heywood on 13/11/2024 at 15:26
Quote Posted by Starker
The entire list is a who's who of who brown-nosed the hardest. Also, it is not a list of the picks for the positions, but rather a list of positions to be given out as rewards.
I get that. Musk obviously bought himself a seat at the table. Trump passed over Kristi Noem for VP and wanted to give her something for her support. But I'm still trying to figure out what Hegseth did to get the job. Yeah, he was a supporter, but so were a ton of other voices in the conservative media. I guess the point is that he's not a general or a bureaucrat, so he doesn't have relationships with other DoD leaders and a sense of loyalty to the current system. And maybe he's a results over ethics kind of guy, like Trump himself, and ready to go on a witch hunt for liberals in the military. But still, why Hegseth when he has other loyalists who already know how the department works? Makes me wonder if he buried a story or something.
Starker on 13/11/2024 at 18:21
I mean, from the last time we know that he changes his cabinet more often than he changes his underwear, so it's not like it's necessarily a hugely consequential decision for him. And more than anything he worries about how people look in front of the camera.
DuatDweller on 13/11/2024 at 20:38
Money, fame, amount to nothing if you don't get appointed to some government position.
I wonder what music star is going to be named later for a position somewhere.
:erm:
Cipheron on 13/11/2024 at 21:34
Quote Posted by heywood
Not a new government agency, but an outside group that's more like an advisory panel, so Musk won't have any regulatory authority. His business interests prevent him from being in government. Musk as NASA administrator would be interesting, but he owns SpaceX, so that doesn't work.
Musk He mentioned how there are 428 federal agencies which is "too many" thus he thinks 75% of them could be done away with since "nobody has heard of them"
I read an interesting analogy to Musk's claims of all the (so far unnamed) things he thinks he can just cut - video game reviews.
Many aspects of a video game are a required and essential component of the game, but they're never going to get mentioned in a review because they just ... work. If the main menus and save system are being mentioned in the review at all, it's probably because something is horribly, horribly broken thus the reviewer saw it as necessary to highlight the issue in the review. If it's not mentioned in the reviews, the feature probably works exactly as expected, it doesn't mean it's an unimportant feature that can be just yoinked out of the game without causing any problems.
So if there's some small government agency that does exactly one function and nobody has ever heard of them, then it's probably some vital yet unsexy function that has to be done, but nobody else wants to do it. This office does exactly one thing, they do it well, they have a set budget that's easy to disentangle what the money is being used for. Trying to merge these offices into a bigger department that now does 20 different at the same time is likely a fool's errand, and if it made sense, would probably have been done years ago.
Finally, Musk has said he's going to put all the waste up on the internet to be named and shamed. He really is very, very stupid. There's no other way around this. If there was that much low-hanging fruit, then it would already be well publicized. The fact that he can't actually name a single example of what he's talking about says all you need to know.
The point of cutting costs is that you DON'T highlight exactly what your cuts are going to cut. You just give the big figure "Department of X spends $500 billion a year" then demand a 5% cut to end "waste" and you just lie about what actually got cut. That's how the cost-cutters do things in real life.
Musk's idea of making an internet leaderboard explaining what exactly is being cut goes against the logic of cost-cutting neo-liberalism because it wouldn't allow him to hand-wave away what exactly is being destroyed. So the idea of them being extremely transparent about the effects of the cut, it's definitely going to blow up in Musk's face, or be quietly shelved in favor of making broad, opaque cuts, then ignoring the real-world results.
RippedPhreak on 13/11/2024 at 21:44
Quote:
The point of cutting costs is that you DON'T highlight exactly what your cuts are going to cut. You just give the big figure "Department of X spends $500 billion a year" then demand a 5% cut to end "waste" and you just lie about what actually got cut. That's how the cost-cutters do things in real life.
But...doesn't this kind of explain how we've gotten to 40 trillion in debt or whatever the amount is now? Why not try something different?
Pyrian on 14/11/2024 at 00:35
We've got all this debt because Republicans loooove unfunded tax cuts for the same reason Cipheron mentions - when you have to actually cut something real, that's going to be unpopular. Ultimately, it's pretty clear that the "huge amounts of government waste" is more fantasy than reality. Where it does exist, it's exactly the sort of corruption that Trump wallows in, e.g. overcharging the Secret Service to stay at his properties to protect him (poorly, apparently). And there's a lot of existing law to mitigate that sort of thing, which Trump and his administration will surely once again do their best to ignore, find loopholes around, or overturn.
Remember Trump's last term, where Trump's Energy Secretary was a guy who famously advocated abolishing the Depart of Energy and had no idea what it does?
And these chuckleheads and their supporters have the chutzpah to accuse Democrats of "Diversity Hires" while Republicans staff up with the least qualified candidates in history.
Starker on 14/11/2024 at 02:36
Not only are there major tax cuts to the rich that increase the wealth inequality every time a Republican gets into office, there have also been two massive wars that weren't billed directly to the US taxpayer, but actually got funded by debt, so as an end result, not only does the debt have to be paid off some day, the US tax payers spend a lot of money servicing the interest to that debt.
Most of the spending is in two places -- social services and the military. No Republican is going to cut anything going to the military (and a lot of Democrats are loath to do it as well). That leaves only a few areas -- medicare, social security, veteran's benefits, etc.
RippedPhreak on 14/11/2024 at 03:10
Quote:
Republicans staff up with the least qualified candidates in history
I'm not exactly cheering for these picks but "qualified" means very little when the "qualified" people have run this country into the ground over the last 40 years or so.
