721–730 of 1001 posts
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DOGE has destroyed several agencies that were investigating his companies including FAA (starlink), FDA(neurolink), NHTSA(tesla). I'm sure there are many more, but these instantly come to mind.
What do you mean destroyed? As far as I know they still exist?
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Imagine you know you are sick. Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with burning straw. The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.
I will raise you a more direct analogy, let's imagine you have a deep wound in your arm and are actively bleeding out. There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up. DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it? This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is…
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> Absolutely, it should be looked at! I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, but as RFK was confirmed as the secretary of HHS we should expect a lot of scrutiny on big pharma and insurers. Eh, we're going to see a lot of scrutiny on proven vaccines and other proven medications that RFK harbors a lot of delusional beliefs about, because he's a conspiracy addled pudding-brained nutjob.
And we've devolved into ad hominem arguments 2 replies in. I don't think this is the forum
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> 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check? I'd be incredibly careful assuming that lower tax receipt from corporate income is due to lower tax rates. Why? Because lots…
I think you're only half right. Yes, the nominal rate is far from the only thing that determines corporate income tax receipts. But in practice, what you see is that the effective tax rate has been steadily dropping. That is, corporations are more and more profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller fraction of those profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...
Companies always do something with their profit after tax. Most commonly it's paid out as a dividend (which would be taxed) or used in a stock buy-back (increasing share price and eventually taxes as capital gains).
People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message…
This post is a series of illogical leaps strung together one after another, starting with the first sentence. The core fallacy that is obvious in your post is that you seem to think everyone who voted for Trump is part of this “MAGA” group of yelling yokel troglodytes. Your viewpoint is utterly saturated with obvious polarization. I honestly don’t know a single MAGA or anyone who would be caught dead at a Trump rally…
Even if you agree with some policies Trump is the height of incompetence fraud corruption and abuse of power. Gutting effcient and useful goverment agencies to fund the Wall is stupid and wasteful. It also wont reduce illegal immigration.
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The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit…
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.
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These are good questions that are easy to answer once you’ve spent time in gov: - it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort - the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothin…
It’s absurd to say anything is “what people voted for” in a system where only the votes of about 5 out of 50 states matter.
You could say the same thing about a popular vote where a candidate wins by 10 votes - "oh, our entire system is decided by 10 voters? how unfair"
For the US election, votes in other states resulted in a situation where only 5 were swing states. If those voters in non-swing states voted differently in enough numbers, then there wouldn't be just 5 swing states.
Look at any of the elections in the past 40-50 years and you can clearly see that which states are "swing states" and which aren't changes over time.
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The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax). This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit…
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste In fact, I’d argue that the government’s role is specifically to spend on things that are economically inefficient but nonetheless important.