I worked for a leader before who told me to “trim 20% of my spending” without understanding one bit why I spent what I spent. In trying to explain to him that I was spending the minimum I could, and what I was spending was literally required by law, he told me just vaguely to “find a way”. Right.
Without a plan of why, and let’s state the obvious - he has no plan and the emperor has no clothes - you can’t do it. I saw a story that ties Trump removing regs as one of the causes of the Ohio environmental disaster we have right now. No idea if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me since his main reason for doing almost anything was “undo Obama”.
Leaning out the government could certainly be done, but you have to find the right spots. And you have other parts of it that are far far too understaffed, like the VA. Cutting 25% of the VA would turn it from barely functioning to completely stopped.
you reckon that’s a bug and not a feature to tRump, who said of service men and women, veterans, they are “chumps” and “suckers”? why would he give a cent of his money (“l’etat c’est moi”) to those people? they knew what they signed up for!
(obvs, some of that needs /s. i do not think this way - i expect that he does, however.)
When someone says “a rich person is less likely to be corrupted by personal financial interests than a poor person” I think of Homer trying to convince Lisa that their pet elephant will be safe with the ivory dealer who wants to purchase him:
“Lisa, a guy who has lots of ivory is less likely to hurt Stampy than a guy whose ivory supplies are low.”
Doesn’t Representative Ronny Jackson realize that Texas has 38 members in the US House of Representatives? That’s a bigly amount.
It seems he’s pushing for his own job to be made redundant. Does he really think that Donald Trump as President would care if a bureaucrat was elected, appointed, or just hired for the job?
In Saddam’s Iraq, to have any kind of government job – even one as humble as school teacher – you had to be a member of the Ba’ath party. The US under a future Republican administration might go the same way.
To coin a phrase, “Meet the new Ba’ath, same as the old Ba’ath.”
I’d be very curious to know what the breakdown in that “25%” is between “it’s a nice round number/sheer fantasy”, “specific elements of the administrative state that reactionary lobbyists and think tanks have quite detailed enemies lists on” and “the “fraud and waste” that everyone always talks about as though it were astoundingly massive and self-evident; but invariably has a harder time going into detail about if pressed”.
I absolutely wouldn’t underestimate category #2; but I would also be deeply unsurprised if there’s a lot of “moron who barely has a dim grasp of what the organization does, much less how; gesticulates angrily about how it could obviously be done with vastly less” built into that estimate. Trump attempting to do his bit for the Trump/Elon analogy and all.
Exactly. Of course this is the GOP “plan” for the debt ceiling. Enact some sort of mandated across the board cuts rather than figure out what can be cut and what shouldn’t. That reduces the pressure to raise taxes without them taking the political pressure for actually having to say what government services should be cut back and eliminated. Even most people in the GOP realize that while many of their constituents want to “cut government,” almost every government program is popular with SOMEBODY and that means that being on record as advocating cutting them will mean losing votes and/or campaign contributions.
