I admit it: I have lost all hope for the immediate future. Things will continue to get worse, not better, and the most we can hope for is a valiant rearguard action against a rising tide of not just authoritarianism, but ignorant, meme-level authoritarianism.
The future is here and it is staggeringly stupid.
At 66, I may not live to see the end of it, especially if the current Administration crashes the economy or stumbles into a world war. Even if all they manage to do is hose Social Security, Medicare and ACA-driven insurance markets, they'll do me real harm.
This is not to say our Federal bureaucracy is a model of perfection; it's messy. It's slow. It is undoubtedly wasteful -- but you don't fix that with a handful of 20-something software engineers and deep, uninformed cuts.
Every government that has prided itself on "efficiency" has been heedless of human cost, indifferent to human suffering, injurious to individual freedom and dignity. The Trump Administration's unwarranted vandalism to USAID has already cost lives and will cost many more. They're dinking with the military, with the VA, with Education, and they're lurching towards a Constitutional crisis with the potential to do immense harm.
And some of you are still cheering for this.
Me, I'm resigned to hanging on with no prospect of a better life and scant odds it will stay even as good as it is.
You wanted King Stork. Well, you got him.
Update
2 months ago
10 comments:
Yep it is easy to rage on everything and burn it all down but rebuilding on the ashes takes time and effort. Some of the Republican congress critters are starting to realize how much federal funding their states are going to lose which might limit DOGE's firestorm.
Unfortunately, I fear you are right.
Dodge is looking for many trillion $ to not pay out so they can
continue the tax breaks for the uber rich, the law for that
sunsets this year.
Its a case of I got mine, screw the little ones.
I also fear your absolutely right.
Eck!
Government just got hijacked by a bunch of lying crooks, but "Hey! We own the libs".
If they could read, and if they could spell "Pyrrhic", they would grasp the magnitude of their achievements.
Sometimes, all one can do is wait out the car crash and hope their limbs are intact at the end.
I suppose one could yell at the Congress that's supposed to audit and close down agencies to do their job and not let Trump do it--but given the current lot, I'm not sure what good it would do.
On the bright side, one of the bigger articles in the New Yorker's 100th anniversary issue is about a competition for high school matching bands that takes place in Indianopolis. You might enjoy that.
Jeffrey Smith
The whole "efficiency" or "profitability" measurement is ridiculous when applied to government services.
I mean, the whole point of government is to do those things that can't be done profitably or even very efficiently and yet which civilization requires doing anyway.
Poop needs pumping away from houses whether anybody can make a buck at it or not.
I also suspect we'll find that contractors who buy fleets of Teslas, pay large contributions to approved campaigns, and send employees to stay at Trump hotels will somehow be seen as more efficient than those who don't.
DOGE finding inefficiencies and waste in Tesla's government contracts is about as likely as Putin converting to Judaism.
It does seem that we are in a time when today is worse than the day before and tomorrow will be worse than today.
We'll see what happens when farmers find out they can't get help or answers from the USDA and people who need to get on disability or Social Security can't get assistance. It will suck to be anyone who needs help from the feds for any issue at all.
I quoted back a portion of email from one of my US Senators, "According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in the most recent fiscal year, the government issued $250 billion of improper payments. This, along with over $36 trillion of national debt and an annual deficit of $2 trillion, is unsustainable. For the sake of our grandchildren, we need to address the waste, fraud, abuse, and incompetence within our federal government."
Then, I gave him my thoughts:
1) Assuming that your numbers are correct, that amounts to a rate of 0.69% of the payments being made having been improper. That is an impressively small percentage in my experience. Rule of thumb is to expect up to 5%.
2) I agree that we should not ignore our national debt. Further, I assert that a president does not have complete control over national debt. That said, according to Consumer Affairs' website: "From the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017 to its end in 2021, the national debt increased by 40.43%, about $8.18 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. It rose the most from September 2019 to September 2020, when Trump spent $3.6 trillion on coronavirus pandemic relief." Did I miss your righteous indignation over that?
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