fuel companies, and loan sharks of various kinds - than they would pay with higher federal tax rates investing in R&D, infrastructure, education, clean energy, and public health.
There's nothing hypothetical about pointing out that the billionaire economy is massively distorted and extractive, and is caused huge public harm which will literally remain visible for geological timescales.
50% of billionaires wealth? Hell yeah.
>I personally love paying taxes that go to these functions
An issue with this is that it isn't just current tax payers and tax revenues that are paying for this federal spending, but a ballooning debt due to a budget deficit. The brunt of this debt's interest burden is going to fall on the future tax payer.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not passing judgment on whether this pausing action was warranted. I'm only responding to the part of the user's comment implying that federal spending is being paid for by current taxes, when it is not necessarily. As a decent chunk is paid for by debt, some of the current federal spending will be the responsibility of future tax payers, including those who cannot yet vote, as these future tax payers will be the ones paying off the interest.
I mean, the playbook here is pretty well used:
Create an emergency that wasn't there (cut all the fed aid and grants, muck up the government, etc)
Make a solution that will fix it (the soon to be tax bill, also the secretary positions and other stuff)
Stuff that solution with every policy candy you can (pro-life, tax cuts, guns for tots, funding catholic schools, etc. It's going to be a conservative jelly doughnut)
Due to the emergency, we must pass this bill (ram through the tax bill asap, no need to read the thing, blame the slackers, etc)
Declare victory, hope that helps reelection
EDIT: To be clear, I don't think that's what is going through the new admin's heads. At best, I think it's more of a 'pull things out of the engine until it stalls, then put things back in and hope it runs again' kinda thing. But more likely, it seems they really haven't a clue what they are doing. All those people in the first admin that put country in front of self are gone this time around, and it shows.
I don't know what you think is going to happen if we don't get spending under control.
It is beyond me how younger people especially are not rioting in the streets with the amount of money that the government has been spending.
The problem isn't spending, the problem is the rich don't pay nearly enough taxes.
Sure maybe? but more important to me is to lower my own tax burden
If you are competing for resources with billionaires, who's taxes also go down, you are losing money.
By that logic I am better off with lower taxes, since the government is a trillionare and moving the money to billionares is progressive.
The government is accountable (in theory). The government is a different kind of entity with different behaviour to a single human, or even a corporation. Your argument is a semantic one and was not made in good faith I think...
But if the government acted more selfishly , like a corporation (it's heading that way), then yes you are also competing with the government in certain areas. It partly depends if the billionaires in question and your semi-fictional idea of government are colluding directly. In which case you would be competing with a n-trillion dollars of capital for things like housing, some of which is controlled by billionaire beneficiaries. Essentially government monopolies are what you might be worried about, which do exist.
In reality the government also spends some of its money on infrastructure and other common-goods, which creates common wealth. The government (with central banks) also creates money so the idea of direct competition (which makes no sense to me outside of something like sovereignty over large amounts of land / mineral wealth / taxable subjects ) isn't so relevant.
But, more importantly, the thing important to Trump is lowering the corporate tax burden. Even more than he already had.
Feel free to donate to the charity of your choosing then. Forcing citizens to donate to only state approved movements seems coercive.
Didn't that drive the 1950 & 1960s in the USA? Taxing the rich and giving to the working class to build bridges, schools, GI homes, ... Isn't that classified as the most stable economy in their history? The only decades where the stock market was stable?
How do you know your taxes are not going where they should? Do you wish for them not to be used to help the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable?
Was DARPA's tax payer investment in ARPNET worth it or DOD with GPS?
I'm not saying there is abuse in the system, any should be found and dealt with. Nor saying spending should stays the same, money needs to move improve the health, well-being and wealth of non-rich.
The biggest boom and gains in the US arguably happened after the Civil War and before WW1, during which federal tax burden was something like 2% and there was no income tax.
Not on a per-capita basis. Real GDP growth per-capita rose 2.2x* between 1866-1913. That's smaller than say, the period starting after WW2, 1946-1993 which as 2.5x.
Even post-WW1 1919-1966, it went up by roughly the same as post-civil war, 2.2x - and that period includes a depression and heavy income taxes.
Given how much easier it is to double a small economy than a large one, the fact post-WW2 period beat it is doubly impressive.
Also one should note there was actually an income tax from 1861-1872.
* Using Maddison Project estimates of real GDP
That is strong evidence post WW2 is a competing nomination. At 2.2 vs 2.5 it is probably down into the noise if they are estimates, especially ones from 1800s. This why I did not provide any quantitative comparison.
Down into the noise on a winner, I think I'll take the one with much lower taxes and far lower incarceration rate as my preferred template to break the tie.
There is no reason to believe that they would have achieved the same growth rate had they started with a larger economy.
As I stated, it is much easier to double growth when you're small and ultimately, growth rate doesn't matter as you can't spend growth rates. Nominal growth matters. The economy increasing by $5.5k per capita (2011 $) in the period after the civil war is a lot less impressive than increasing by $23k after WW2.
You think it was our social investments that brought us wealth in the 50s and 60s and not our massive military spending winning a world war which destroyed every other advanced economy?
Didn't that drive the 1950 & 1960s in the USA? Taxing the rich and giving to the working class to build bridges, schools, GI homes, ... Isn't that classified as the most stable economy in their history? The only decades where the stock market was stable?
Part of the hilarious hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party is that they long for the glory days of the 1950s...but are completely opposed to the tax policy required to pay for it or the economic and social policies to implement it.
The dissonance resolves itself when you realize the "glory" they are talking about is not how our society uplifted Americans economically in that era, but how racial and religious hegemony was maintained.
I think these particular people would be happy to forego all economic progress made in the last 70 years if it meant they could return to a time when being male, white, straight, and Christian was all it took to be at the top of the social order.
id like to stop paying into the US military thank you very much. move it to be a charity, as intended by the founders.
why the state sponsored militia, when i could be contributing to some other militia?
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I've put these points up many times on online forums and it is a sure way to get ad hominemed to oblivion, and if that doesn't discredit you then you're banned or flagged. It's simply not allowed opinion.
I remember when everyone was calling for public daycare/preschool. I posted an address for anyone who felt it was their duty to pay for daycare of others to send the money for my child. I received nothing but curses. What they really meant was everyone else would pay and they would receive.
No, it’s that welfare programs reduce crime and improve the livelihoods of the entire population, and they have flow on benefits to the economy by increasing workforce participation and lifting education levels where more advanced products and services can remain on shore (subsequently also increasing government revenue).
Instead, the US does not invest in its people, and fears the immigrants that will do the jobs they aren’t willing to endure or study for. Compare to Asia, where universal education and healthcare are valued at the cultural level and it’s clear why they have sophisticated economies and why jobs have shifted there. The US only holds its position as long as it holds it’s hegemony on global capital, but it also holds record amounts of debt vs GDP, and disruptions like Deepseek are a reminder of where most of the talent in the world comes from. Capital and geopolitical dominance alone isn’t going to save the country. To make America great again, you have to invest in the people. (And if America isn’t the people, what exactly is it to you?)
> And if America isn’t the people, what exactly is it to you?
Not grandparent commenter, but I wanted to make the snark comment that maybe America is now just the blustering violence, at home and exported, and that even bullets are more protected than kids.
Which countries do you think have the happiest population?
Denmark consistently ranks highly. And Denmark has Greenland. Ergo we need Greenland to be happy. /s
what's your transparency mechanism? theres plenty of such things that get sent around and get money, but theres very little transparency and accountability for how those funds are used
Isn't this just saying taxation should be optional? Should paying for the military, police or roads be optional? Or are you suggesting the amount you have to pay is fixed and then you get a choice to allocate it to different budget areas you favor.
Because their duly elected representatives, senators, and president agreed on the bills that included this money. Even if everyone said "We elected the new president to specifically stop all health funding," the Constitution doesn't let him do that alone. Congress has to do it. We can't even get to debating the merits of bills until people agree on a system for the government to write, debate, agree on, and carry them out.
American soft power enables a multitude of benefits to US taxpayers, but as a higher-order effect. Leaders who only apply first-order thinking will disrupt complex systems without understanding them.
At what cost to those US taxpayers? Leaders who only look at benefits without understanding costs will bankrupt the American people.
Why are you not questioning the defense budget then? Aid like this is mutually beneficial. Countries get free medicine, US gets favorable trade deals, the money spent stays with US companies and flows down to US taxpayers in terms of wages and taxes the companies making the drugs pay back. But if you think that’s not beneficial, then why do we need trillions every year for defense?
This is not a direct response, but as an aside, defense spending really has fallen in recent decades. It's not the War on Terror days anymore: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
a naive guess would be about negative 33 trillion dollars cost to US taxpayers, the current debt.
but whats the costs overall of changing the official US name of "gulf of mexico" to "golf of mexico"
or the cost to everyone of all this disruption?
whats the costs ive had to pay from Turmp bungling the covid response? how many bungled responses am i going to have to pay for because trump doesnt want the US to have a leading role in the WHO?
the cost of all these deportions? both immediate and future? why am i paying for this RTO mandate that Musk wants to run?
whats the cost of all these tariffs trump's about to put in? wheres my opt out?
The election. Most of those things lost the election so here we are.
Stop asking about the costs and think of the benefits, you as an American, being the center of the world your whole life has received from US influence and economy power?
Strange thing to be asking honestly.
America is home to over $750 billionaires who would be paying zero income tax. Personally I think that should be what changes.
>Stop asking about the costs
This is not a serious position. Cost is always a factor.
Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good.
It makes me a little sad just reading your criticism.
At what cost? How much cost should I personally bear to reduce disease worldwide?
When we hit a point of diminishing returns do I still need to pay incrementally more into this?
I don't know why you're asking me to answer questions that are clearly personal to you, and have no objective answer.
All I can say is, probably not none.
And maybe a note on diminishing returns, in that we might want to reflect on the eradication of smallpox and the near total eradication of polio, and what it has meant to you and to your community to not really have to worry about those diseases.
Because we can't opt out of taxes that fund this.
If it is clearly personal and you do not have an objective answer then let this be a cause we can choose to donate to based on our personal assessment.
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How much are you willing to pay for screening a very long list of diseases - both in administrative costs and traveler time wasted? Will you be quarantining citizens too, as some infections have an incubation period before they can be detected - who will pay for all of that? How many tourism dollars will be lost due to this additional friction?
Now that we have established you're willing to pay to prevent diseases spreading to the US, why do you think that screening at the border is superior to reducing the worldwide incidence, or eradicating them and never having to screen for them ever again?
There is no upper bound here. The eradication of smallpox is money saved and suffering prevented every day for as long as humans are around.
Border screening clearly has a high failure rate, our recent experiences with this should be fresh in your mind. Besides threatening public health domestically, outbreaks in foreign nations are nevertheless a major economic liability. If COVID had never left China, we would still have seen a huge worldwide disruption, for example.
And anyway, screw them, we got ours is a shit perspective. Empathy should be part of the conversation when talking about so much suffering and death.
"No upper bound" is not a serious policy position. Sorry, I can't engage that.
Merkel disagreed.
And yet, it is obviously true.
This may surprise you, but US citizens travel. And US citizens get sick in other countries. Unless you want to argue that we should take away rights from US citizens and either prevent them from entering the country, unlawfully detain them or prevent them from leaving.
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You sure know the concept of incubation time. Barring infected persons from entering if they have no symptoms is not possible. And quarantining every single person who enters is also not possible.
Quarantine would only work in a society that respected the whole nearly as much as the individual, which you would know if you had been alive in 2020.
Who's going to pay for the quarantines - the same overburdened taxpayers you were concerned about?
I'm sure you would be happy and reasonable about being quarantined every time you travel abroad. You wouldn't complain at all.
Worked so well for covid
I'm not going to pay for quarantine. I'd like my tax dollars to go elsewhere, per your recommendation. Maybe you can make a charitable donation instead?
Sure man, just win the next election and have your people do exactly that
Ah yes because covid was stopped so well
With RFK you're going to see huge populations of unvaccinated, border control won't help in that scenario with how contagious it is, but immigrants will provide a scapegoat. RFK is probably going to push for removing MMR vaccine requirements for legal immigrants too. His organization got many killed in American Samoa from measles.
The US is the wealthiest country in the world, and the US got to that place by having these programs in place.
Who makes shoes/other goods, mines the earth, or other dangerous work? The people in those poor countries. These programs are often the stepping stone that western countries use to enter countries and "develop the economy" in these areas to the benefit of everyone. Developing the economy brings jobs then brings peace. Then the cost of goods stays down.
Fewer orphans. More experience treating diseases. More stable economies to exchange goods and services with.
Very likely these programs pay for themselves via your taxes via price of goods and services. Entirely ignoring the moral good
The US got to this place by winning a world war with virtually no negative impact to our own country. We were literally the last ones standing.
All of these programs came after we established our position.
America won a world war because Europe, Russia did a lot of the early heavily lifting of and because the USA was already an economic and industrial power?
Europe and Russia were the ones killing each other and destroying each others' economies. So yeah I guess they did the "heavy lifting".
Assuming you’re an American, approximately 0.2% of your income goes to healthcare and similar assistance for people outside the US if you pay 20% tax rate.
That tracks with what I said elsewhere in this thread, ~1%. It's too much, cut it off.
You get a LOT in return from that, think about how much you benefit from food and other goods made in those countries. Such an ignorant comment.
I actually don't think I get much in return for that.
It's turtles all the way down. 0.2% here, 0.2% there, do it 100 times and you save a lot of money. Gutting foreign freebies is an easy starting point, not the end.
It's a great way to get rid of the American Empire that we've built up.
I mean, you aren't going to like playing second fiddle to China, but that's the choice you are making right now.
Out of curiosity, what cost do you believe that you currently personally bear for this?
How much should I bear or how much do I actually bear?
I should bear 0 cost.
It looks like US Foreign Aid is ~1% of the Fed budget, so 1% of my taxes. So again, too much.
How much would you pay to not get Ebola or another haemorrhagic disease, should it find it's way into your community? How much are you willing to pay to hedge against that risk by squelching outbreaks near the source?
Absolutely willing to pay for this. What % of the budget goes to that? Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?
> Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?
It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums.
Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.
>It's a bundled deal, sorry.
And this is why Trump turned it all off. The bundled deal is not working for too many voters. They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.
> They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.
I am certain they'll get the deal they deserve. For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong
im not willing to pay anything for you not getting ebola. you have to pay the lot for everyone to keep yourself from getting ebola
no thanks I'll take my chances with the ebola
If you don't want to participate in society, why are you even on the internet?
I do want to participate in society. I don't want to fund the rest of the world.
Um yes? I am convinced you’re a child with how you think everyone can line pick their own items and only those and somehow that works or would provide enough for the causes lmao. It’s like the people who only wanted 1 or 2 channels and they then realized how much those actually cost without everyone subsidizing.
Yes it's called private services. For instance there are no public roads for miles where I live, so I rented backhoe and made them. There is no police, so I learned how to defend myself. There is no water, so we drilled a well. The whole of public services can be privatized into line items.
Until you grow up and learn how a neighbor can poison the ground water and you’re fucked.
The entire foreign aid budget is like 75 bucks an American a year. You probably pay less than that.
Off by an order of magnitude, but even if you were right, it's too much.
OMG - you mean you are losing sleep over $75? You know how pathetic you sound?
Try telling that to the IRS if you underpay. It's just $75, what is their problem?
Step back and listen to yourself.
Cost is a fundamental part of the human experience. We need to ask that question on every single human action (singular or collective). There are no free lunches.
You being alive right now is very likely a cost that the collective we could have decided to do without. Clean water, the suppression of diseases that'd wipe out entire populaces... Without those, you should likely have died before you were 5. You know what, I think you're right, you should have died before your 5th birthday.
A good number of us have said "yeah, that cost seems worth it", and you act like your opinion is the only one that should matter.
It would appear that more voters think the cost is too high.
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Of course they didn't know the exact policy mechanism, basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters). We voted for Trump because he promised massive disruption to the status quo.
> basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters).
The policy mechanisms that are coming into play today were the ones proposed in Project 2025. We had been talking about this for months before the election.
>At what cost?
$14.03 per American per year.
He’s just too poor I guess.
> Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good.
Considering the Covid lab-leak theory has been confirmed now, we can confidently say that paying for disease research in the world causes more disease.
It hasn't been confirmed.
That's just making things up without the numbers. You'd have to compare all research and all benefits from it to the single event of COVID. Even in the COVID context, Paxlovid effectively came from a British scientist.
Not confirmed and the fact we do tax payer funded research is what stopped the situation from being worse than it could've been?
It literally hasn't been confirmed lmao
For real. The “I can be trusted with nuance” crowd strikes again!
These people are beyond logic.
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After reading that whole thread I couldn't help but recall that even wild animals often demonstrate at least some degree of empathy
I empathize with Americans, especially for those for whom the government stopped working and who have been struggling and dying as a result.
I don't care at all about foreign aid.
A major reason why foreign aid happens is to stop problems growing which will affect you in the USA.
Unless you want to lock down the USA, stop all international travel and trade then you need to help other countries or else you will also suffer.
It's like society refuses to read history so we need to go back to 1920's every few decades to understand why we have the things we have. Which is sad.
Sorry I don't believe this argument. Let's turn it all off and see if something bad actually happens to Americans
People are piling on you because they have no sound argument. I admire you for keeping your cool.
Thank you, it's honestly been a ton of fun
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With all the megabrains in here, how can some of you not see what's coming? China is making friends at the rate that the US is making enemies. Think about it for a second... Which new friends has the US made? I am talking solid, willing-to-give-you-the-middle-finger-and-go-with-the-other-guy friends (yeah, I know). Now contrast this to the friends China has made. China has secured the most powerful nation in each contested territory. South America, Africa, The Middle East and obviously, it is, itself the biggest power in Asia.
Now for effect, The US cannot even keep Europe aligned with them, and the fallout will be that much sharper in the next few years. You have bought cash money the sinking territories of Micronesia (great for UN votes, but not much else) What you have left is The English Speaking Conglomerate of USA, England (Not the UK - because I don't think you can count on Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And of these "Five Eyes", in a Sino-American conflict, two of them will be felled very quickly by their neighbour China (Australia and New Zealand) and Canada will have to fend off a massive assault by it's neighbour Russia (China's BFF) That leaves the original "greatest friendship". The enduring Anglo-American powerhouse.
Now I would think that England has not done itself any favours with Brexit. How is that going for them? So Europe is not a certain ally for them either. The EU is Europe, ask Turkey :-)
What you have left is an Anglo-American vs Sino-Russian battle for the future of humanity. The thing is the rest of humanity has already decided who they are betting on. Hint - It's not Anglo-America.
You Anglophones have managed to take control of 3 of the 6 continents. Is that not enough? And if it isn't then expect that there will be hell to pay, because at this point, the world will rather die on it's feet then endure more suffering under your boot.
Goeiedag en Dankie.
Additionally, raising the import customs for the EU is just going to alienate them even more. Some of the EU countries are already not favorable of the US, while others currently are but might no longer be. The whole Greenland thing is also not helping.
As a Canadian, with the amount of unprovoked aggression coming from the USA and the turmoil being caused by even the threats of tariffs (yes, companies have to take into account that there might be tariffs and that causes chaos) let along if he actually does levy them, I would not count on Canada to be as close of an ally any longer. The writing is on the wall that we need to do everything we can to align away from the US. It's going to be hard and take time but even if Trump is gone 4 years from now we know how capricious and vindictive the American public can be.
Most Canadians would like to strengthen our bonds with the EU, but unfortunately I think it's going to mean getting pretty cozy with China as you said. No I don't think China is better than the US but the world is getting a wakeup call for how stupid it was to put all our eggs in one basket. From now on having any one partner dominate to the degree the US has is going to be seen as a huge weakness.
> With all the megabrains in here
HN is just another social network, with a bias for programmers and tech enthusiasts. I enjoy it and believe it does a lot right to promote good discussion, but let’s not kid ourselves: there are no “megabrains” here, certainly not in any meaningful way. There are a ton of misguided people who think being passable at coding reveals some type of deeper understanding for how the world works, but that’s just hubris. HN is filled with flawed humans which, if anything, may have a bigger blind spot for their own limitations than most. Don’t idolise HN frequenters, we’re all just people here. People in a community who rightfully gets relentlessly made fun of in other corners or the internet precisely due to using terms like “megabrain” to describe its members.
i took it less as OP idolizing and more as a way to question the expertise of those in question. more often than not people who frequent this site are full of themselves due to being in these fields and living among those who are not, so referring to someone like that as intelligent while proving them wrong is necessary world view shattering statement
I believe this knowledge is more common in Europe, less in US. People have no idea what all those populist powermoves by Trump actually mean. I see the US as a fallen country.
To strengthen your statement, people in the US also seem to forget that China has done some major investments through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It has secured influence in 150 countries through massive infrastructure projects (roads, railways, ports, digital networks).
The US is excluding itself from the world. Quite literally.
Goeiemoggel
> It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities
I'm all for reigning in government spending and our unprecedented deficit, but not sure throwing a stick of dynamite into the grant office is the best approach.
Which is something many americans should've realized before re-electing a chaos monkey with a heart of stone.
It looks like the majority of voting Americans don't care about anything as long as they get to own the other side.
In many ways, Americana seem to be voting for the country to devolve into anarchy.
> It looks like the majority of voting Americans don't care about anything as long as they get to own the other side.
I think that's overstating the case. There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt, and many voters on both sides plug their noses and choose what they believe to be the lesser evil. They might or might not be empirically wrong in their beliefs, but don't mistake voting for enthusiasm.
And "the majority" of voting Americans is technically 49.8%. With 63.9% turnout, that's only 31.8% of eligible voters.
> There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt, and many voters on both sides plug their noses and choose what they believe to be the lesser evil.
Even if both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt to about the same extent there is still large variation among individual politicians in both parties.
P.J. O'Rourke, a well known conservative author and journalist, said it well in 2016 when he announced this:
> I have a little announcement to make ... I'm voting for Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary.
> I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place.
> She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.
In 2016, normal parameters would be to increase military and intelligence gathering spending and start a war somewhere in order to establish democracy and reduce oil prices. Things could have been much worse than a US that had conflicts inwards rather than outwards.
And in 2025 and onwards, they're getting both?
People don't want "normal parameters" though. The normal parameters may have worked well for P.J. O'Rourke, a rich and famous dude, but they haven't been working well for normal people. For better or worse, they want to shake things up.
People do want a kind of chaos agent. Just look at all of the love for Luigi Mangione. Is Mangione the right chaos agent? Rationally speaking, no. Is Trump? Rationally speaking, no. But the desire for fundamental change is palpable.
Those who pearl-clutch the "norms" will continue to lose, and continue to be perplexed about why they lose.
> "I never thought the leopard would eat MY face" sobs man who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
One of the all time great tweets. People might well want a chaos agent on their TV, because politics has become wrestling. They absolutely will not like it when the chaos comes back to them, which they have assumed it won't. Look at how many people were complaining about the price of eggs before the election; now watch how the US responds to avian flu with a nonfunctional federal government.
> now watch how the US responds to avian flu with a nonfunctional federal government.
What makes you think we had a "functional" federal government before the election?
You appear to be ignoring how both Democrats and Republicans have consistently, completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades. When the people are desperate, they make desperate choices. There's a reason that Biden was extremely unpopular at the end of his term. Don't ignore that.
> You appear to be ignoring how both Democrats and Republicans have consistently, completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades.
False equivalence or just false.
By many measures the Democratic Party is still an ordinary political party that tries to enact particular policies to address particular problems based on facts and a cost-benefit analysis. The ACA is one example. The IRA is another. There are many. While in power they diligently seek to pass legislation addressing priorities they ran for office on. You may disagree with these priorities, but the majorities who elected them do agree with them. And in fact, typically a majority of Americans, including many who vote against Democrats, also agree with these priorities.
The Republicans also run on platforms but are much less successful at converting their positions into legislation, largely because their coalition contains a fractious contingent that is motivated by attention more than policy goals, but also because in the event they get cold feet: they realize in the event that repealing the enormously popular policy they ran against would have enormous blowback for them. Repealing Roe is one example. The repeated attempts to repeal the ACA is another.
What you're reacting to, I think, is the failure to pass policy due to checks and balances -- you need both houses of the legislature, the executive, and, increasingly, agreement of the courts. But even if the policy passed, nearly 50% of the populace would think they had been failed by its passage.
I hope you and I don't have to learn how functional the government was before the Republicans broke it. The avian flu is a great test case. International trade is another. Here's hoping the mass layoffs Trump intended to set into motion and the collapse of state and local governments due to sudden budget shocks doesn't set off another Great Depression. That would be another interesting test case. What happens when ram the ship of state into a granite cliff?
Obama did run on PPACA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081114051543/https://barackoba...
> The ACA is one example. The IRA is another. There are many. While in power they diligently seek to pass legislation addressing priorities they ran for office on.
The IRA?
The ACA was more or less Romneycare, a Republican idea, but ironically passed with zero Republican votes. The ACA was a permanent government subsidy to the very health insurance companies that people hated and continue to hate, as evidenced by the recent celebration over the murder of a health insurance CEO. The ACA has not resulted in universal health care. It has not ended medical debt and bankruptcy. It has not ended the practice of claim denial. It has not controlled health insurance premium costs, which have surpassed the inflation rate despite bad inflation in recent years.
In any case, the question of the extent to which candidates keep their promises is not particularly interesting, because even their policy proposals are contolled by their campaign donors. Fundamental changes in the system are rarely on the table. The disparity of wealth in the US has continued to grow unabated over the past 50 years, through Democratic and Republican presidencies.
> they realize in the event that repealing the enormously popular policy they ran against would have enormous blowback for them. Repealing Roe is one example.
Um, they succeeded at that. Roe was overturned by Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents.
Inflation Reduction Act.
> The ACA was more or less Romneycare, a Republican idea, but ironically passed with zero Republican votes...
I agree with much of what you say, but the ACA is popular. Its popularity is growing. Passing the ACA was a matter of getting half a loaf rather than none. It was an attempt to do something. The rest is just goalpost moving. You set out an extreme position: "completely failed to function for the public they're supposed to serve, for many decades". They passed the ACA. The ACA is popular, has brought the cost of healthcare down, brought health coverage to millions of people, etc., etc. I wouldn't have preferred this system, but it obviously is not a complete failure.
> In any case, the question of the extent to which candidates keep their promises is not particularly interesting, because even their policy proposals are controlled by their campaign donors. Fundamental changes in the system are rarely on the table. The disparity of wealth in the US has continued to grow unabated over the past 50 years, through Democratic and Republican presidencies.
Sure, and this sucks, but "the Democrats are as bad as a Republicans" is a recipe for cynicism and resignation, not revolution.
> Roe was overturned by Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents.
I pointed this out precisely because they did succeed at it. They succeeded at it and then struggled in the next two elections, and arguably the third as well. In every national election this year around the world the ruling party was thrown out. This is the first time since ... well, since the chart I got this fact from begins, that no election was one by an incumbent party:
https://jabberwocking.com/bad-economies-only-recently-starte...
That Harris came as close as she did actually shows that the headwinds against the Republicans have continued.
My point was that when they take the power they have won and attempt to enact their policy positions they start losing. This was an example of that.
> the ACA is popular.
It's more popular than nothing, of course. I wouldn't trade it for nothing either.
> Its popularity is growing.
This is somewhat misleading. Over the years, its polling has gone up and down within a range. https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...
> Passing the ACA was a matter of getting half a loaf rather than none. It was an attempt to do something.
This is the kind of Sophie's Choice I hate. Single-payer health care was proposed in the US in the 1970s but was killed by Jimmy Carter, inspiring Ted Kennedy to primary challenge him. We could have had it, and still could have it.
Polling doesn't tell the whole story, because single-payer was taken off the table for decades. It wasn't part of the public debate, because hardly any political leaders advocated for it, not even Democrats. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, almost single-handedly resuscitated single-payer. Regardless of the polling, single-payer is demonstrably superior, as shown by nearly every developed country in the world besides the United States. The reason we don't have it is massive corruption, the health care industry buying off opposition. Buying Democrats as well as Republicans.
> "the Democrats are as bad as a Republicans"
I didn't say that. I said they're both corrupt.
> They succeeded at it and then struggled in the next two elections, and arguably the third as well.
Third? What third? Dobbs was decided in 2022. To say that Republicans "struggled" seems like an overstatement. Perhaps they won fewer seats in Congress than they could have, but they still took control of the House in 2022, adding the Senate and Presidency in 2024. If only Democrats experienced such a "struggle".
> My point was that when they take the power they have won and attempt to enact their policy positions they start losing. This was an example of that.
Republicans gained full control of the federal government a mere two years after Dobbs. That's winning, not losing.
Those people have a severe lack of imagination, because they fail to see how much worse they can make it for themselves.
> Those people have a severe lack of imagination, because they fail to see how much worse they can make it for themselves.
It's interesting that in this entire thread following my original comment, not one comment has defended Democrats by describing how they do good things and significantly help the public. Talk about a severe lack of imagination.
That the choice is always phrased in terms of harm reduction just proves my point about the duopoly and corruption. Why are better things never possible?
I'll name one: affordable care act
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865354
> People do want a kind of chaos agent.
Evidence is that they don't.
They send the same reps and senators back over and over and over.
If they truly wanted a chaos agent, they should be turning over all the offices.
They wanted Trump--specifically.
> They send the same reps and senators back over and over and over.
> If they truly wanted a chaos agent, they should be turning over all the offices.
I'm primarily talking about the swing voters, who can swing elections only when they're close. Large groups of partisans also exist who vote Democrat or Republican no matter what, no matter the candidate, so it doesn't really matter to them whether the candidate is a chaos agent or not. And of course the House of Representatives is heavily gerrymandered precisely to avoid close elections.
Moreover, an individual member of Congress, 1 out of 100 in the Senate, 1 out of 535 in the House, doesn't have much power to change things. Their primary function is to support the President's agenda. That's why people focus more on the Presidential race, because the President makes a lot more of a difference than a member of Congress.
In any case, though, Congress does tend to change hands according to how the public feels about the President, especially the House, the entirety of which is up for election every 2 years.
These types of conservatives have been strongly rejected by voters since 2016. PJ ORourke has no influence in conservative circles today.
> There's a political duopoly, both parties are obviously, blatantly corrupt
Are you KIDDING? You’re talking about overstating, following with a huge understatement.
Trump sells fucking bibles to schools. Trump launched a shitcoin right before his inauguration. Trump took 1 million dollars per CEO for his inauguration. The corruption scales are off the charts with Trump. You can’t talk about "the lesser of 2 evils" when one of them is a literal wannabe dictator / mafia boss / cult leader. Come on.
Popular vote disagrees with this.
Popular vote disagrees with the temperature at which water boils.
No it doesn’t. Popular vote just thinks these are good qualities for their president. One of the failures of democracy is letting people vote themselves into an autocracy, and forgetting that democracy must not become the tyranny of a majority.
And apparently this is what Electoral College was supposed to prevent.
No, that's not true at all. The EC was to prevent the interests of more populous states from governing the less populous states.
You didn't actually dispute my claim. I notice that you offered no defense whatsoever of Democrats, or other Republicans for that matter.
I wasn't trying to argue about who exactly is the lesser of evils. As I said, the voters might be wrong about who that is. My point was merely that not everyone who voted for Trump, or voted for Harris (or Biden or Clinton), was enthusiastic about their choice. Not everyone was trying to "own the other side". In fact, many people vote primarily based on their beliefs about their personal economic prospects. As a famous 1992 campaign slogan said, it's "the economy, stupid".
It's ridiculous whataboutism to "both sides" here.
The president ran on a platform of brazen corruption and retribution against political foes, and he's following through.
Democrats doing insider trading and other low stakes small ball shit really should not be mentioned in the same conversation.
Unfortunately, you appear to be missing the point. You're focusing on personal corruption, when the main issue is policy corruption. The fundamental corruption of our privately funded political system is that politicians mostly do what their wealthy campaign donors want them to do, and what their wealthy campaign donors want is mainly to rig the system in their favor. This is not "low stakes small ball". It affects everyone. In our system, the voters are mere tools for acquiring power; the power is rarely exercised in their favor. That's why people become disillusioned, and yes, it is "both sides".
If a politician happened to enrich themselves while simultaneously helping the public, then shrug, I can live with that. But the latter part, the most important part, isn't happening.
I think it's time you provided some examples.
> Democrats doing insider trading and other low stakes small ball shit
Er, plus supporting genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and repression of peaceful protest of the same with our tax dollars. Not what I would call "low stakes small ball shit", and not something I will ever overlook or forget.
Democrats had four years to find a strong candidate to beat Trump, or to find a way to hold him accountable. It didn't seem to me like they even tried very hard to do that.
Even after all their 'mistakes', if that's what they were, they could still have handily won the election simply by promising to enforce an arms embargo. They had lots of polling showing this fact very clearly. Over 30% of 2020 Biden voters in battleground states said the lack of an arms embargo would probably affect their vote!
You - and every 2024 Dem voter - might ask yourselves why Democrats would rather hand the Presidency to Trump than stop supplying the bombs killing Palestinians.
Not sure I understand here. Are you suggesting that the new president will cut off arms to Israel? That makes absolutely no sense.
I don’t know why so many people fall into this line of thinking. Supporting genocide is bad. If a person draws a line at supporting genocide, they likely won’t appreciate the difference between Democrats who support genocide while pretending to be sad about it or Republicans who support it with a smile. Genocide is happening regardless of which person they vote for so they decided not to vote or throw away the vote on a third party. It’s really not complicated.
If the Democratic Party leadership were capable of learning, they would ask themselves what they could have done differently to turn out the folks who stayed home. Instead they will blame the left, put their head in the sand and run the same losing strategy next election expecting different results. The fact that democrats are our best defense against authoritarianism means this country is pretty much toast.
The president who achieved a cease fire in the first month, while the previous administration seemingly didn't try?
Previous administration tried hard. Sadly the Israeli PM decided he'd rather wait to see who won the next US election before seriously negotiating.
> Previous administration tried hard.
* Four UN ceasefire vetoes said otherwise.
* Over 100 weapons shipments, including 2,000 lb unguided bombs, said otherwise.
* Using the power of the government to smear peaceful student protesters spoke mountains.
* Biden's repetition of debunked mass rape lies painted a pretty clear picture.
* Constant gaslighting from Blinken, Patel and Miller re Israeli atrocities such as Hind Rajab or the Al Nasr babies said otherwise.
* A firm commitment from Kamala that there would be no arms embargo, "no matter what", said otherwise with crystal clarity.
I find the rewriting of history on this topic deeply disturbing.
His own side was calling him "Genocide Joe" because of his enthusiasm for arming the Israelis. What are you talking about?
> *His own side* was calling him "Genocide Joe"
Source on that?
"Kristin Welker, NBC’s moderator, noted to Ms Ocasio-Cortez during their interview that some activists on her party’s progressive left flank have started using the derisive moniker “Genocide Joe” for the US president." https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
Reddit? Twitter? Mastodon? Facebook?
You can Google the term and find articles referencing it, and a quick search on any social media platform will show usage as well. You can even find it used on HN. You can buy "Genocide Joe" merch on Amazon. People called him that to his face[0].
[0] https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2024/genocide-joe-yelle...
Also the same person who thinks all the Palestinians in Gaza should go to Jordan or Egypt.
> “The Biden administration isn’t just giving a green light for ethnic cleansing — it’s bankrolling it,” said DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson. “Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
https://truthout.org/articles/rights-groups-say-bidens-israe...
That article is well over a year old, while Trump made his comments this week.
Correct. A year ago, Joe Biden supported ethnic cleansing, and now Trump supports it.
... And? What is the point you're trying to make here - that there's a 12 month statute of limitations on openly advocating for ethnic cleansing?
> A year ago, Joe Biden supported ethnic cleansing, and now Trump supports it.
How many residents of Gaza ended up in Egypt or Jordan? I rememeber that kerfuffle and basically Egypt and Jordan said absolutely not, and it didn't happen. Trump is a loudmouth, so it's unlikely that he'll follow through on this (fortunately) but personally I count the chances of him doing something like this much, much higher than I did for the other US party (both of whom's policy on Gaza/Palestine has been really bad).
Every time the republican party does something we do not like, it is both sides are the same. However, when democrats or even progressives not related to democrats do something wrong, it is "liberals are bad and awful".
There is no equivalent of Trump or JD Vance on the democratic side.
I think that many of them genuinely want the chaos and destruction. Unrelated to that, they see this as a rational money saving measure. If you look at intentional harm and destruction that saves nothing but only harms, Trump voters love it too.
[flagged]
> I'm all for reigning in government spending and our unprecedented deficit,
My bold prediction: the deficit will continue to grow at record levels.
Not for a long time. We'll keep firing economists in charge until the reported deficit is satisfactory.
This is what happens when an entire nation votes for a pure agent of chaos who has a highly questionable moral code and is easily proven a liar over and over again if he speak for more than 2 minutes. Now only check and balances in the US government can hold back the worst of it. I would have loved to have a new government auditing/ROI office open up and start review departments, instead they started using a sledgehammer to fix the leaks in the plumbing.
An “entire nation” didn’t vote for him. He won less than a third of eligible voters.
He does not have the mandate from the electorate that he claims, so let’s stop acting like he does.
I recall the steve jobs method of figuring out if people are good employees... He tells their coworkers "I heard so-and-so is shit", and if the person is loudly defended, he might be ok. If not, he might not be that good.
Maybe this is a way of doing the same thing. If people defend funding something strongly, it might deserve it, and if not...
More tax cuts for the rich sure won’t help either
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Is the title true, though? I thought OMB paused funding to NGOs, foreign governments and large discretionary contracts, but the pause explicitly excluded all aids and benefit programs.
And how many NGOs have become too powerful and too meaningless and even detrimental to the US? I simply don't see aligned incentives. For instance, the more homeless are on the street, the more funding an NGO gets. Then how will the NGO have any incentive at all to truly help the homeless? Similarly, the more illegal passing at the border, the more funding NGOs will get. Then, why would they help close the border at all?
> I simply don't see aligned incentives. For instance, the more homeless are on the street, the more funding an NGO gets. Then how will the NGO have any incentive at all to truly help the homeless?
That assumes the NGOs, like for-profit corporations*, are motivated solely by funding. Have you ever worked for an NGO seeking to help the homeless? Do you know anyone who does? I assure you they are differently motivated from a big-tech CEO. They typically work to achieve a sense of purpose, not power boats.
* And of course for-profit corporations almost always have more motivations than just profit. Sometimes they even describe them to shareholders. Cynics label official motivations for a corporation other than profit as "virtue signaling", as though the corporation has both true and feigned feelings, but it has neither. And if the feelings of the officers, employees, and owners of the corporation align with its official "feelings" is immaterial, only whether progress towards the goals they motivate is measurable.
I don't understand one thing.
Why is this submission flagged?
Also, why is this not on the front page? This has over 110 points while a post about OpenVMS on the front page has 34 points.
While I agree that OpenVMS is cool, I think the fate of over 20 million lives (due to the suspension of PEPFAR) deserves more weight than an obscure 50 year old operating system.
> why is this not on the front page? This has over 110 points while a post about OpenVMS on the front page has 34 points.
This question, phrased in the general case, is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. (Look for "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?")
In the present case, users flagged it and it set off the flamewar detector. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857139.
Simple: many (perhaps even most?) visitors take the name "hacker news" literally and are not interested in discussing socioeconomic news. At least not on this forum.
I am not the one who flagged it, but here's probably why: users feels this is off topic.
Overall as a non-american HN to me is a technical forum.
I know everything involves politics, but I honestly don't come to HN to know about about the US budget Federal decisions.
Whether we like it or not, US federal budget decisions impact NASA, Fermilab, academic AI researchers and the health of over 20 million people suffering from AIDS (among many many others).
> Overall as a non-american HN to me is a technical forum.
As a non-American, this is massive on its own, and could be absolutely world-changing depending on how it evolves. The US are where they are thanks to a great brain drain, powered by both industry and government money. Messing with this will have consequences, particularly coupled with visa restrictions. Or not, if Trump flip-flops once more. In any case, this is very important news for any technology- or science-adjacent field, including health and medicine.
I see this form of thought here a lot.
The general gist of it is "well, everyone else likes this so you should be okay with it too". Usually the person arguing in that direction is one of "everyone else".
I've never found it super convincing.
Personally, I don't actually think that the technical discourse here is super great- occasionally I see things from highly knowledgeable folks, but a lot of the time it's just hacks out a hackin.
HN is a forum run by venture capitalists and folks who are tied to that either aspirationally or professionally.
I get a lot of information about how that group of folks thinks from this site, and I find it helpful in understanding their affect on the world I live in.
You're welcome to have whatever preferences you have for the site, but it's not how I have been interacting with it for the last decade.
To the point about flagging, I am always surprised how willing folks are to believe that every other social media algo is gamed, but just assumed that there is no manipulation going on with their own media consumption.
I mean, go write a bot to flag stuff using ghost accounts, I don't care- I get my "HN front page" from a set of search terms, which will show a lot of dead and flagged content. It's pretty trivial to see what happens if you're looking to know that kind of thing, and other folks have written at least two tracking systems I know of for killed HN content.
I can totally buy that the reality of empire and its internal contradictions are uncomfortable enough for the tech bros that seem to make up the most of the site. The idea that they reflexively repress anything "political" sounds reasonable.
That doesn't seem like a great premise, but I buy it better than the idea that I should be beholden to that same ideal in my use of the site.
Because digg-style "bury brigades" are still a thing.
I flagged stuff like this because there's no real curious conversation to be had, it's not interesting in a technical way, it's unrelated to hacking and startups, and basically just incites lazy dog-piling that, while I don't disagree with it, is not interesting to read for me. I will go to reddit if I want to read that sort of commenting.
There's a joke around the orange website in here somewhere.
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I think you and I know why at this point. HN and YC as a whole are all in on this administration[1]. It's the reason why it's going to get censored.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774698
> I think you and I know why at this point.
I know it's satisfying, but that's a risky way to think if you care about the truth.
Users flagged the submission and it also set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector.
No mods or admins touched this post. , or even saw it until someone sent an email about it. Then I turned off the flags and the flamewar penalty.
Hey dang, can you explain why these threads were flagged then?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790729 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716926 (please don't say "paywall", there are so many submussions under the paywall from US-based magazines)
Who are these "users" and how to stop them? Thank you.
We can only guess why users flag things, but in those cases I'd guess it was because they were follow-up indignation pieces with lots of inflammatory energy but little intellectually interesting information. It could also have to do with the titles being flamebait (which of course is related).
You guys do get that HN is not a site for arguing angrily about the hottest political controversies and/or divisive personalities? If so, it shouldn't be a puzzle why community members flagged those posts: that kind of thing is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Users are people other than you who use the website. HTH.
> HN and YC as a whole are all in on this administration[1]
You made it sound like you were linking to evidence, but it’s just another post by yourself making the same unsubstantiated claim. That’s worth nothing. If anything, dang has shown over time they avoid silencing these discussions, it’s obvious users are the flaggers.
As someone that is in that cohort I think you are alluding to, I see just as much "anti-right" or "anti" or "anti Trump" type actions when it comes to flagging and downvotes. It's not at all obvious to me that one side owns the narrative here and only one set of ideas / directions are promoted or censored.
I have to be very careful in my support for the "wrong" side in touchy topics lest I be down-voted and flooded with low-effort jabs by frankly very smart and knowledgeable people. These people can bash me with their "intelligence" despite them many times being wrong or not understanding my point or seeing that we have simply have different principles manifesting in different views. This transcends tech, politics and any other realm we regularly discuss here.
> Given the spending that is now on hold was apportioned by Congress, it is likely this will face legal challenges about the scope of presidential power.
So, how quickly will this be overturned?
Have you met the current congress? They have to care first.
This assumes that they are the only party with standing to sue, which is not likely the case. (Previous rulings on the lack of the authority of the executive to withhold appropriated funds have come in suits by intended recipients.) Both private parties (nonprofits and businesses) [1] and a group of 23 states [2] have already filed suit over the order.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/non-profits-health-groups-sue-...
[2] https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
EDIT:
And it has been blocked, for now: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-pause-federal-grants...
Supreme court is in Trump's pocket. You can bet it will be appealed, all the way up, with some new legal theory invented to say that Trump can do whatever he wants.
Is it up to congress though? Not the Supreme Court?
It would be, but they are a rubber stamp for Trump now. Now only judges can stop the madness. Hopefully SCOTUS will actually do their job and make sure that Trump sticks to the law, which does not allow him to just defund programs set up by Congressional vote. Otherwise we wouldn't need a Congress. He's pushing at the walls to see how much he can tear down.
Someone with standing needs to sue, which is then moved through the court system. We would need a US v Trump.
That, or they impeach, which is utterly laughable.
Anyone who's supposed to receive that money has standing and a federal judge can quickly rule that the status quo must remain while the case proceeds. The Trump administration can appeal that ruling but I think it would make it's way through the available steps relatively quickly.
The next steps are probably to cut funding anyway. I have a gut feeling that this is part of a larger power play that demonstrates that (this specific) President has no limitations on his power.
How quickly did any of the Trump trials conclude?
They concluded pretty quickly once he won the election.
Yooouch
The cases don't have to conclude to get a binding interim order (preliminary injunction) blocking the action.
We hired someone to manage our obligations who was famous for signing contracts and then stiffing his contractors. It makes perfect sense that, once freed from underlings who were loyal to anyone or anything but him, he would continue this practice.
All the entities that were receiving those grants and aid have already obligated it. They have rented office space, hired employees, purchased equipment. And all of the entities they have contracted with using this money have done the same. If they have to dissolve, they won't be there to start up again if the courts manage to compel the administration to execute the laws as written. (And Trump is also famous for protracted lawsuits which he wins by default when some deadline has passed.) Closed storefronts don't tend to open with the same business.
I don't mind when rich fools learn hard lessons. Their self-esteem drops but their quality of life doesn't. It sucks when poor people are the blackboard on which this hard lesson is written.
The first quarterly profits of the White House will be improved.
Businessmen do enjoy their short-term gains afterall.
So true. In for a penny, in for a pound. Until their money printer breaks down under the sheer weight of their lunacy.
Impeachment speedrun.
First the inspectors general firing, and now this - which seems to be illegal impoundment?
> Impeachment speedrun.
An impeachment of a GOP president, by a GOP House and GOP Senate? With one of the GOP reps trying to give him a third term:
* https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
* https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/23/trump-third-term-amendment-c...
Sure.
The GOP are now basically accomplices.
Plus it’s not like there are Democrats doing anything to fight it.
> Plus it’s not like there are Democrats doing anything to fight it.
Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do, given recent actions have all been Executive Orders, which is the prerogative of the Executive branch.
Unless things start happening in the legislature, where perhaps things like filibustering are an option, what options do the Democrats have against purely Executive actions?
> Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do,
Biden had a very long time to do a lot of things. You can get a lot done with a bit of creativity and a willingness to cause a few constitutional crisis'.
He was even given a blank check for crime by the Supreme Court.
What things do you think the Democrats should do but aren't doing? Your "anything" suggests you think there are many such things. A list would be helpful.
Oh, when the republicans are turning to fascism let's blame the democrats that lost the election completely and has no power to do anything anymore.
Exactly. There is no need for fascism because there is no left opposing him. That is what people do not understand. We have corporate government that will be dictating your lives and you are focused on Trump and not the Oligarchs that control everything.
They lack the numbers. And it seems everyone is frightened by everyone else's obsequiousness towards borderline illegal orders.
What would a hypothetical "left" do differently than the current Democrats? Assuming this "left" is similarly handicapped like the Democrats are, having just lost control of the House, Senate and White House?
You don't get to blame the Democrats anymore. They were voted out in November, and are no longer in power in any way.
There is no "opposition" power structure in the US system.
If congress brings a bill to a vote, democrats can threaten to filibuster it, but the GOP can pretty easily call that bluff right now.
That's it. That's the only "power" a minority party has in the US system.
I am sure at least some of them know right from wrong. It'd be a tragedy if representatives were loyal to a president over the country.
It’s almost like you haven’t been watching US politics for the last eight years.
I should have said I'm hopeful. I'm always hopeful people can behave like adults and see the long term consequences of their action (and inaction) over others as well as themselves.
This is like being hopeful of staying dry in the rain
> It'd be a tragedy if representatives were loyal to a president over the country.
Trump was impeached twice by the House but was not convicted by the GOP-controlled Senate twice.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Donald_Trump
The second impeachment was for "incitement of insurrection".
Pardon my bluntness, but what planet are you living on?
Knowing right from wrong and acting on that knowledge are entirely different though.
> I am sure at least some of them know right from wrong.
They also know which way the crowd/mob leans, and they know if they want to achieve their goals/agenda
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
they need to have power
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
If you don't have power you can't do shit. Just ask Harris/Biden/Clinton.
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” ― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
At this point, at least in the US, ideals are for suckers and losers. You can have ideals once you're in, but being effective is more important before that.
There is no if in that sentence. It is Trump's party. The party of what used to be personal freedom is now in support of what amounts to a king.
It's honestly astonishing.
What were once considered conservative values have been completely tossed aside. It kind of blows my mind.
Standing up to Trump is dangerous to one's political and mortal future. He's removed the security details of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, two Republicans who served him during his first term. Trump is a spiteful man with no care about the lives or safety of others, and that's partly what got him elected. The remaining Republicans know this, and will toe the line. Speaking out against Trump, even if one retires, is dangerous.
So the Executive and majorities in both houses of the Legislative branch are all aligned? How does that make them "accomplices" and not just a valid government doing governance?
> How does that make them "accomplices" and not just a valid government doing governance?
By supporting someone who attempted a self-coup:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_T...
"Accomplice" means a confederate in a crime. If the executive violates a law and the legislature, among whose duties is to catch and prosecute such acts, allows him to do so, they are accomplices. If they work together to achieve ends through the normal, legal process, they are not accomplices.
Sorry this doesn't acknowledge the reality of how our government has trended over the last 30 years
What is a crime? At the end of the day, laws and legal processes are just social norms. To quote The Onion: "Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole"[0]
[0] https://theonion.com/trump-claims-he-can-overrule-constituti...
Who will enforce the law against him?
There's a long list of EOs that have been overturned by courts.
For now.
How long until these get pushed up to the constitutional courts where the judges can be legally bribed?
There is a long list of unpunished Trump crime.
Since it isn’t clear what exactly will be stopped here.
Some of these could hurt the districts with republican representation the most. Like food stamps, unemployment, and similar. So maybe something this stupid will wake people up?
A lot of other policies could be twisted so trump isn’t directly blamed. This is… pretty cut and dry if you suddenly stop getting money you rely on.
So maybe it’s actually possible? One can hope.
I have zero faith. Republicans in those districts will find a way to spin this, and the people will eat it up.
Maybe I'm just too cynical anymore but I have almost no faith in the American electorate.
I mean. You’re not wrong.
I think the only way I am going to be sane over the next 2 or 4 years is to hold out some sliver of hope…
He promised months back that he would challenge the impoundment law. He claims it's unconstitutional.
See: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/26/nx-s1-5195528/trump-impoundme...
So presumably he wants this to go to the Supreme Court. If the court rule against him, then Congress's authority is preserved, so I doubt they will impeach him. If the court rules in his favor, then I doubt they'd impeach him over something the court agrees with him on.
JD Vance might be his insurance policy. I can easily imagine him being even worse.
Absent context, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made. Remember, though, that we're comparing a JD Vance who was recently impressed with the importance of following the rules with a Trump recently impressed by the opposite.
It doesn't matter, they won't vote to remove. Even actual treason wasn't enough last time.
Donald Trump could do truly terrible things that I will not list because I would be accused of hysteria and the GOP would not impeach, let along convict him. The only sin I can imagine they would not forgive is to raise taxes on the wealthy. It's going to be a long, strange four years, and perhaps more.
> Impeachment speedrun.
do you think Trump is playing this by ear? this term is unique because he has an experienced team that has already served one term, they are aware of what comes after leaving office, they had 4 years to plan ahead, and they can blame the previous administration for a lot of stuff.
if Trump was going to serve two terms anyway, this is the worst-case scenario for democrats.
Even if he was impeached (he won't be), then its DJ Vance, who will just continue the playbook. Looking at the next 6 people in the presidential line of succession, everyone on of them would be fully onboard with keeping this up.
nothing new. Reagan fired 15 IGs too soon after his 1981 inauguration
So, I'm not American and have just seen all the Trump circus from afar in the las 10 years.
But... hasn't Donald Trump ready been impeached, trialed, found guilty of several crimes, several times with total impunity?
Like, at.this point from here it seems he can do as he pleases. He could very well shoot someone and he will get away with it.
The only hope for the US as a country is some kind of natural disaster (heart attack , stroke or similar).
Nope. Congress destroyed the power of the impeachment in Trump's first term.
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Not giving money to researchers is hardly a criminal matter. Of course some congressmen could propose impeachment anyway, pretty sure some already have, but they don't have the numbers to kick him out of office so it's just posturing for their constituents.
Executive impoundment is explicitly illegal and unconstitutional, actually. The president does not have the power of the purse, that's congress.
Arguably this is only temporary. I don't think Congress sets the timeline do they?
It's not immediately clear to me how we should read the Constitution on that question, but the Impoundment Control Act seems to explicitly include "delay" alongside "withholding" in things that it might be forbidding.
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Well, at this rate, and by his actions, Trump is basically telling congress to get f'ed.
His disregard with what Congress already signed into law is troubling, but he might find sympathy from members who were not in Congress before, as well as members who didn't sign the legislation he's overriding.
Then those new members can pass a law ratifying these cuts and doing so legally. This is just crime.
Memo source, though apparently two were released, one with later clarifications.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/deb7af80-48b6-4b8a-... https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25506191-omb-memo-1-...
Side note the OMB (agency issuing memo in question) website redirects straight to whitehouse.gov, which seemingly was not previously the case.
"everything from development assistance to military aid."
Was written twice. I appreciated that.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849061
Awesome conversation. Saner heads prevailed in this one. This is going to backfire very badly on the American people if it becomes the norm. Happy that supporters of this madness got their asses kicked out of here today.
He's rapidly trending into dictator territory
It seems to be what people wanted!
It is not what he campaigned on, nor what the majority of voters wanted. Not once did I hear “we are going to shut down clinical trials so your loved ones die.” I did hear a lot about grocery prices, which certainly aren’t going down because of this.
Then you weren't paying attention. There were plenty of clues that this is precisely what was going to happen. There were many of us sounding the alarms and too many people scoffed. If you want to see what comes next, take an in depth look at project 2025. It's all there. It's the plan. It was always the plan.
I'm astonished that anyone believed things would unfold any differently than they have. We were told exactly what will happen by everyone in power. And the kissing of the King's ring before inauguration should have been a clue.
Shit is going to get awful. It's already to the point that, when I'm on reddit, I can't distinguish between r/news and r/collapse headlines.
Folks think I'm saying "I didn't expect this" when what I'm saying is "Donald Trump didn't campaign on it." That's relevant and people need to be reminded of it every single day.
But I mean, it was part of the campaign. You can't be forgiven for not being able to read between the lines. The campaign went like this:
- Kamala: He's going to do Project 2025.
- Trump: No I'm not ;)
- You: Well he said he wasn't going to do it, he lied!
You missed the wink and the fingers crossed behind his back, but the rest of us picked up on it. Sorry you weren't paying attention to that, but Kamala pointed it out to you, so you can't say you weren't warned.
Trump did in fact explicitly say he “hadn’t heard of Project 2025” repeatedly during his campaign. Bullshit obviously, and his supporters were warned many times of this, but I still think it’s fair to say this specific set of actions isn’t what he explicitly campaigned on.
Being a dictator is absolutely what he campaigned on. He literally said it, and signalled it in every way possible. Those that didn't see that coming either weren't paying attention or wanted it to happen.
>>> He's rapidly trending into dictator territory
>> It seems to be what people wanted!
> It is not what he campaigned on […]
"Trump’s vow to only be a dictator on ‘day one’ follows growing worry over his authoritarian rhetoric"
* https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritar...
"Trump reiterates he wants to be a ‘dictator’ for ‘one day’ at Wisconsin rally":
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-re...
It’s been a lot longer than a day.
The thing about dictators is once you give them power, you can't take it back, even if they promise they want it just for one day.
Give a sociopathic malignantly narcissistic chaos monkey an inch and they'll take...well...everything.
AFAIK there was information about Project 2025, so this was not secret was it? And lot of people still support this as you can see it even here (as this thread is already flagged).
There are enough people who will reactively flag anything that touches the lines between politics and everything else, usually under a misunderstanding of the guidelines, that it's hard to infer intent behind a flag kill.
Project 2025 was getting grassroots attention & was becoming rabidly unpopular.
Trump denied any affiliation, claimed he didn't know these people. (Even though many are folks he's already worked with.) The media accepted that unquestionablably & regurgitated Trump's obvious lies.
Can you find even one actual Trump voter that says they regret voting for him? All the supporters I know still seem pleased with their choice.
Dictatorship is literally what he campaigned on.
Then frankly you weren’t paying attention. This was all laid out in Project 2025 and there were plentiful ties between it and Trump despite his deflection.
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Communism? This looks like the end stage of capitalism affirms horseshoe theory. It was the capitalists who were sitting front row at the inauguration, not communists.
This is the most disheartening part of it all. I have immense respect for the ideals that formed the United States, but I'm increasingly in doubt about the actual implementation.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
--Benjamin Franklin's response to Elizabeth Willing Powel's question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
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Anyone who wants freedom and to control the excesses and abuses of the people in power would support the ideals of the Constitution. Just because white people created it does not mean that non-white people may not want to also be free and protected from abuses of the powerful.
Considering how non-white people keep streaming into white countries that have benefited from these white created Constitutional limitations on power, it seems they too desire freedom and liberty even if they are being used and manipulated by the powerful in the white world to essentially break those shackles on the powerful by a kind of civilization fracking, pumping so many people into a system until it collapses and those shackles on the powerful can be removed and the powerful can once again act just like the powerful act in all the non-white countries that have not implemented the white created constitutional limitations on power.
People may not realize they are a tool of the rich and powerful to destroy the very freedoms you currently enjoy, but this has never been a white vs non-white issue even though the jealousy has been used to further the aims of the rich and powerful. It has always been a rich and powerful vs the middle class and poor, with the rich and powerful manipulating the middle and lower classes to act against their own interests and in the interests of the rich and powerful. The saddest thing is that people on the “left” and often the poor, are just useful idiots for the rich and powerful, no different than some gang leader uses and abuses people to commit more abuse and crimes to get richer and more powerful.
I’m not sure what people imagine will happen when white people, who essentially created everything we all enjoy, including freedoms from tyrannical violence and oppression, have been eradicated, but there is no indication that it will end well.
And no, I’m not white since that seems very important to you.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to "the ideals that formed the United States". They're not nearly as admirable as we like to believe.
Some of the worst atrocities are no longer in practice -- though it took the bloodiest war in US history to achieve some of them. But that's not the same as fixing the ideals, and many of those problems are still woven through the fabric of the law and the society.
Imagine what those "ideals" might have been if women, blacks, native Americans, poor people, and others had been in the room. Giving them the right to vote after the basic framework is laid down does not accomplish that.
> I’m not sure what people imagine will happen when white people, who essentially created everything we all enjoy,
Just... No. Not only non-whites created a lot of things we all enjoy (money, algebra), that are also foundational for our civilization. Also, white people also invented a lot of things we all should vehemently reject (such as fascism).
> including freedoms from tyrannical violence and oppression, have been eradicated, but there is no indication that it will end well.
Very hard NO on this one as well. Nobody is eradicating white people and nobody is even considering it.
Most people that voted for him either weren't paying attention to the clips you and I saw of what he said he wanted to do, or didn't believe him.
People in the right-wing media ecosystem are not presented with anything that might threaten their image of their politicians.
And people in the right-wing media ecosystem RABIDLY sequester themselves away from any possible source of contrary information.
Goddamn, like imagine if Hilary Clinton made a social media company called "Truth Social"!
But there always seems to be double standards
Hardly a surprise.
No, he is not. Many of these are ordinary powers that could have been used by any president.
When he comes for the military, Supreme Court, and Congress, that is the trend you want to look for.
Over-exaggerating what Trump does plays into his handbook.
> When he comes for... Congress
What are your opinions on January 6th? That would include both the fake electors plot and the riot attempting to interrupt congressional proceedings.
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Refusing to execute laws passed by Congress is not an ordinary power.
He wouldn't be refusing to execute laws passed by Congress, he would argue he is exercising his own power that Congress is trying to restrict unconstitutionally. Incidentally he believes his own power is limitless, and it appears SCOTUS does as well.
Not so fast.
> Given the spending that is now on hold was apportioned by Congress, it is likely this will face legal challenges about the scope of presidential power.
If he can face legal challenges he is no where close to a dictator.
SCOTUS already said he's immune from any official act he does as president.
Only immune for core constitutional powers
He's immune from prosecution. He can still lose court cases that say that he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do X, though, for many values of X.
At that point he can order his subordinates to ignore the ruling. If his subordinates claim that the court ruling overrides his orders then he can fire them. Court orders are purely advisory after the Trump v. United States decision.
Well, if he goes that route, there are still three things that could stop him:
1. Federal employees could refuse, even at the price of being fired, in enough numbers that there isn't a functioning government if he fires them all.
2. Congress could impeach for ignoring the court ruling.
3. The people could decide that, if he is going to ignore the constitution, then they're going to ignore him (and the whole federal government), since it's only the constitution that says that they need to listen to the president. If the president tries to enforce it by force, then it becomes a civil war; if not, then the country just collapses into the states.
(Keep in mind that the military's oath is to the constitution, not to the president. If the president is giving them orders contrary to the constitution - and contrary to a court order stating that the orders are against the constitution - it is far from clear that the military will obey them.)
But if none of those happens, then sure, the president can order whatever he wants.
> Congress could impeach for ignoring the court ruling.
What if he just ignores the impeachment?
The answer to that one is they would inaugurate the Vice President, and then it would be up to the generals who they would follow.
> in enough numbers that there isn't a functioning government if he fires them all.
Sounds like it would be small enough to drown in the bathtub at that point. Mission accomplished.
> Congress could impeach for ignoring the court ruling.
Only if Democrats have a 60 vote majority in the Senate. Not happening. In the last impeachment, Trump argued he was allowed to extort a bribe from a foreign ally by holding up congressionally appropriated funds to benefit his reelection campaign, and as long as he did so with the benefit of the USA in mind, it cannot be grounds for removal via impeachment. The Senate agreed with him and acquitted him of all charges. Why in the world do you think that would go any differently a second time? And who is going to bring those articles? Republicans?
> The people could decide that, if he is going to ignore the constitution, then they're going to ignore him (and the whole federal government), since it's only the constitution that says that they need to listen to the president. If the president tries to enforce it by force, then it becomes a civil war
And herein lies the problem. This appears to be the only path forward if Trump keeps going in this direction and Republicans don't relent. Note he has already argued he has the right to use the military against US citizens.
I do think that congress would impeach if he said "I declare martial law and cancel elections". He'll have to get there piecemeal without creating a single moment for opposition to coalesce.
It'll be much more subtle than that: simply deploy ICE personnel at polling stations who will arrest any non-white person who cannot prove their lawful residence on the spot. They'll be let out, but only after the election is passed.
Why though? Why wouldn't the Republicans just go along with the new dictatorial regime, as they have been every step of the way? If they really had the character you imagine, they would have held the line at the insurrection. Instead they whitewashed it and put him back in power. I am in no way confident that group of people would check his power again.
He's not immune from prosecution, but prosecution requires evidence. But he controls the evidecne and witnesses, and there's no way to compel him to produce evidence, witnesses to testify, or really conduct any substantive investigation. So, how does one prosecute that case? And who prosecutes it? The DOJ he controls? Or the Congress who are in his cult? And who rules against him, the SCOTUS and judges he appointed? Who would enforce the decision, himself?
That is not at all close to what the ruling said.
"immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate"
Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), is a landmark decision[1][2] of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate[1][2] such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch.
This covers a lot of what he's doing.
That's argument is easily contradicted by plenty of worldwide examples of opposition trying to use the courts to combat dictators. Dictators often ignore court decision they dislike because they have the ultimate power of enforcement.
Big “if”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024...
The playbook is to slowly destroy the limits of power. First step is to bombard the opposition with a flurry of orders that will need to be questioned. Some will be, but some will stick. Rinse and repeat and, the next time, orders could be more extreme. By then, they'll be harder to stop, either because you are still fighting the first round, or because there is no one left to question the next.
There is already plenty reason to be concerned.
January 6th, where he was found guilty but didn't receive punishment because he's above the law.
Oh and he's already started firing people from the military...
Shrugging the shoulders is what lead us here, and you keep doing it.
In no way I am shrugging my shoulders. We gain more ground holding to truths than these easily debunked falsehoods.
> January 6th, where he was found guilty but didn't receive punishment because he's above the law.
No, he was not. He was acquitted. Twice
https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impeachment-trial-live-up...
> Oh and he's already started firing people from the military
This is common. For example: Obama
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/obama-fires-tw...
> We gain more ground holding to truths than these easily debunked falsehoods.
Then you should display more candor in describing these situations rather than be reductionist about it. He was acquitted not because he was not guilty of those things, but because his political allies determined the things he was guilty of were not impeachable.
Trump argued:
The "thing he did to help him get elected" in this case was holding up Congressionally appropriated money to gain leverage over a foreign nation (Ukraine), which he used to to attempt the extortion of a bribe (opening a pretextual investigation against his political opponent, Joe Biden). That they acquitted him does not mean he didn't do those things. It was conclusively proven he did that. It's just that Republicans think that's legitimate political behavior, and refused to remove him.As for the second impeachment, this is what Mitch McConnell said:
Many of the Senators had the same reasoning, which is that while they blamed Trump they didn't feel they had the power to impeach him at that time, so they left it up to the courts. So no, they did not really acquit him, and yes, they did lay the blame at his feet for what happened (found him guilty).As a final point, McConnell mentions that we have a criminal justice system to hold him accountable, but Trump argued that impeachment is the only tool that could, and indeed the SCOTUS agreed to a large extent. So if he can't be held accountable by impeachment, and not by the courts, he's above the law.
"He was acquitted" and nothing else matters. That is how the law works. Do you now want to get rid of the rule of law?
"practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day" does not make the thing he did illegal. "so they left it up to the courts", which again is the rule of law.
"So if he can't be held accountable by impeachment, and not by the courts, he's above the law." If the laws does not find someone guilty then that is the rule of law working. Being above the law would be being found guilty and then not having any consequences. He was not found guilty. Period.
Do you want mob rule? Vigilante justice? Or the rule of law?
Let me make it clear, I do not like Trump in the smallest bit, but acting like an authoritarian does not make me a better person.
First, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. He was proven to have committed extortion and bribery by the House prosecutors in the first impeachment, and his defense was he was allowed to do it, not that he didn't do it. That to me screams "above the law", because what he was proven to have done was extort a bribe, and that is in fact an enumerated impeachable offense. You can't square that circle without using his party affiliation to elevate him above that clause of the Constitution. If he were a Democrat he would have been impeached and removed, but then again he would never have been elected as a Democrat.
As for the law, the legal process did not fully play out. We were promised courts would be the appropriate venue by McConnell when he voted to acquit despite saying that the evidence shows he is guilty. That's not really an acquittal in the way you're trying to portray because the only reason the acquittal happened was because McConnell felt the case deserved to be tried in court, not in the Senate.
But where is that trial? It was curtailed due to Trump's election as POTUS, and it was stymied by people he appointed to the court. So how are you going to talk about the rule of law, when justice has been denied to the American people for the crimes committed against us? Where is our trial? It was cancelled because... what's that? He's above the law until he's actually demonstrably bound by it. So far that demonstration has been elusive.
What I want is a trial, with evidence, a judge, and a jury. That's not mob rule.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs
I'd hate to compare Trump to Hitler, but many forget that Hitler and the National Socialist Party came to power completely by legal means - truly a feat of political engineering.
And furthermore, they were on the brink of total failure many, many times - but always managed to get a lifeline by the actions of indifferent politicians and statesmen - many whom could have stopped them, by simply saying no. They (NSDAP) could not believe what they managed to get away with, and the sheer luck they had.
What we're seeing now is sort of parallel to that, in the way that the people that do care, simply do not seem to take action. Maybe it's the fear of being primaried, maybe it's the fear of personal retribution, maybe they just don't want to rock the boat.
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The president is not allowed to pause spending just for the sake of it. This is prevented by federal statute.
I mean this with all due respect but I don't think you know what a dictatorship is.
You could disagree by saying how or why you disagree, for example maybe you feel a dictatorship must have a singular dictator and not be a group of elected officials.
I don't like Trump, but many of the things he is doing technically could have been exercised a long time ago. Fortunately (or unfortunately) decorum was generally a thing, so said powers were not exercised.
Now we will see the extent to which these powers can, and should be used. The way the USA is supposed to work is a balance of executive, legislative and judicial powers. The problem mainly is that the legislative branch refuses to compromise and do anything. The judicial and executive branches seem to be taking the lead, with the executive, that is the president, at the helm.
I expect even the conservative Supreme Court to rule against most of the recent activity, though. Especially the 14th amendment stuff.
> I expect even the conservative Supreme Court to rule against most of the recent activity, though. Especially the 14th amendment stuff.
This is a test I'm eager to see, but I'm not very hopeful about it.
My cynical take on this is that he's shaking everything up on "day 1"-ish because that's what the people who funded him want and giving them what they want right after the election hits big and will secure more funding. I wouldn't be surprised if he's expecting all of these changes to be shot down and whatnot but doesn't care because they'll have forgotten all about it soon enough but they will remember this last week or so.
The most important detail (the amount) is being left. Is this just a few dollars (in terms of the US budget) or a sizable portion? How is the money split between the different categories?
Those details aren’t known; because the order is so broad and vague. That’s part of the problem.
Have you read it, it's downright insane. "Marxist", "woke", etc. it carves out an exception for Medicare and Social Security, but that's literally it. Even things like Pell grants, food stamps, and Medicaid are up in the other because the wording here is that bad.
So, as of this order, the US just had an ~$3 the trillion drop in GDP. Much of it to research and nonprofits.
Not literally: "Medicare and Social Security benefits will not be affected, nor will any programme "that provides direct benefits to individuals", including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, the White House said."
I guess the article or link has been updated?
Ignoring the legality of this, I don't really see what this is trying to accomplish. Even if the spending is not in line with Trump's priorities, it's not like he can unilaterally change the budget (of course, that's not stopping him...).
One silver lining of this madness is I expect bipartisan support for clarifying and codifying the scope of executive power into law at some point in the future (sadly likely after Trump is long gone, though).
> I don't really see what this is trying to accomplish.
Chaos power grab.
There is no silver lining here. The USA fell gradually, then all at once. It's over, done. We lost.
>I expect bipartisan support for clarifying and codifying the scope of executive power into law
Absolutely not going to happen.
Trump Republicans want him to function more like a supreme executive/king instead of a president with controls on his power.
Other Republicans are too scared of losing their jobs to stop this either.
Democrats do better with an enemy, so they actually have a perverse incentive here.
If we make it through this mess with our democracy intact, I will definitely be surprised. I hope I'm being dramatic, but I'm afraid I'm not.
We'll see but I believe you're probably wrong. This particular action, e.g. federal aid pause, will affect people from all states. The constitutes will be rightly angry and threaten their congressmen, which will result in the outcome I mentioned earlier.
I just think that politicians have figured out how to spread whatever lines they want into the public consciousness better than ever.
I don't see Republican constituents blaming Republican politicians. They'll find a way to spin it to fit their existing world view. Democrats as well; same story, different words. Division is the name of the game.
These discussions never seem to answer important questions.
If we never question taxation. And never question spending. Where do we end-up?
It is sustainable?
Why is it that we can never question either one of these things?
Are these things like fundamental laws of gravity?
Are politicians never to be questioned for their spending or desire to tax us more?
Or how they use our money?
Is it wrong to periodically evaluate the results obtained by every dollar spent?
If so, why?
Does that mean we should allow politicians and agencies to spend as they wish and without supervision or accountability?
Is there ever a good time for oversight?
Etc.
Today it was revealed that we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms. What? This is insane. And, I suspect, likely the tip of the iceberg.
C'mon folks. Questioning how our money is spent and how much money is taken from us by government is what we should be doing all the time. It should not be the exception. Without accountability, politicians (from all political angles) will take and spend as much as they are able to.
I have this hypothesis: If the government did not take taxes out of your paycheck every week and people had to write them a check every month, there would be riots in every city of this nation. People are blind to taxation and the related spending because they never see that money, it's magic money. You don't feel the pain. If you did, you'd be up in arms when you learn that $50MM of your dollars are going towards buying condoms on the other side of the planet.
And, BTW, those condoms are likely made in China. If they are needed, why doesn't China donate the condoms? Why do US taxpayers have to foot the bill and likely support a healthy profit margin in the process?
We are not going to end-up in a good place if we do not clean-up our attic and bring the house to order. I trust Elon/DOGE and, by extension, the current administration, to do just this. Enough is enough.
Put a different way: We DESPERATELY need to invest this money on internal growth, education, security, health, etc. We need housing, better health outcomes, much better education and myriad other things. Money is not unlimited. Instead of spending $50MM for condoms in Gaza, we should put that money to work where it will do the most good at home.
In order to know where and how much we are wasting, we need to put a microscope on everything and, perhaps, put a number of things on hold while we sort things out. It's a necessary part of the process.
Unrelated to this thread, what do you think about BQN and especially Uiua? For a decade, you lamented that APL was dead and nothing further developed notation qua tool of thought. I am curious if you see hope for the APL way today.
> we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms.
This is a patently obvious and gross mischaracterization. The US has been providing a broad spectrum of humanitarian assistance addressing urgent needs such as emergency medical aid, food, water.
Whether or not you agree with that, you undermine our chances at constructive discourse when you exaggerate or otherwise decontextualize a situation.
It's also absurdly disingenuous to claim that "we never question taxation. And never question spending." Of course these concerns are the subject of continuous debate by much more serious people than yourself.
Again, whether or not you agree with the outcome, the assertion that "we never question taxation" is utterly, and completely divorced from reality.
> you undermine our chances at constructive discourse when you exaggerate or otherwise decontextualize a situation.
You are proving my point. You have decided it is absurd to question anything. You have unilaterally decided what I said isn't true and whatever the hell you believe is, in fact, the only truth. Therefore, nothing to see here. Do not question authority. Do not question spending. Do not even bother to engage in any level of forensic accounting to see what's going on.
> It's also absurdly disingenuous to claim that "we never question taxation. And never question spending."
You are also confusing politicians TALKING about taxation and spending with us DOING something about it. For all that debating, we throw money at (likely) millions of things we should not be funding at all. One of those categories is what I call "stupid foreign aid".
At the state level, things are not any better. Here in CA we have been duped by politicians into throwing money at a ridiculous high speed train that went from "We can build it for $10 billion" to now being somewhere over $130 billion and rising. They are saying it will require another $140 billion to complete. Here we are, nearly twenty years after voter passed a $10 billion dollar proposition and got nothing for it. This stupid thing will probably cost half a trillion dollars and will never attract enough riders to even approximate direct and indirect costs.
You have to wonder how many projects like this exist in the federal budget. Crap that is doing nothing but burning cash.
> by much more serious people than yourself.
And then, having nothing to say, you resort to personal attacks. As if that is going to change reality in any way. Good for you.
We must kneel down, bow our heads and accept what we are told. Taxation is OK. Do no question it. Ever. Spending is OK. Do not question it. Ever.
Got it.
> You have unilaterally decided what I said isn't true
Presented without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
> > we were sending USD $50 million to Gaza for condoms.
> This is a patently obvious and gross mischaracterization.
Looks like it hasn't been confirmed yet, but let's not pretend like there aren't really odd and weird and arguably wasteful items in the US spending bills that serve no immediate purpose for US citizens.
Rand Paul releases a yearly report of some of the most prominent ones that he uncovers. I assume they're all hidden in thousand-page spending bills that make it through. These are the results of people that are really un-serious and I wouldn't trust them with our money, they're just drunk on the numbers. To them, a million here a million there is peanuts and essentially bargaining chips in the little games they play in senate/congress.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/dr-paul-releases-202...
I'm busy reading the report now, but the summary notes:
"$4.8 million on Ukrainian influencers, $32,596 on breakdancing, $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security, $3 Million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil, and much more!"
> $32,596 on breakdancing
Without context, this is meaningless. This may be wasteful, or may create a community space where needed, or sponsor an Olympic team, or... There's many ways that 32k may be an easy investment for a much bigger return.
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flag, hide and move on.
that being said, I'm not sure what you expect. many of trump's actions for better or worse have tech consequences.
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in that case maybe it's time to move on from HN, and maybe the internet generally until 2028.
Maybe, but HN is so good when it focuses on concrete tech issues.
AI prognostications are almost worse than the politics.
I appreciate discussions on politics with smart people that don't always agree with me. I don't want HN to turn into an echo chamber. I understand why people would choose not to see news about politics, and I am also frustrated by how frequently discourse about these important issues turns into personal attacks and uncivil discourse.
I second that these developments have immense repercussions in tech and in the lives of many of us (even those who live across the Atlantic such as myself).
Are there not enough politics forums for that sort of thing already?
How does HN became and echo chamber if we limit ourselves to tech discussions?
I might agree with you if the discussions were high value, but in the current environment that is essentially impossible.
> I might agree with you if the discussions were high value, but in the current environment that is essentially impossible.
All the more reason we should keep trying. These are important discussions and this place has some very smart people who can actually make a difference.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42851328.)
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
This was said by Grover Norquist, a thought leader amongst Republicans in the early 2010's. I've always thought that China or Russia would appreciate being able to drown us in a bathtub as well.
> Grover Norquist
See:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
> This was said by Grover Norquist, a thought leader amongst Republicans in the early 2010's.
Norquist actually said that in 2001, not the early 2010s.
Not weaken, destroy.
I thought we tried this last time, didn't we?
He has much more conplete control of fhe Republican Party and, fhrough that, much less practical constraint in both policy and personnel this time, so this Administration reflects his will and intentions much more purely than did his first.
he also has control of the courts.
No intelligence agency would enlist him. He can't keep secrets.
A stick of dynamite can't keep secrets either but it does its job.
That's a good point. And, after the damage is done, who cares who started it? It's not like there will be repercussions for Putin.
Doesn’t really matter at this point. But if he were, he would not be behaving any differently.
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, and all that.
Like, I've no doubt that Putin is very happy that he was elected, and the FSB and GRU probably put their finger on the scale to at least some extent, but it's probably more a case of a convenient idiot than a Manchurian candidate.
> Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, and all that.
that only applies when you have a flat prior. stupidity should be random - one action moves the needle one way, another action moves it back and you have an average of zero. when every action moves the needle the same way and somebody benefits from it, there's something going on.
I wish people would apply Hanlon's razor more critically. Because the way people apply it allows evil people to act dumb and get away with it all the time. Guess what: evil people don't come out and say "I'm evil!" They don't wear super villain costumes, and they don't look like evil monsters. They look like everyone else, and they say all the right things like everyone else. Evil people rely on plausible deniability and Hanlon's razor to get away with their deeds. At every turn they are called out, they will say "I didn't mean to, I'm really a good person honestly! You're overreacting! I was just joking!" At some point you have to put on your critical thinking skills and stop allowing people to lie to you.
Oh, to be clear (I was the Hanlon’s Razor invoker), I would consider Trump to be, well, evil, but in the amoral monster sense rather than the evil mastermind sense. He is a _profoundly_ bad person, but my view would be that it’s down to a failure to see people as people, rather than an active plan to hurt people (Some of his sponsors/handlers, of course, are type 2 evil, but if nothing else, Trump lacks the _visionary_ aspect that’s required for that.) If he thought it would benefit him, or if the right people whispered in his ear, he’d be a faux-humanitarian; he simply _doesn’t care_ (and, likely, doesn’t really understand the difference.)
> Guess what: evil people don't come out and say "I'm evil!" They don't wear super villain costumes, and they don't look like evil monsters.
sometimes they just do a Nazi salute in front of the world's cameras and people rush to their defence.
> Medicaid and Social Security benefits are not affected
That's disappointing, I wonder why those aren't getting paused? If you want to get spending under control and you're already breaking the law then you might as well stop everything.
Because no Republican would ever be elected to national office ever again?
> Because no Republican would ever be elected to national office ever again?
People regularly vote against their own interest out of spite:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
I don't think societies have such long attention spans, or the rationality, to follow through that.
Every single democracy in the world is facing the same problem of gerontocracy. The old people (or about to be old) vote the most, they have the most numbers, and they cannot enact any policies that will help the young by cutting old people entitlements.
Luckily, this is a problem that solves itself.
Medical science, of course, is delaying it somehow.
How does it solve itself if successive generations are smaller and smaller?
The current ones will eventually retire from public life.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is disproportionate share of society’s resources going to old people.
Hopefully they leave their inheritance to a number greater than 1.
You severely underestimate Trump, the GOP and a tamed media and tech industry's ability to spin things as the Democrats' fault.
They can also trivially rig elections by just organizing things to criminalize the majority of your opponents, but that's overkill.
At the end of the day, their win was total and permanent. There are no realistic fears of reelection issues to ever worry about.
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that was a rhetorical question. We all know why they don't do it: because a significant percentage of their voter base are boomers who rely on that stuff.
All that is a rounding error next to military spending. You want the deficit under control, cut military spending.
This is completely wrong:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Military spend is less than 20% (combination of “Defense” and “Veterans Benefits and Services”). Some of the Vererans benefits and services are old age healthcare and defined benefit pension, so that can get subtracted from military spend and moved over to social security and Medicare (since it would happen anyway regardless of military spend).
Social security, Medicare, Medicaid m, and other healthcare subsidies are 21% + 14% + 13% = 47%.
Income security is another 9%, like food stamps, social security supplemental income, earned income tax credits, all stuff for lower income/wealth households.
So 60% of US federal government spend is welfare. Less than 20% is military. 13% is interest costs. And the remaining ~7% is for everything else.
Generally Social Security and Medicare are not considered to be welfare.
Speaking of Social Security, I did an interesting calculation. If each year starting with the year I first paid Social Security tax the government had taken that money each month and the matching amount my employer paid and put that money in a one year T-bill, and each year rolled the maturing T-bills over into new T-bills, that would have grown enough that by retirement it would be enough to pay my benefits for close to my expected remaining lifespan.
It was surprising how well it matched although I think it may be coincidence. Benefits go up if you had higher income when working and down if you had lower income, but it is not linear.
Someone with half my income would have benefits lower than me, but their benefits as a percentage of their income would be higher and so T-bills wouldn't have earned enough to cover them [1]. Similarly for someone earning twice as much as me T-bills would have earned more than needed to coverer their benefits. I apparently came in right at the spot where it balances out.
[1] Your benefit is calculated based on the average monthly income for your 35 highest income years. If your monthly average was M, and you become eligible to start collecting social security in 2025, your benefit at full retirement age is the sum of:
For this calculation past year incomes are index for the cost of living. For example in 1986 I earned a nice round $42 000. That counts as $161 537 when doing the calculation of my monthly average.If anyone is curious you can get the adjustment factors here [2].
[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awifactors.html
I would contend it is welfare since the quality and quantity of the benefits constantly decreasing (due to population histogram flattening out). Benefits received are less and less correlated with what you put in.
Defined benefits need to be reduced, via changes such as raising retirement age, changing the bend point in the benefit formula, and changing the inflation measure.
Also, that left hand right hand change of funds from social security trust fund to US treasuries is not meaningful. At the end of the day, if the government is not collecting enough tax revenue to offset the spend, it is resulting in decreased purchasing power of the currency (which is a form of welfare in my eyes from young workers older non workers).
For Medicare, you have things like having to see a PA/NP rather than an MD, or having to wait longer times for appointments. And people generally get far more healthcare than the accumulated value of their FICA contributions.
It is, mathematically, today’s young workers paying for old people’s healthcare. And they should bet on getting less.
You are right. I never suspected this would be the case.
Still, social/income security and healthcare (and education) should be the last places one should cut budgets.
Also, the US spends more in their military as a percentage of their GDP than any other developed nation. This sounds like an excellent place to cut. The US government subsidizes a lot of weapons research as well, for companies that'll later sell the tech the government helped them develop to foreign countries at a profit. I don't think it's fair to subsidize a private enterprise this way.
It is still worse than this.
The largest amount of the money is in the unfunded liabilities for social security and healthcare over the next 50 years. It is hard to even know what it is, 60, 70, 80 trillion?
Younger people will end up both paying for this while getting old from higher interest rates and inflation and then when actually old? The money has all been spent. Sorry, no services.
If you think the price of things are bad now try some fiscal dominance and debt monetization. I suspect it is already too late to avoid fiscal dominance. At 50, maybe I won't see it though. At 20? A 20 year old probably has a good chance of fiscal dominance, debit monetization and maybe even USD losing reserve currency status.
Fed children that don't suffer from easily treatable diseases contribute back more than the cost. Blanket actions like this are very poorly thought out even under that kind of cold ROI perspective.
That is the dilemma for democracy, isn't it?
It is obvious to anyone that well raised children provide a huge ROI...but not to a large portion of voters due to the shape of the population histogram. Instead, countries are spending tons and tons of resources on 80+ year olds' dialysis, heart bypasses, hip replacements diabetes management, and end of life care. And keeping their property taxes low even though they live in large houses on large lots. Cold or hot, there is obviously no ROI there.
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Everything in a society IS politics. From deciding where we order dinner from, to which framework we'll build upon. Politics is how groups decide on issues that affect all individuals in the group.
Absence of politics is an illusion. They'll still affect you regardless of you wanting to see it or not.
Even the assertion of anti-politics and private property is in itself a political statement. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to have non-political dinner conversations or discuss the latest releases on HN.
Not everything is american politics though. It does get tiring to hear about American politics non stop. We aren't talking about general social issues here, but about American politics. I wouldn't want to hear about Chinese local politics non stop either, and I don't think a lot of people browsing Hn would.
This is a good point - not everyone is directly affected by, or interested in, US politics, but, still, I think it's safe to assume most of the HN audience is going to be impacted directly or indirectly by what happens now in the US.
I'm also not interested in all popular topics on HN, but I'm OK with seeing a list of posts where only a few interest me. A different matter would be subjects that can be triggering to people, but I haven't seen complains about that.
I agree that american politics are in a league of their own, as they end up affecting a lot of people outside of the US. (I'm Canadian, so it's especially true for me!). I think the issue is more about frequency. Like, I get that some events are very relevant (elections, foreign policy, etc). But stuff like federal grants or whatever is... hard to understand without context!
Again, I totally get if this was news about civil rights, abortion, or whatever but I just don't see what most people outside of the US can make of information or articles like this.
I wouldn't mind an article that summarised or explained the first 10 days of the trump administration or something like that, but there's been a lot of posts like these recently.
I'm so tired of this line of reasoning, please dissect the political implications of wiping my ass backwards instead of forwards.
Using such a broad definition dilutes the term to the point of meaninglessness.
I mean sure... so is asphalt, roads, plumbing, toilets, etc. Most of us here use the bahtroom more often than we think about politics, especially american ones, so do we post plumbing questions here too? I mean... no working toilet would be a bigger problem for most individuals at that moment than whatever trump does.
I agree with you because I'm not from the US. I understand HN is a page from California, so US centric themes.are most likely to pop up. But I do prefer to consume my US dose of politics circus from elsewhere.
So much of what these grants fund lead directly to a Show HN or an IPO announcement down the line. That line is now cut. If this can't pass the "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" test, what does?
Do you think politics doesn't or won't impact tech?
People who can compartmentalize like this see to me to be on the fringe of sociopathy.