I can free up a lot of budget by sacking the entire armed forces and selling the jets to Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. "freeing up a significant fraction of the budget" is not consequence free. If he forces the health insurance industry to reform and extract a sane profit margin above cost of service, he deserves a medal. If he wipes out USAID and stops his competitors being funded for battery car programmes he secured for himself in times past.. Less such.
"waste" is a very emotive term for government spending. Many economists laugh at the belief spending less money is net advantageous as a thing in itself: money makes the world go round. Sometimes you want it spent more than you want it saved.
I want to run the heater so my kids aren't cold but cant afford it. Meanwhile my mayor is using my tax dollars to buy 200 home depot sheds for 800k each from a donor.
Yes, the point is spending money, just by the people who earned it.
I don't need to be funding $50M worth of condoms to be sent to Gaza. That's a "them" problem, and while there might be second order effects to a population explosion there, I honestly don't care.
Thing is, I checked my twitter feed for the first time in a month, and was recommended Alex Jones, so I can predict how well DOGE is going to work out pretty accurately.
Though he absolutely, literally is. The executive branch taking control over finances is unconstitutional, and there are likely a bevy of other things involving laws for conflicts of interest and laws for security clearances.
The only question is what'll happen in response when the criminals control so much of the infrastructure.
As a bonus, Musk is currently breaking the First Amendment as well, as he is both wearing a government hat and actively censoring people discussing what he's doing.
Freeing up money is not actually that hard. Doing it in a constructive way is a lot more difficult. I could go in and completely defund roads, airports, social security, public schools, the courts, the military, and save a ton of money.
Then what. What's the big plan? What are we going to do with all this money that will give us a better ROI?
That money was paying for stuff. Some stuff runs smoothly we enough that we take it for granted. Is everything perfect? No, but I'd like to see a little more care when screwing around with important infrastructure and services.
This reminds me of people that join a legacy software project and start proposing that you do a completely rewrite of the system without really understanding why certain decisions were made. It's almost always a total disaster and then someone else needs to come up and clean up after them.
Even if he does manage to find his $2T to cut (which I think is pretty unlikely), he will fail at the above metrics.
But sure, it would be cool to be proven wrong on that. I really hope I'm wrong. Otherwise he'll have hurt a ton of people (that he doesn't care about) and will have set the US back on the world stage decades. Not to mention... hello recession... or worse.
The remaining 27% is split 50/50 between defense and everything else. Musk will not be given access to the DOD. The remaining half of discretionary includes things like transportation, R&D/science funding , education, NASA/SpaceX, climate/energy, etc… essentially a lot of high value investments for our future that slashing would be like shooting ourselves in the foot.
But how would the words "it's not about the budget, but ideology" but refuted by budget cuts, anyway? I can give you candy in my van, and the candy can be real, but that still doesn't make it about the candy. And freeing up a significant fraction of the budget is hardly saying anything. You can save money by throwing people on the streets and letting them starve. You can make money by letting drug dealers go free and making them give the government a cut of the profits. Maybe not enough to offset the tax cuts to the super rich, or the costs incurred by just setting everything on fire to consolidate wealth for a few sociopaths, but probably "significant". So? That's supposed to be an argument for waving firing prosecutors for political reasons through?
Big rowdy protests on all matter of topics are fine. I actually used to work across from an embassy and they had huge street-closing protests every year. I'd walk straight through them to go grab a sandwich, I never felt unsafe.
This was something else. They stormed the fences, smashed windows, broke into the Capital building, they trashed the place, they beat the shit out of the cops. People died. DC Metro Police officers—let's be clear, they deal with real crime—described this as the most brutal hand to hand combat they'd ever experienced.
I'm not sure what you've heard about America. If you ever have a chance to visit DC, do it, it's a very cool city.
This does not happen here.
It was a protest that got out of hand. Those who committed violence deserved custodial sentences, but the rest who were mere trespassers never should have seen the inside of a jail cell.
This is exactly how public perception will instantly normalize things if Trump ever gets the power to throw political enemies out of windows. "Oh this stuff happens all the time. Politicians have always been killing their enemies. Look up Seth Rich and Whitewater. Don't be so naive."
It will happen in the blink of an eye. And then it really is over.
Most of the Jan 6 trespassers got off pretty easy, especially if they settled. Most of them who made it into the rotunda stood around gaping with dumb looks on their faces, like the proverbial dog that catches the car. They didn’t know what to do and they sensed they shouldn’t be there. Many of them then listened to Capitol police offers in the building and exited.
But many didn’t exit and they formed a tense, violent, and scary mob, in the seat of our government, to disrupt the Constitutional transfer of power. It is amazing that more people didn’t die (a SWAT team quickly dispersed the mob outside the Speaker’s lobby right after the lone shooting) and there were many acts of heroism and smart policing to distract, disorient, and delay the mob, buying more time for evacuation of Members of Congress and for law enforcement to regroup in force. Many in the mob had weapons, which is a couple of felony counts right off the bat (possessing weapons in the Capitol, which is looser than you may think, and possessing weapons in the Secret Service restricted area around POTUS and VPOTUS, which is a felony that doesn’t mess around).
The felonies and misdemeanors at issue in the case I was on were pretty clear and the jury reached its verdict thoughtfully, carefully, and quickly (we all quietly read through the many pages of the counts and judge’s instructions before opening discussion; it was an excellent group of people).
January 6 was an insurrection. Most members of the mob were sad sack idiots, and I can feel sympathy for them as individuals. But if anything, the government did not treat them harshly enough, nor quickly enough.
I am a bit worried about my own safety now, with all the insurrectionists having been pardoned. Fun times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_of_the_January_6_Unit...
The fact that this failed doesn't really mean that the underlying intention was just "protesting".
Do they involve a crowd smashing through doors and windows specifically to reach or at least terrorize human victims inside?
Rioters were shining high power military-grade lasers at peace officers, assaulting cops. They sieged government buildings and destroyed and burned much of their own city. Nothing happened to most of them.
A young boy was shot and killed in Seattle (where a few blocks of the city 'seceded' from the US) and I watched some LARPing teenager dressed like a dollar-store ninja hit a cop in the head with a baseball bat (the ninja turned out to be a local politician's son so I can imagine the punishment levied). The mayor went on TV and described all this madness as a "summer of love".
The behaviour I observed was abhorrent and eclipsed anything that transpired on Jan 6.
Yet it was all conveniently forgotten.
Smashing some doors and windows was child's play in comparison, and the melodrama surrounding 1/6 was over the top. I actually heard someone describe it as "worse than 9/11". They were serious, too.
And you want me to believe the guy on 1/6 with the buffalo horns is somehow comparable to the cowards blinding people with industrial lasers? The Portland riots to this day is some of the most insane footage I've ever seen and the lack of punishment and length of time it was allowed to go on is unbelievable.
Most of the Portland rioters should still be in jail but most got off with a slap on the wrist if they got any punishment at all.
It's an inconvenient truth for some because I remember even middle aged Google engineers were arrested for acting like fools. You would think educated people would know better.
There is a 100% chance some posters on this very website were at the Portland or Seattle riots and somehow have justified that their participation was righteous.
I imagine the 1/6 folks felt the same way.
Jan 6 was not overblown. Rioters rushed the building, smashed windows, and broke into the offices of Congresspeople and staffers. People were injured and hospitalized. Capitol Police were understaffed and lost control of the situation, and were physically attacked.
Those convicted of crimes due to their part in Jan 6 deserved what they got. It is a disgusting miscarriage of justice that nearly all of them have been pardoned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_s...
Huh? American here. Can you point to any examples? I can't think of a single one.
"Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
"Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks, according to a Republican close to the White House who was not authorized to publicly discuss private matters and spoke on condition of anonymity. The account was confirmed by an administration official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds."
As near as I can find, some 6 people were arrested for this violent protest by the Secret Service, and some 16 by DC police. Is is vanishingly difficult to find if anyone was subsequently charged and convicted for this event, which was without parallel, at least in my lifetime. This followed the events of May 30, 2020, when the Church of St. John's Episcopal In Lafayette Square, across from the White House, was sent on fire. To date it seems that no one has been arrested or charged for this destruction.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-george-f...
This one wasn’t restricted to just a govt building, although it did start with the takeover of a police building. Kids were shot and killed. But the rioters were initially aligned with BLM so there was a lot of sympathy from the government and media. Barely anyone was investigated or punished, in contrast to Jan 6th.
"Mr. Redcap, you tried to shove him off a cliff."
That is a laughable assertion, most importantly because the job that Congress was doing on Jan 6th, and which the deliberate goal of the protesters was to stop, was the peaceful transfer of power, which is probably the most important (and historically rare) job in a modern democracy.
Saying "but hey, some left wing protesters surrounded a police station" is a ridiculous false equivalence, because what they were trying to accomplish was orders of magnitude different.
