Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
then why is it always the same handful of people saying that
DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or waste.
[flagged]
That’s a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking: they’ve been asking for funding to modernize for most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is allocated, it’s often directed towards contractors who cost twice as much and have a higher failure rate so congresspeople can say they “shrunk” the government.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the Heritage Foundation christo-fascist plan. Unfortunately they've teamed up with the mad Libertarian wing of the Republicans who turn up in places like HN and complain that all taxation is theft and are ready to burn the country to the ground because they've been so well programmed by propaganda that originally just wanted to build support for a tax cut for the already rich but metastasized into a superpower…
[flagged]
Choose not to pay your mortgage. What happens? They take your house. Does that make mortgages theft? No, it doesn't.
What makes something "theft" is that it's an illegitimate taking. The only way you can say that about taxation is to have already defined government as being illegitimate. Then (and only then) taxes are theft.
But if someone hasn't already made "all governments are illegitimate", then arguing that they'll take things from you if you don't pay taxes isn't the convincing argument you seem to think it is.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead. The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%. Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first" The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the ti…
> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#165Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#166[flagged]
HN has had NYT articles from the beginning:
Spam stock tips work - for spammers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26 - Oct 2006
You aren't going to get far with this community arguing that we should ban nytimes.com. What you (i.e. anyone who cares about this) should do instead is find more substantive, more interesting, and hopefully more neutral articles analyzing the same things, and submit them to HN instead. I can't say I've seen very many of these lately, but presumably some exist.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#167Why is this flagged? Even if the comment section isn't up to standards, the article should be relevant to everybody.
I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links in them, you should get answers to all the common questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
(Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've heard a new one.)
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance. Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.
I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend. I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money. I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not. However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable). And from that I blame…
A lot of people think they government isn't overspending. They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.
Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
Posts about this from yesterday, with lots of additional links, if anyone wants to read about how we approach politics on HN:
Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
#170Two points that are often missed: 1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective. 2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build g…
2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance. Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.
Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.