"No good reason" is subjective. Was there any reason given?
Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes?
Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes?
Soldiers and their families are, were rather, represented in print. Not any more.
What's that worth?
Now what do you have?
I'm pretty sure that's part of the reason they want to shut it down.
Are you saying that Stars and Stripes would deliver mail / messages to soldiers? I'd like to hear more of what you were saying.
I also feel like they can do without, all else being equal. Not being able to read a magazine isn't the end of the world.
Now you can't.
From the article:
> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.
That's 0.0022% of the Pentagons budget, i.e. essentially nothing.
This is the wrong way to think of it. It's either a positive use of money or negative.
But on top of that simplicity, Ryan Air for instance asks employees to steal pens from hotels.
They are extremists, but they run some savings that would be so silly they are negative to create a culture.
This however seems political. Someone is trying to make someone else look bad.
Even 1500 people's tax every year, which sounds worse, is still nothing.
Do you have a source for this? There is absolutely no way this is true. Are you including Social Security contributions as "federal income tax"? Or maybe did you mean the average American household pays $10k each year?
Say it's about $10k for federal, for ease of calculation. If it's less, then that means even more people's lifelong contributions are incinerated by a propaganda rag.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... says that payroll taxes and corporate income tax (in 2015) together are about the same contribution to federal income as individual income taxes, which puts a factor of 2 the other way in your estimate.
Then only $1 million of a program which costs $15 million would come from the "average American".
That’s the average that an American tax payer pays. That’s not what the average American pays. The difference is subtle, but meaningful. If I said, “I am an average American, how much can I expect to pay in federal taxes?” That number will not be $10k.
"Mean" is almost never correct for distributions that aren't near uniform, and never correct for distributions that aren't even near normal and not near symmetric.
As long as we're not measuring by physical stature, of course.
The answer to this question is in the eighth paragraph of the article, right before the discussion on how congress actually refunded the publication, the decision now resting with the senate and how the Pentagon ordered it to shutdown anyway which is unusual.
I will hasard that when you said you looked at the article it was to be taken literally and didn't imply that you actually read it.
Overnight, the defense contractor assembled a team of 20 people that were on the bench, so they could bill for the project. 20 random people that had never worked together before, all to work on an experimental java project the agency didn't need until that Monday (and I'd argue, didn't need even after that Monday). I suggested in that meeting "why don't we just return the money to the taxpayer?" and got glares from at least two senior executives.
Right there is 1/3 of the $15 million that is spent on Stars and Stripes.
With a $700bn budget, based on what I've seen of the defense industrial complex, I'd suspect at least 10% of that goes to complete waste (and toilet paper isn't waste. I mean things like IT projects that don't see the light of day, etc).
Unfortunately there is no longer any good way to report this crime. Official whistleblower channels are compromised or ineffective, and going directly to the public... well, there are plenty of cautionary examples of how poorly that tends to go.
So I wouldn’t say I witnessed it. I was called into a brainstorming session for “how can we spend this money? We need to come up with something quickly.”
> A few days ago they also ran a story about a poll showing Trump lagging Biden among the military.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-stars-...
> In February, the Trump administration proposed eliminating all of the publication’s federal support in 2021. That’s more than $15 million a year, about half its budget. “I can’t think of a graver threat to its independence,” the paper’s ombudsman, Ernie Gates, told me recently. “That’s a fatal cut.”
Sucks that you've been downvoted for pointing out a fact.
I hope we all got a good laugh over the idea that the Pentagon would ever be concerned with costs on the scale!
> The memo ordering the publication’s dissolution claims the administration has the authority to make this move under the president’s fiscal year 2021 defense department budget request. It zeroed out the $15.5 million annual subsidy for Stars and Stripes.
> The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.
The implied reason is “because its funding wasn’t included in the (non-binding) presidential budget proposal “