Nicker on 29/4/2025 at 02:07
Trump Tariff impacts get real. The container port in Seattle is empty. LA is down by at least a third already.
[video=youtube;33kfpNiiAmo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33kfpNiiAmo[/video]
heywood on 29/4/2025 at 13:10
Well, that is the result he was going for I think. November and December will be interesting given the usual buying spree of Chinese goods for the holidays. Maybe, just maybe, Christmas will be a little less commercial this year? Nah, who am I kidding.
heywood on 29/4/2025 at 13:25
I read this morning that Poilievre is out of Parliament. So Trump got the result he said he wanted, but it worked out better for you guys anyway. By the way, just to set the record straight, "America" doesn't want to own Canada, Trump does. It's ironic and stupid because the US and Canada were well integrated culturally and economically before Trump and he's only driving us apart.
I grew up near the border. My grandparents used to own a fishing cottage on Devil lake in Ontario. When I was a kid, we used to spend weekends in Toronto and the Niagara Falls area once or twice a year. We took road trips around southern Ontario and it was culturally indistinguishable from the Great Lakes and upper midwestern US states that border it. My wife's extended family are all French Canadian, having migrated to New England from Quebec. Montreal and Quebec (city) are half a day's drive, so we've visited a lot. Despite the official differences in language, the border regions of Quebec and northern New England blend together. Before the terrorist attacks here in 2001, there were towns that seamlessly spanned the open border. I've taken a couple of extended motorcycle trips to explore all of the Maritimes and they feel like Maine but with more Scottish in the accent.
So to me, it always felt kind of like we were like one big country anyway. Quebec has it's own cultural heritage that it tries to hang on to, and so does the southeastern US, and Texas. Otherwise, we blend together culturally and economically and even the political differences were pretty minor. It's really sad to see what's happening. The fight is not US vs. Canada, it's MAGAs vs. normal people.
Nicker on 29/4/2025 at 13:51
Quote:
Maybe, just maybe, Christmas will be a little less commercial this year? Nah, who am I kidding.
He heh. You're a funny guy. I suspect the decorations and sales will be running through October and Halloween starting this year. Christo'een. Hallowistmas.
As for the Canadian election, the double repudiation of Maple MAGA, Mr. PP, is especially sweet. Thanks DJT. Mr. PP has been running constant attack ads for over a year. Up here, we only campaign during elections. We want governments to govern the rest of the time. PP's attempt to Americanize is with 24/7/365 political messaging soured a lot of people and made it hard for him to pivot when his certain victory six months ago, began to fade.
Also, many people remembered his glee at DJT's win and he could not spin that away. Conservatives need to stick to fiscal conservatism and to stop fielding ideologues for leadership.
The saddest thing for many is the bite taken out of the NDP, representing the actual left side of Canadian politics. Many of their voters moved the the center, voting Liberal to keep PP out of power. A strong third party is essential to protect us from the sort of simplified, ossified partisanship we see in the USA.
Anyway, Maple MAGA was locked out and that's the important thing this time around. Time for those loyal to the US Constitution to take the hint.
heywood on 29/4/2025 at 15:54
Trump gave you an issue for Canadians to unite over. We don't have that here. The Republican party is fully MAGA now and isn't wavering no matter how bad the shit show gets. And all the public anger at Trump isn't translating into support for Democrats, who are polling lower now than at the election. Immigration is part of the reason. It remains Trump's strongest issue even if people don't agree with the tactics he's using. But more than that, a lot of Democratic and independent voters don't seem to know what they want. By staying solidly united, the minority party wins over the majority who can't come together.
Cipheron on 29/4/2025 at 20:08
(
https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2025/04/doges-efforts-to-trim-federal-budget-cost-nearly-as-much-as-it-has-claimed-to-save.html)
Quote:
DOGE’s efforts to trim federal budget cost nearly as much as it has claimed to save
... Earlier this month, Musk admitted in a cabinet meeting with Trump that DOGE is likely to report savings of $150 billion for next year’s fiscal budget.
But according to a study by the Partnership for Public Service, the cost of actually making those cuts came in around $135 billion for this fiscal year.
That's assuming that DOGE actually saved as much money as claimed. If it's any less, they're on track to actually increase the deficit, not decrease it.
Which just goes to show the same thing that happens any time people promise to do this stuff: this stuff is hard, and they're already penny-pinching, which is why Musk wasn't able to come up with anything meaningful in "waste fraud and mismanagement" and in fact his effects are likely to cost more money than they scraped back.
And this IS the low-hanging fruit he was going after, no doubt if he kept going the bargain would get worse and worse.
Starker on 29/4/2025 at 22:12
Most value they got out of it is probably in the data they got access to, some of which you can't even buy anywhere. The IRS data on your competitors alone is priceless.
heywood on 30/4/2025 at 12:00
The only savings is coming from workforce reductions, and the total cost of the federal workforce before DOGE was $336B/year. So even if the total workforce is cut down by 25%, that's only $84B/year, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the current federal deficit of $1.8-1.9T/year. And we didn't need a DOGE to dictate across the board workforce reductions. It would have been simpler to issue one Executive Order mandating a certain % cut from each agency and letting the agency leadership figure out how to get there.
It's really a missed opportunity to do a proper deep dive on efficiency. There were two DOGE-like initiatives before: the Grace Commission during the Reagan administration, and the National Partnership for Reinventing Government during the Clinton administration. Both were led by people who understood how the federal government works and they were both effective in finding savings and recommending reforms. Most of the Grace Commission's recommendations required Congressional action and the Democratic controlled House in the 1980s wouldn't go along with them. It did result in the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure Commission which had some success in reducing the defense budget. The Clinton administration's effort was more successful because he had a Republican controlled House that was happy to implement the savings.
For me, there are three takeaways from watching DOGE in action so far:
1. Young white male tech bros are not effective government reformers. Who knew? Without any experience in government or knowledge of what government does and how it works, how can you expect them to find the waste and figure out how to do things better? The one thing these guys have is unlimited hubris, like their leader Musk.
2. Agencies and programs that Congress created and funded through legislation signed by a President can't be eliminated by the executive branch alone. Again, who knew? The barrage of unlawful executive actions just created a big mess for the judiciary to clean up.
3. The secondary, unstated mission of DOGE is to give cover for an ideological purge.
Nicker on 30/4/2025 at 12:42
Reduce war spending by 10% and there's all the belt tightening you need.
Starker on 30/4/2025 at 14:11
Also, they probably reduced the tax revenue by several hundred billion by hurting IRS's ability to go after the big fish (where the big evaders are) and forcing it to review more of the individual tax payers and smaller companies instead since it's much less complex of a process.
Quote:
(
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-doge-irs-cuts-will-cost-more-than-savings-trump-musk-deficit)
Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he'd worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.
Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi's background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.
But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he'd been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.
As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.
[...]
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
[...]
The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.
[...]
