The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies? I think the only thing people have been habituated to is the enormity of the government; go back to any other point in history, was the government this big in terms of independent agencies, employee/contractor count, budget/debt as percentage of gdp?
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.
Explain how shutting down USAID due to documented fraudulent spending strengthens the president’s power. I can’t think of a single way myself, but maybe I’m overlooking something?
If he gets away with shutting down USAID by fiat then it makes it clear that he can go outside the bounds of law and demand anything of the executive branch.
The next step might be going to the DOJ and telling them to detain, let's say, Ilhan Omar on suspicion of treason. This illegal demand will have much more force because anyone refusing it will know that they stand on their own and have no recourse through the courts or congressional oversight.
> The president is fascist because he's, checks notes... , relinquishing governmental power by shutting down agencies?
You do know the president is not supposed to have that power, right? His job is to execute the law, which as currently written requires those agencies to exist.
Yes and FDR also skirted around constitutionality and even threatened to pack the courts to ram his reforms in. I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
>>What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
Because those agencies are funded by the federal budget. We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is? And don't tell me this is just a small part of the federal budget. Oh its just a couple billion here and there. That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt. This level of fiscal irresponsibility is basically taxation without representation on the unborn.
>>We are literally going into a deficit to send money to other countries. Do you realize how insane that is?
You mean the international development fund that's being raided right now? You know that it exists because US realized that it's cheaper(as in - LESS money spent overall) to help countries develop, so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those countries eventually? It's part of being a global hagemony - it's not insane, it's just good business strategy. Out of all people, Musk and his cohort should be able to see this.
>>That's a lot of money that could go towards not being in debt.
The whole idea is that you'd be in more debt if you didn't do this, because you'd spend another trillion dollars on yet another conflict somewhere because people got fed up with having no access to fresh water and food and now there's a war that US just "has to" intervene in. Aid money is meant to explicitly prevent this.
> so that US is less likely to engage militarily with whatever conflict happens in those coutries eventually
Or you know, we can stop getting into wars? Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
> It's part of being a global hagemony
It's called overextension and almost every historical power declined due to internal rot coupled by continuously getting into conflicts, which, wouldn't you know, drained the treasury.
Ah yes, "just stop". I mean, but all means - please do.
>> Did our adventures in the middle east advance US interests?
They made a few american corporations extremely rich and justified balooning the military expenditure. Whether that's in US interests or not - you decide.
>>It's called overextension
It's part of projecting your might as a superpower. The same reason why American taxpayers are paying billions of dollars to station troops in Eastern European countries - not out of charity but because it's explicitly in American interests to do so. International Aid is the same - "we're giving you money now so that we don't have to spend more money fighting with/against you(cross out one) in the future". "stop getting into wars" has the same energy as "just stop tipping" or "just stop spending so much money on the military" - imagine how quickly your entire national debt would be wiped out if you did that!
> because it's explicitly in American interests to do so
Please elaborate, and be precise because every interventionist argument is like, "but our trading partners, but our allies" but always fails to link exactly how that improves the lives of Americans. So tell me exactly what we are afraid of. If its trade tell me exactly what the comparative advantage is or what the resource we need is. And if its defense, tell me exactly what the threat vectors are, not just, "the island chains".
We've doing truly stupid things in the name of bullshit concepts like "containment" which led us into Vietnam, or "stabilizing the region" which led us into the middle east.
We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student; please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
That's your(American) argument, not mine. When I ask why is America building anti-missile batteries and stationing their troops in my country, the answer is "because it furthers their interests". There is of course always some bullshit of "because it improves our security" - but everyone knows that's not true. They are here because they want to project they are a superpower and therefore have bases all over the world, not because they love us.
>>We can start with the Burmese scholarships that gives 300k per student
Well I had to look it up, and apparently this is what Trump said about it:
"We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five — that’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships in Burma. You can imagine where that money went," Trump said.
I wish he was more specific. What is he insinuating, exactly?
>> please tell me exactly what the American interests are.
Having a population of burma(a historically very active conflict area) that is well educated and more likely to oppose the military Junta? Of course no one will ever say that openly, it's "humanitarian aid".
Hey, if I told you I happened to be an expert in this field, hypothetically, and I said this was a vast oversimplificaiton, would you be willing to listen to an expert?
I'm pretty open minded so if you have a detailed answer, I would love to hear it. Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of hand wavy answers around like "stabilizing" or "soft power" because I feel like vague language masquerades corruption and misuse of funds. What I want to know are the direct causal links between our money and our interests.
I work alongside highly skilled experts in my job and I've never heard them say anything remotely like this when someone disagrees with them, so I'm pretty skeptical that you actually are one. This sounds more like something that a rebellious high-schooler would say
Nobody is denying that the US budget / finances are in dire need of cleaning up, but the approach taken is a hostile and forced takeover of essentials like foreign aid, education, medicaid, etc. People will die because of this approach and its short sightedness will have a bigger negative impact on the US economy and international relationships than it will gain them from reduced costs.
> I don't agree with everything the president is doing, but the rail we are going down is just doomed. What is your proposition to stop interest from eating 100% of the federal budget. We just paid 1T of interest, do you think that is going to decelerate?
So, for you, an acceptable solution to "the budget is too big," is "let's rip up the Constitution?"
If Trump wants to veto budget bills and demand certain cuts in exchange of passage, that's fine, totally within his power, and would probably work.
Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.
Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes
Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.
> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?
I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.
I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people
Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.
Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.
Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.
Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.
Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.
You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.
Sure the spoils system was bad, but the current iteration where you have hundreds of independent agencies that cannot be fired breathing down your neck with statutory power is fucking insane.