Ever feel like these things are being burned down not just on purpose, but for the gains of someone else?
There is a certain type of mentality that just doesn’t believe that government should do anything, and that private enterprise will always have the solution.
Those people appear to be in control of all levers of power in the United States.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/trumps-latest-plan-t...
So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market.
I think you can make that ~80%, but maybe you've done the calculations more diligently than I have.
In before "No clearly the party that helps the billionaires the most and is mostly comprised of billionaires and is backed by all the tech billionaires are the good guys, they are the true party of the people"
Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed
On top of that, there is the whole accelerationist ideology factor, which is also deeply insane to me.
For example - The ratio of government employees (including contractors) to US population is at an all time high[1], and the ratio of GDP to government expense is at an all time high[2].
It should be obvious if you have a profilgate printer priting dollars left and right, and the printer's controllers livelyhood depends on the printer working, workers will eventually lease printing to anyone willing to pay the controllers.
Thus, doesn't seem like a problem of wealthy people to me. You are always going to have wealthy people in any society. But it seems the fault is at having a printer, and letting people who aren't your neighbor, to control it.
I'm open minded in this being a "Chicken or egg" Problem. But I'd need to hear a compelling argument for it.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-governme...
And completely ignores who is President and his explicit words.
Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
This means the other party being the only sane choice for people with morals, but also being subject to various types of capture corporate or otherwise, gets to spend their time in power bumbling around trying to undo the damage and make sure the wheels don't completely fall off, so the "welfare" state expands by necessity since the only thing the two parties can agree on at this point is that all problems should be solved by throwing absurd amount of money at them and nothing else.
SNAP is peanuts. About a trillion dollars out of the seven trillion goes to the military and by far the largest amount goes to retirees.
> The elected representatives (all parties) of this country have voted to increase military spending year over year and most of the population is fine with this.
How can you tell if they're fine with it if all of their alternatives lead to the same result?
> Separately but equally damaging in terms of spending is one party is consistently doing everything in their power to fuck over the most vulnerable, provide tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and generally make life miserable for anyone who isn't a wealthy (soon white) dude.
The party that set up Social Security so that it has an income cap on the tax, makes larger payouts to people who had higher incomes up to the cap and max payouts to people who hit the income cap, and pays out more to white people in aggregate even proportional to their income because they live longer, was the party of FDR. The party that has been obstructing housing construction in San Francisco and other major cities for decades to the detriment of renters, young prospective home buyers and the homeless is the party with the majority in those cities, and you can't even pin that one on the filibuster.
You don't get to blame the other party for the things they screwed up and the things you screwed up.
IMO even the stuff that they boast about was load bearing stuff that they simply didn't understand, not as they claimed "waste", but perception is key here: they did what they themselves would describe in this way.
* I think "elected king" is a better description of Trump's goals; he seems to want the justice department to be his personal legal team, the armed forces (all armed forces, including police) to be his personal forces, etc.
Fallout's storyline from the live-action series, where Vault-Tec dropped the first nuke and started the apocalypse simply so they could wipe out the competition and rebuild later, is a little too on-the-nose.
Un-bias intelligence in this operation is not welcomed. One is told what is "factual truth" (not facts themselves) by those who operate out of Pennsylvania Avenue in DC.
If you're not blindly loyal and in line with the administration, then you'll be at risk of losing whatever role you have unless your loyalty is proven then you may receive some of that back based on how much you have demonstrated.
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The problem in infosec in this world is not competence, it is cult of personality. This is why black t-shirt dislike black polo shirts not so secretly.