The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
freegovinfo.info
freegovinfo.info
The current disarray moves well beyond the precedented events like government shutdowns and rapidly screw things up across the board.
I for one am curious how this turns out. I give it an 80% chance of failing spectacularly, 20% chance of 'wow, we were wasting that much money?'
The fact is the federal government seems to grow and spend without any limit or regard to logic. It doesn't -feel- like much has ever been done to address it.
Well, now someone decided to just sledgehammer the whole thing. I'm both horrified and hopeful at what comes from that.
I mean, i understand the need to remove unnecessary costs like DEI etc, but actual productive output like science fundings etc are important in nation building.
What i dont like is how trump is looking to (or is being manipulated to) move a lot of public spending into private entities. For example, the recent ai stargate announcements. How is the public spending meant to benefit all americans, rather than the few that own those companies?
But it seems to me that DEI has so pervasively infiltrated the academy and scientific community, that excising them is extremely hard without drastic measures.
There was an open letter in 2020 summer from a lot of "prominent scientists" that claimed that suddenly social distancing didn't matter because BLM. I think that any such people that are viewing the world trough this lenses shouldn't touch federal money on account of being idiotically political or egregiously stupid.
If you're referring to this letter, that characterization is pretty much the opposite of what it says: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette...
Does it?
>White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.
>However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.
Do you think that anyone that has put his name under such idiotic sentence deserves state money in any form - except payments under ADA?
Sure .. All the risks of being black in the USofA and the additional risk of being even more likely to contract COVID while black.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/11/22-0072_article#:~:t...
So you don’t believe there should be an attempt to reckon with the structural forces in play since the beginning of the country that have systematically lowered the wealth for Black Americans, trans and queer Americans, disabled Americans, neurodiverse Americans, and immigrant Americans?
Hey you finally found the Bailey. The DEI arguments were just to win your vote. Aka the Motte.
He woulda said he'd fix whatever you hated to get your vote. Now we gave him the keys to the castle and gets what he's always wanted. What the richest people who donated to him always wanted.
Public schools, police departments, parks, streets - I interact with these more than any other government service and no of them can print their own money and most of them work really hard to be run like businesses that care deeply about budgets and managing costs.
In terms of "growth", the number of federal civilian government employees has basically never been lower as a percentage of the population.
https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_580_h...
But arguably a lot more companies that aren't on the face of it defense and arms manufacturers are getting a larger and larger piece of the pie. Tech companies rely on defense – and "national security" – spending as key revenue streams, and they've built the connections with the government to match. (I think both SpaceX and Oracle are very much obvious examples now.)
So, perhaps the definiton of the MIC has to be updated for the 21st century to include "national security" spending and other significant technical suppliers.
Thank god, this also hit the Russians incredibly bad, but yeah; people's perceptions of the production capacity of both countries is wildly, wildly overestimated.
The MIC basically had its budget slashed by ~80% or so after the cold war. Thousands of factories were permanently shuttered, hundreds of companies more or less ceased to exist - sometimes some of their engineers were aqui-hired by other firms, but by and large they just stopped working for the MIC in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqjvTKFufuk
This is what they called the "Peace Dividend"; when the Soviets collapsed, we no longer felt we needed a military that could repel a conventional assault from the Soviet Union (with all 700m citizens, and the heartland of industrial Europe (i.e. Germany, Poland, Czechia) backing them). We just, worst-case, needed to stop Russia and their 140m citizens.
They called it that because it unlocked a huge chunk of the budget that previously went to the MIC. A literal dividend of money.
He classifies the Tech companies as not part of the military industrial complex, which seems like a mistake. The US tech industry is integrated with the US intelligence establishment and is effectively part of their military presence. Musk, for example, was making a very visible contribution to the Ukranian war effort with Starlink. Google & Facebook are a bigger threat than the US military when it comes to governments being taken out in my opinion and the US military is probably more of the same mind than they let on.
He's also very focused on earnings which is a headscratcher. He has revenues right next to that, and revenues are what matter. Earnings just say the US weapons producers are an inefficient industry which isn't a matter of controversy because it doesn't matter much. He seems to be confused about what figures to look at.
The 2024 budget was 15% national defense.
in 2024, the US Fed collected 4.9 Trillion in taxes and spent 3.8 trillion (78% of revenue) on the following programs: Social security, Medicare, health, and income payments like disability.
It also had 1.8 Trillion dollars of deficit spending, bringing the total to 6.7 trillion with welfare taking up (57% of total spending). The fed spent 0.9 trillion (13%) paying interest.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
- 1350B on social security
- 870B on Medicaid
- 850B on Medicare
- 830B on the military
- 660B on interest payments
Out of total of $6200B. Essentially 3/4 of all spending is in these 5 major categories. There is little left to save in other ones.
How to minimize taxes in retirement. (the RMD causes panic because if forces taxation). Many get a pension, social security, have a 401k, paid off house, and savings. Not everyone needs social security.
But we're not quite there yes, and I imagine many gen X will need that social security.
Increase social security taxes (example: no longer stop taxing wages over $150k for a start)
Decrease social security benefits. Means testing. If you have over $200K of income, then no check (or $300k, pick a number. Just not $50k)
Cancel 1 leg of the nuclear Triad. Cost / Benefit military procurement vs. keeping Lockheed healthy.
A functioning congress could fix this problem. If they functioned.
(*) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref...
I get that there's plenty to not like about the Federal Government (and by plenty I mean a lot), but the answer to addressing that is to fix the problems rather than burn everything to the ground.
In fact, Trump explicitly lied about project 2025 during the campaign. So many may have been swayed to vote Trump, with the understanding that project 2025 was not on the table. Those people did not ask for this.
The voters knew exactly what they were voting for.
But yes, plenty of his voters heard what he had to say and liked it.
Tangent: in the United States, more people believe in angels than in evolution (69% vs 60%).
"failing spectacularly" to me looks more like collapses of the international monetary system or generalised large scale riots. Which could easily happen, the US government is responsible for about half the US economy; look at the USSR for what can happen when that sort of system gets dismantled too quickly. Mere large monetary amounts are not a factor these days.
The majority of the US budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid and defense spending. This is about 60% of the budget.
The billionaires are in control of the US now as oligarchs and defense spending is how they suck up money. So that is never getting cut.
Social security and Medicare will be untouched even though they talk about cuts, because that's how they keep a good chunk of their voting base placated.
The cost of medicare/medicaid will continue to spiral to the moon as the Trump admin killed the governments ability to negotiate drug prices again, because this is good for the oligarchs. But even ignoring pharma, the cost of services is still growing out of control.
There are plans in place to cut medicaid to reduce the corporate tax. Trump is in full DGAF mode, he's not running for president again so his mask is off. Heck, at the speeds he's going he may get everything he wants in place before Midterms anyway.
https://democrats.org/news/new-report-house-republicans-floa...
Sorry for such a partisan link, but he already said out loud he wants to reduce corporate tax from 21 to 15%
That's not the case really. In the last 50 years there was no trend in federal spending vs GDP, with widest movements being a growth from ~19% in FY2001 (which ended with 09/11) to almost 25% in 2009, with subsequent decline to the same average as before. Nothing catastrophic. In the immediate postwar era of course, the spending has been much lower at around 15% but that was when the population was 9 years younger and no Medicare or Medicaid existed, i.e. old or poor sick people were just left to fend for themselves.
In 2024 out of 6.8T in federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid was 1.9T. Remove that and you are back to a typical 1950s level of 16-17% federal spending to GDP.
First, that's not true. Ignoring COVID, it keeps going up, slowly but surely.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Secondly, why does the government need to spend to match GDP? The more productive we are, the more the government spends?
In addition, it becomes inevitable because with high per capita GDP there is a lot of excess income which people want to invest because their needs are covered, and varying outcomes of those investments (even if purely random, by chance), tend to compound, which results in entrenched, systemic inequality, that might even crystallise into caste system. Only way to counteract it is more taxes and more government spending, so that there's less excess income left to invest, and outcomes of those less lucky are compensated by gov spending.
Step 1: It's not really happening
Step 2: Yeah, it's happening, but it's not a big deal
Step 3: It's a good thing, actually
I feel like this thread has fast tracked the steps.
I don't mean this to be insulting. I think you actually bring up interesting points. But perhaps could have not led off with step 1 and started with this.
Take a car analogy, if the GDP per capita increases such that the number of people who can afford a car doubles, the government will have to invest more in roads. Moreover the expectations to the quality of the roads will likely increase as well. In other words if more stuff gets done in a country your more likely to night more infrastructure and services to support it.
My dream government is that of Switzerland, which keeps the purse close to the people.
A lot of these problems wouldn't happen if we just had the 35% capital tax not lobbied down over the decades. Now we're going to 15.
Your response is that we aren't taxing enough.
I have been harping on this for years
Tax as a percent of the economy has gone through the roof, both as a percent of GDP, and as inflation adjusted dollars. If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.
Is the government providing 10X more services per capita? Do we have 10X the schooling? 10X the police? 10X the roads?
These numbers are already scaled for both inflation and population, so it should actually productivity.
This video is probably the most succinct summary of it I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
It was made two months ago and has been right on the nose so far in terms of the phases in their process.
Note that “run openly on authoritarianism” is step one.
Total US GDP in 2023 was $27.3 Trillion...so around 2.5% of total GDP.
GDP grows (inflation adjusted) around 2.3% per year.
US Health Care is 17-18% of US GDP.
So while federal discretionary spending is important, it's not nearly as important as keeping growth up, and getting a handle on health costs.
I'm all for cutting this, reducing benefits to current recipients to bring spending to sustainable levels, but to date I haven't found a politician to vote for who endorsed this position.
Why not just cut and run on social security? I've paid in my whole life and probably won't even take a cent from it. We realize it's a mostly unsustainable ponzi scheme dependent on huge population growth that nobody wants, why not just tell us 'sorry, your money is gone, we're ending the program'?
Single payer I'm all for. Just in case you thought I was picking a side :).
There's no appetite for this for the exact same reason social security was created in the first place. Without it you have a bunch of senior citizens out on the street unable to work and unable to afford basic necessities.
For all the gnashing of teeth on "entitlement spending" the reality without it is pretty unpalatable to most.
How is social security discretion spending? It's tied to what has put into it, i.e. much more like a trust fund as I understand it.
It is a tax, and an income redistribution program.
For the record, I agree with the overall program. Old people need some support from society.
This is unsustainable. The people running it know and have known this for decades, instead of fixing it they have been at work finely tuning everything to ensure that the boomers receive full benefits just before major overhauls are require, significant additional taxes and/or reductions in benefits are 100% a guarantee at this point, but they continue spending and even increasing benefits all the while. A quarter century ago, Al Gore suggested putting a small amount of money aside to fund the program in the future and everyone laughed at him, on both the left and right. Instead they cut themselves stimulus checks and went to the mall, kicking off a decade of indulgence that ended with the 2008 global financial crisis while spending 7 trillion pounding sand in Iraq and Afghanistan with no particular goal and little to nothing to show for it.
This generation has acted like overgrown children their entire adult lives, they've spent and borrowed and kicked every can in sight down the road. They rigged this program along with every other as another massive transfer of wealth from the generations with the least money to the one with the most. As a final FU to future generations, they are as we speak in the process of dismantling the global world order that has protected and enriched them for their entire lives. I hope in the near future they will at last see some retribution for all of this.
(*) I say this as someone who thinks COINTELPRO was a key example of a law enforcement agency getting high off its fumes and shredding human rights, of which the list is endless.
No-one will trust the FBI from here on out.
Need to delete it and re-create the function with a different name.
Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?
There is a disconnect with how big we are and what infrastructure is needed to support it. Let's say we cut everything but Senate, House, President, VERY basic defense. Our military is larger than probably anything else. I think the naivety is hilarious. Our employees and government bloat is big because our nation is big. There is no way around this. It's time to impeach, Trump. Good night.
Do you know where I could get some data on that topic?
Certainly, there is no precedent in US history for an authoritarian, law-flouting executive takeover centering illegal purges of the executive branch as a whole (and a particular focus on illegally purging federal law enforcement and internal government accountability officials), racial scapegoating, and massive "deportation" efforts that rapidly encompassing setting up massive concentration camps, almost all done by executive fiat, with the tacit support of a Congressional majority that is ideologically aligned with both the policies of the executive and the decision to execute them without regard to existing law rather than through legislation.
There are a history of similar things one might point to in other countries, but it's a first for the USA.
Although I am not inclined to agree, it is fair to dispute specific funding cuts or firings. It would also be reasonable to temper those arguments against the futility of general cut-backs without specific cuts.
Consider a few hypotheticals:
If we accept that special interest groups exist for spending, then it would also be reasonable to accept that these groups would protest cuts in the most hyperbolic way imaginable.
If we accept that the Federal gov. is not free from corruption, selective enforcement, what is in effect "legislation from unelected bureaucrats", or entrenched bureaucracies which oppose the will of the people - If we accept that any of this exists or is possible, it is not unreasonable to accept that some of these bureaus would be cut or eliminated.
It is reasonable to expect that these bureaus and special interest groups would stand in solidarity. They have every incentive to join together and expand the largess of the central government. It makes sense that partisan media groups would paint any criticism or cuts in the most hyperbolic and odious terms.
All of these things are easy to reason about. It is also easy to take cursory glance at the historical record. It is easy to examine the economic and political ideologies of the odious authoritarians which the partisans are so quick to invoke. Where did these odious authoritarians cut spending? Where did they reduce the purview of the state? If we examine this, we will find that cuts and reductions are entirely antithetical to the authoritarian platform. It is a contradiction in terms. For these reasons, I regard the comparisons as ridiculous hyperbole.
Humor me here. How is the following not a non-sequitur, "Cutting spending and regulation is authoritarianism. What we need are more regulations, central planning from unelected bureaucrats and socialism"?
Can anyone here explain that?
It is easy to construe blatantly illegal and facially unconstitutional acts as authoritarian, actually.
But you can't argue with these conservatives; at this point it is fair to assume that they don't debate in good faith.
Or maybe Dead Internet Theory and I've just been arguing with a lot of bots. Bot that convinced a country we needed 4 more years of this.
Even if you like the fiscal goals - I do, for example - the gitmo housing plan is messed up
I hope their spending dragnet now result in a balanced budget, its not hyperbole to acknowledge how disjointed and disruptive it is
I wish we had a comprehensive immigration policy that wasnt undermined for decades, its not hyperbole to acknowledge that this dragnet to address this is staffed by people interested in punitive disruptions to people's lives, that this particular process has plenty of mistakes in it and it doesnt afford people access to a lawyer if improperly arrested by immigration personnel despite an authorization or citizenship. and that its punitive to go after some statuses (or anyone in this way really) even if identification isnt a mistake
yeah there are a lot of problems, a lot of parallels to how worse things started, and lacks the accountability to prevent those outcomes
its fine to acknowledge that while being a beneficiary of other policies. there are court cases on appeal that I want new prosecutors to drop, stuff thatll fly under the radar, there are plenty of other things going on to happen for some industries and new industries
I agree with you that its not as black and white as partisans are saying, and its pretty clear that lamenting or protesting the outcome is an unproductive use of energy in a system that doesnt support that, while its clearly an oligarch land grab that you can spend time getting a piece of too
However, it still leaves the question: Were cuts possible in terms of realpolik in any other way? We can argue that there should have been more nuance and in the ideal world, yes, we would like more measured cuts.
Additionally, even if we found areas to cut which are generally agreeable, the proponents of that spending would use every means possible to oppose those cuts. The special interests would have every incentive to use the most inflammatory language to incite aligned partisans.
The rate of increase in debt has been increasing consistently. Even with Clinton's so called balanced budget, the total amount of debt has increased over the long term.
If Trump were not taking this radical approach in his first weeks, I would assume that his talk about cuts were empty campaign promises. Even with these actions, I'm cautiously optimistic at best.
I'm not a die hard Trump supporter or enthusiastic about any politician. Generally I dislike politicians and the political classes. It wouldn't be a terribly inaccurate to generalize by calling them all looters. These cuts make it possible to consider hope.
The debt data is very clear and very public. If anyone is "cooking" it's you.
>You're assigning an awful lot of trustworthiness to a known liar...
Am I? Did you bother to read my above comment?
In my view, all politicians are liars by necessity. They have every incentive to make the most grandiose promises while campaigning. Once in office they can begin looting. The long term health of the polity is of no concern to their particular set of incentives. They need only worry about the next election campaign. Bankrupting or exploiting the public is almost a foregone conclusion. Individuals may differ, but these are the incentives inherent to the political game.
>... for someone who claims not to support him.
These are my assessments of politics and politicians. I've even been explicit about them previous to spelling them out in more detail here. Despite that, you insist on projecting your partisan nonsense onto my views, as if you have some kind of crystal ball that allows you to read my mind or another telepathic power which would preclude you from engaging in good faith.
Take another look at this discussion. You've gone off the deep end here.
Description of facts
> The hyperbole is a bit much for me.
Your assessment.
Then you respond to every calling out as "I'm neutral"
I can only laugh at this point.
Why is your perception of my views even on the table? Argue the topic, not the person.
>there is no precedent in US history for an authoritarian, law-flouting executive takeover centering illegal purges of the executive branch...
As I've attempted to illustrate here repeatedly, authoritarianism is in direct contrast to cuts in state power. Especially as it concerns the specific comparisons to National Socialism made on this site. Totalitarian statists seek to increase the power of the state, not cut it. Your assertion is a non-sequitur.
>...purges of the executive branch as a whole...
The president is the head of the executive branch. With other administrative agencies, there is some dispute over the extent of presidential authority.
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-con...
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-cont...
>...setting up massive concentration camps...
Deporting illegal immigrants is not comparable to Dachau or the actions of the National Socialists. Making this comparison trivializes genocide.
>I can only laugh at this point.
I don't find it funny in the least.
You would be right to say that mass deportation will probably involve violations of civil rights and profiling in practice. I hope we can agree in our opposition to this. However, illegal immigration is illegal. Circumventing immigration law by funding NGOs with taxpayer money is a greater expansion of state power. We should be more concerned with the victims who have been trafficked, including women and children. The incentives of the "amnesty" program's abuse led to the exploitation of minors. The abuse has to stop.
If partisans want immigration reform, they should pass the laws. Until then, enforcing the existing laws is not an expansion of state power. Circumventing the laws via NGOs is an expansion of state power. It is an usurpation of the democratic process you claim to value.
I ain't reading that. You're just trolling. Peace out.
Aka "i have no willingness to debate in good faith."
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html
- Over FY24, revenue ran to $4.19 trillion, while spending ran to $6.14 trillion – leaving (up to rounding before calculation) a deficit of $1.95 trillon.
– Of all of this spending, ~$4.10 trillion is likely untouchable politically, since accounted for by the DoD, Social Security, Medicare, and interest on public debt. This leaves us with ~$2.04 trillion worth of spending to cut $1.95 trillion from. I think you can see how feasible that is.
Federal salaries and benefits are _peanuts_ compared to the trillions of dollars involved – I think around 8.6%, although the CBO doesn't have spending broken down by cost objects.
Assuming Elon's run the numbers, he'll be perfectly aware that trimming down the federal workforce won't do jack shit to get the US to a balanced budget. His motivations are different.
The ultimate in removed regulation is an apparatchik unhelpfully advising: "Just don't screw up."
The ultimate in simple taxes is serfdom.
Those are the end-states of looking only at quantities while ignoring the changes in the character and mechanics of a government.
> There ultimate in removed regulation is an apparatchik unhelpfully advising: "Just don't screw up"
What you posit as merely "unhelpful advise" is in practice an unpronounced threat: "Do it the way we expect or else". It isn't a removed regulation but an obscured one where the final interpretation rests with the apparatchik.
>The ultimate in simple taxes is serfdom
I never got the memo when black became white. The simplest tax paid is zero taxes. Serfdom renders individuals as property fixed to the land/estate they pay tithes/taxes to. They couldn't by an be further from each other.
That's a kind of serfdom. Not literally the same thing but ...
Look up "the working poor", is a little bit already a reality to some
Regarding spending cuts being antithetical to authoritarian regimes, note that the cuts don't affect the military or law enforcement (except for people who were involved in prosecuting Trump) that's very much in line with many authoritarian regimes.
There is plenty of precedent for both spending cuts and shrinking (in some areas, usually while expanding others) government from US Presidents. Simply refusing to spend appropriated funds as directed by law where even the excuse given isn't either of those but imposing ideological constraints not contained or authorized at the discretion of the executive in the governing law is, on the other hand, not. Openly ideological and patronage oriented purges of the federal workforce (at least, since the adoption of civil service laws expressly to to stop that) again is not, and is neither about shrinking the scope of government or cutting spending.
Again, this is how the issue is being played in a partisan fashion. Yet, when we dig deeper, beneath the soundbite interpretations, we find that legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have complex and conflicted views on how much authority The President has over government bureaus.
>...the President’s authority over independent agencies depends not on the Constitution but on a common statutory phrase, which allows the President to discharge the heads of such agencies for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” This phrase—the INM standard—is best understood to create a relationship of residential review—and a particular remedy for legal delinquency flowing from that review. It allows the President to discharge members of independent agencies not only for laziness and torpor (inefficiency) or for corruption (malfeasance) but also for neglect of their legal duties, which includes egregiously erroneous decisions of policy, law, or fact, either repeatedly or on unusually important matters...
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-con...
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-cont...
The cited sources illustrate how complex the law is. If we accept the authority of the state, then it is up to the Supreme Court to rule on the specifics. If the ruling is in favor of Trump's actions, we can again reasonably expect the partisans to paint this as an out-of-control judiciary. From that point we may see more arguments for "packing the court", the entire narrative around "authoritarianism" again becomes an exercise in partisan hypocrisy.
The point about cutting budgets, agencies and reducing the purview of the state remains. It is in direct contrast to authoritarian ideology, which without exception seeks to expand the purview of the state. Many quips have been leveled here, but no one has approached this point.
https://youtu.be/271poZihRTg?si=nLBAtEnN39tGkXzH
They pretty much always rejected this idea. It's in the constitution. President can't do much to a budget congress decides on.
I would like to refer you to what happened slightly more than 8 years ago when a new president took office.
Rub those brain cells together and use your logic organ, dude.
I recently became aware of this issue and this post made me interested to know if there are any comprehensive datasets tracking these take downs. Also would be interested to know what other efforts exist to archive at risk government websites.
Partial list of removed pages and entire websites I'm compiling:
- USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse (stores 50yrs of international aid records) https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/
- CDC HIV website https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/causes/index.html
- CDC Data Directory https://www.cdc.gov/datainfo.html
- CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/index.html
- USAID Agency wide portfolio management system https://dis.usaid.gov/
- Gender Links https://www.genderlinks.org/
- Edu Links https://www.edu-links.org/learning
https://www.citizensforethics.org/legal-action/letters/delet...
Probably the library of Congress is the right place for it to go?
So yeah, Trump could fire the librarian.
Interestingly, the head of the Architect of the Capitol is appointed by a vote of a congressional commission for a ten-year term. Prior to 2024, the president of the United States appointed the Architect upon confirmation vote by the United States Senate, and was accountable to the president.
Hypothetical question: imagine the president ordered troops to evacuate the library and then burn it down. Who exactly would be held accountable, and how?
>Hypothetical question: imagine the president ordered troops to evacuate the library and then burn it down. Who exactly would be held accountable, and how?
Beats me. There's a lot of processes needed for the president to organize the national guard. Lots of chains of command would need to fail to have them burn down a domestic building with no signs of sabatoge.
Just like how if Biden had dropped out of the race, Democrats would've had a shot at another Democratic candidate for president?
Americans have been told what makes the country strong is that there are balances of power and we're watching it unfold in real time. I dearly hope to be proven wrong in my worry.
That should all add up to a midterm that starts to turn the tide.
Also, definitely don't be afraid to call your congress reps and be loud about this stuff.
Project 2025 is real, and now that he's gained office he and his enablers are going to try to follow through with all of it. They're going to change the rules they want and ignore those they can't.
Congress is letting the President take their power. Even Republicans in 2016-2020 wouldn’t have done that.
Now he's dismantling everything to "reduce spending".
Anyone literally thinks he'll want to leave in 4 years? He's currently normalizing doing insane things to politicize the people more.
Hoboy
Okay I said, if Biden is too old who is chosen when he steps down? Kamala, who while qualified was chosen to gain vote. Is that the alternative you want? Silence. Trump is also too old and definitely showing his age but it doesn’t matter anymore because the goal post moves again.
It’s pure radicalization and anything that can be labeled as a negative is rationalized to avoid regret.
My mother remains 100% silent about politics. Which is equally as hard to have a conversation.
So when you have people so radicalized they only put ear plugs in their ear, because they’ve been trained to want a war at home. They are too deep, what do we do? Wait until they die? What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
These are tough questions in a world where people can’t be proud we even have any kind of infrastructure. People feel they deserve better when we already have the best circumstances to be alive.
There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
What? You are more misinformed than your father if you don't know that illegal aliens are flooding into the country. Trying to choose a neutral source for you.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jp4xqx2z3o
Since January 2021, when Joe Biden came to office, there have been more than 10 million encounters - about 8 million came over the southwest land border with Mexico.
Under the Trump administration, there were 2.4 million encounters on this border.
I'm not saying believe everything without due diligence. I'm saying everyone calling everyone else liars is not going to end peacefully for anyone.
Tooting is just zone 3, not abroad :D
The truth is harder to discern when each administration redefines encounters, but for example, the Trump administration deported fewer per annum than the Obama administration. I don't know what to make of that, myself, but I think that would come as a surprise to many voters.
They'll fight back against the power structures by ceding control to them, and taking massive bribes. Every time.
Even Bernie Sanders is a Big Pharma lackey, accepting millions.
The ACA as a single payer totally supportive law would maybe have passed back in the early 1800s when communists headed West.
Ah, a low-information voter, I see.
_Obama_ didn't write the ACA. It was written in Congress, and it passed only because Democrats had a once-in-a-lifetime filibuster-proof majority. Not a single Republican Senator voted for the ACA.
In particular, Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) blocked the public option. Obama tried to push for it behind the doors, but the ACA was as far as the Blue Dog Democrats were willing to be pushed.
And then, of course, Mitch McConnell happened and the Senate ground to a halt. ACA basically has not been amended since its passing.
Lobbyists, such as AHIP, were instrumental in structuring the law to benefit insurance companies -- including the removal of the public option.
Also, your argument was a strawman, as I never said he wrote it. If you re-read my post, you'll note I said "Obama [...] could've done single payer". As president, laws get enacted based on his signature and as the figurehead of the Democratic party he has significant leverage and sway over laws, so much so that he took credit for the ACA in its entirety. It's irrelevant whether he wrote it or not, nor did I make that argument.
Claiming that ACA is an insurance company handout because it hasn't been amended is a very interesting argument. The Democrats had a super majority. They could've done anything!
The Democrats are a party by and for lobbyist interests. Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
That's incorrect. ACA was a mostly-consensus project, and insurance companies absolutely hated the 20% profit margin limit in the ACA.
At the end of the day _someone_ has to pay for the care. It has to be either the state (like in Medicare), or private insurance companies. Both approaches can work just fine. We need more regulation of the insurance companies, and we need to decouple them from employers.
> Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
Republicans could have stepped in and offered a public version. Just _one_ Senator would have been enough. Yet Republicans decided to stonewall the ACA completely.
Yeah, you tried. Any more is probably energy wasted.
> What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
Explain to them how oligarchs are burning the younger generation's security and quality of life to amass ever more wealth and power for themselves.
Help them see how this is happening to both them and the people of their generation on the opposite side of the surface political divide.
Your arguments are going to be wildly unpersuasive because your parents don't understand why they're voting the way they vote. They just know that their emotional state is represented at Fox & Fox suggests voting for Trump. The same dynamic is true for pretty much everyone except the rare souls who like to actually look up how & why politicians vote in practice (which most people don't have time to do).
Try figuring out what emotions your parents are feeling and why. Even if you don't change their minds you'll probably get to a better spot in the relationship than if you're trying to convince them Kamala was a strong candidate (which, given her record, tough sell - how does a strong candidate lose to Hitler, we might ask to annoy everyone).
Edited first response since it was too reactionary on my part.
77+ million Americans don't want a "hopeful vision of the future". They want to be angry. They're addicted to the anger. They want to hurt people. Present them any vision you want; they are not ever going to pay attention to it.
The answer is to ignore the theater and focus on improving lives anyway. The few truly hateful ones will be resolved quickly once people aren't worrying about rent, groceries, and making a living wage.
I would argue that most people don't agree on this. Firstly housing;
For decades Americans were told that owning your own house was an investment. To keep home owners happy prices have to go up. Clearly the message was flawed, but no home owner wants to see that number go down. The arguments that rely on "this will reduce of home value" us a strong one thst gets lots of support.
If you ask folk they'll tell you Health Care is too expensive. But equally they'll push back on any approach to make it cheaper. Obamacare made it cheaper, the public voted dems out of office. Biden put price caps on pharma, and got voted out of office. In both cases Trump (with massive support) tried to, or did, wind it back.
Many states didn't take up expended Medicare. Now, we could argue that doesn't make health care cheaper (overall) it just moves it to a different payer. But apparently folk dont want that.
Corporations having power is completely because we give them power. If we truly believed in that excess we'd behave differently.
Truth is we mostly like our corporate overlords. We rail against Musk and Zuck, but we carry on using their platforms. Fox has power because they amplify people's fears and gives them a scapegoat.
Currently DEI is under the spotlight. It's a very convenient scapegoat to every unsuccessful white male. As long as we have someone to blame, we can avoid our own failings.
Vague memory here: IIRC, alongside Obamacare came a requirement to have healthcare, and if you didn't get it you'd be penalized on your yearly taxes. I'm fairly sure I remember that being a big part of the issue with it, people didn't want to be forced into it.
As a game developer: people are great at telling you what's wrong in their experience. They are awful at giving solutions.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar thing here. There's another phenomenon where lowering speed limits is an unpopular decision. But once it's made almost all complaints disappear in a few months. I think this is one of the cases where we just need to do it and deal with any fallout as it comes.
>Corporations having power is completely because we give them power
Not necessarily. Especially not for Healthcare. That's an industry of people leaving the consumer almost completely in the dark and having businesses battle with businesses in how much money they can extract or save. And it's not the kind of thing you can just cancel and find a competitor for.
In other cases I feel many are frustrated. But most aren't frustrated enough to give up concinience nor security. So yes, we do give powerto Musk, to Zuckerberg, etc. Those are in our control but nothing has hit at a scale to really hurt them.
The parties aren't going to change unless the incentives change. You need to get something like the anti corruption act through on the state level:
The other issue is that a significant portion of the country is not guided by logic. But fantasies like if we don’t save Israel it’s going to prevent the second coming of Christ and all natural disasters are caused by “legalizing gay marriage”.
Like a lot of the US, the gap between the haves and the have nots has grown. Many people on HN probably have great healthcare. Many seniors, often reliable voters, also have good healthcare through government programs that look a lot like single payer. This leaves poor people and those in the lower middle falling further behind.
Their fear is that their taxes will help “illegals” and “those lazy minorities”.
You’re assuming these people don’t have active animosity. Besides a large majority of the base are “evangelical Christian”. By definition religious people don’t appeal to logic.
How can you convince someone that Israel isn’t perfect (I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion either way) when they think that saving Israel is the first step in the second coming of Christ?
You are never going to convince these folks that Trump isn’t literally sent by God to save America?
It's a genuinely hard problem, of course, because there are lots of people in the Democratic coalition who are radicalized the other direction. They feel - equally genuinely, and equally strongly - that excluding or deporting an immigrant is a grievous moral wrong which we can't tolerate for mere political expediency. That's what it means to say that there's not a consensus on immigration.
It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.
I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.
I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him.
Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats.
All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say.
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It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.
Don’t let the radicalization turn you into lashing out at society because people have insulated themselves.
I heavily agree on this, people have nothing to look forward to, and nothing to be proud of. In fact, the state of the US is more embarrassing than anything. Every other country has free healthcare, high speed rail, free education etc... On top of that, there is no upwards social mobility. I know a lot of people my age are literally gambling everything on crypto and hustle culture because they have no future prospects or hope.
> This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
but I have to say that this is beyond naive. A single payer healthcare system is broadly popular, it has had the majority of support for decades at this point. We can't have it because it goes against the profit motive of the people running that industry. We already pay more than we would in taxpayer money than we would if healthcare was free across the board. Its as simple as that. Blatant corruption.
And this circles back to the last point, people see this, they realize this... and they don't believe that they can change this. This is exactly why, across the world, Luigi Mangione is hailed as a Saint. Thats exactly why the response was, "I get it." and people should try to examine that more. Its honestly not very complicated.
Fox News and such, are the only ones providing answers and giving people a place to channel this anger. But it is at the expense of marginalized groups, and truthfully, everyone. The Neo-Liberal order has failed everyone, and the Democrats have nothing to offer. I mean, we have corruption and oligarchs controlling the government. People feel hopeless, and powerless.
Some people, I guess. Looks like more than half the people approve of what he's doing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/trump-approva...
And even then, I'd say that this is not really a good marker for like the general sentiment of the entirety of the population. But it's likely somewhat close as things currently stand, but you have to also recognize the current political climate, as well as that there has been no real counter narrative against trump's framing of politics. Democrats have done a horrible job of presenting any counter narrative whatsoever. And on top of that, a lot of people don't realise yet what these things are going to entail. I mean of course rich people want to downsize the government of course and of course they oppose tariffs. It's completely expected that trump supporters are going to be supportive of mass deportation. Boom my projection is that once people see how violent and cruel this is that a lot of them are going to be like. That's not what I wanted that I didn't know was going to be like this yada yada yada and quickly realise how a horrifying and stupid this is.
I disagree that people feel powerless to get healthcare, they are distracted. If you look at either party it is the one singular commonality between the two. Really it should be the flag ship of a 3rd party with the radicalized ideas second.
This from the party that spent 4 years claiming Biden didn't have severe mental decline but "a stutter".
Do not blame the voters for PR mouth piece unless you hear the lies are being repeated by the voters. If you don’t avoid this then it turns into a goal post moving contest.
Perhaps. But they sure do do a great job rallying people as well. So... I will blame the voters when they unironically fall for it.
This is why people voted for Trump. Like Dave Chapelle said, he's an honest liar. Most politicians are just outright liars.
To be frank, yes. Arguing with most single individuals is pointless anyway. If we were able to focus these conversations on congress we'd be in much better shape.
>What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
You have time to stop them. It's just scientific fact that younger brains are more malleable and open to information. It won't always work, but there is some hope there.
>There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
Maybe we shouldn't have let a few hundred rich guys beat us in an argument about Healthcare. Which is a bipartisan issue but they divide us with politics.
Why? I wouldn't think that everything new has a hard dependency on things that are stuck.
The fact it's always been a mess doesn't mean it's not significantly more of a mess now than many times in the past (not that right now is the worst ever, it's hard to beat a civil war, but it's pretty bad).
This is the big-standard authoritarian playbook. In functioning democracies the three branches of govt (executive, legislative judiciary), and the branches of society, industry, business, finance, press, academy, religion, social groups, sports, etc. are all independent. Under authoritarian regimes, they are corrupted & coerced (threat of prosecution or ability to pay & serve to avoid prosecution, or ability to raid the country's coffers) by illegitimate use of the power of govt to serve the executive.
That is where we are now, and will be until the people make it stop.
[...]
> In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.
An important lesson here.
Which I guess was already known - see how the Library of Alexandria burned down, but random receipts on clay tablets / papyrus were preserved.
edit: working now - https://archive.today/Ly7Jv