By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
Really? Wasn't it supposed to be 100% funded by Trump's cronies, who of course were doing so completely out of the goodness of their hearts. Why did that shift to 'majority' private funding? Also, if the funding is so on the up and up, why has Trump refused to release a full audit?
The system as it works is made to cause partisan balance to stay close to the competitive 50/50
That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
And the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections, combined with the media apparatus built up by the right.
I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
If money won elections, then the outcome of every election could be predicted with accuracy based solely on the relative spending by or on behalf of each candidate.
In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost.
Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results.
Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
I didn't say that money wins elections, but nice try.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives could affect more voters with the same amount of money, since spreading bullshit is much cheaper than proving it wrong. The right can flood the zone with a firehose of lies, and even if they literally admit these lies, their voters go along.
I...didn’t say you did say that? No need to be defensive.
But a reasonable interpretation of “the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections” is that such a direct causal link exists.
If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
Then I must admit I'm unsure how to interpret your objections, since I understand you to be arguing against the position "The group spending the most money must always win elections". If you're not assuming that I'm taking this position, why bring it up?
> If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
As a thought experiment, assume we're playing gods and decide to simulate a bunch of universes almost exactly like ours, so we can reliably study how civilizations develop (free from the influence of random chance). Then we evaluate how many of these civilizations had periods of strong corruption, loss in quality of life, and all the other negatives we're experiencing this decade.
My argument is: you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics. Note this doesn't imply that bigger sums of money must lead to victory - especially if the thesis mentioned in my first reply is correct, which I very much assume it is.
I'm not sure. On the other hand, there're plenty of corruption and loss of quality of life where there's not much money in electioneering, or not even a democracy. Take Russia, for example, or any of a number of African or Central American countries.
Again, I'm not proposing a necessary condition. But leaving aside that Russia isn't a democracy (meaning it's not relevant when discussing elections): are you referencing a study that, among the countries you mentioned, compares the relative amounts of money spent & the development of said issues? If so, links would be greatly appreciated.
If not, I once again fail to see your point - sure, the issues I mentioned occur a lot in poorer countries, I never claimed otherwise! So I still can't see how this relates to my hypothesis.
You said: “you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics.”
If it’s not necessary, then the correlation is going to be low. I just described multiple countries’ situations that reduce the correlation. It’s that simple.
(Not to nitpick too much but Russia is constitutionally a democracy; it’s just corrupted such that it’s very difficult for competitors to get on the ballot and there’s a lot of voter suppression.)
I sympathize with your point, we should still blame the voters, but they wouldn't be throwing billions of dollars into politics if they were seeing zero return on their money.
// America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy. //
Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.
But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.
Citizen's United was decided in 2010. Hillary Clinton out-spent Trump by about $500 million in 2016 and lost.
The reality is that spending can keep a candidate from losing an election for dumb reasons (e.g. lack of name recognition), but it can't win an election by itself. There are plenty of examples of the bigger spender losing, both before and after Citizen's United.
> I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
I don't actually. I paid my loans off, and everything else fell off my credit report a few years ago. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places. I fought hard for a long time to keep my street address off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection.
I fully know this. But someday if the dystopic bounty hunters come to me for a chunk of that distressingly ludicrous national debt, I can at least annoy them.
I feel like the media is anticipating a new Democrat controlled congress, and so they are starting to bang on the national debt panic drum in preparation. Not that the debt isn't a problem, and $40T is certainly a milestone, but if the dems do somehow get back in power I'd bet $40T that we will all be treated to endless op-eds about how we have to do austerity because the debt is out of control.
The military will still get it's $1.5T+ budget tho. There's always enough money for more bombs.
It's starting to feel hopeless. A decade of party rotations and this issue still exists. The fiscally liberal will spend and the fiscally conservative aren't being fiscally conservative. How come we no longer hear about DOGE? How long until 20% of all tax revenue goes just to interest on the debt?
DOGE was an obvious farce that defunded and destroyed necessary programs on a purely ideological basis[0], intimidated government employees[1], created far more tax waste than it ever found, much less claimed[2,3] disrupted legitimate government functions by firing necessary employees who needed to be rehired[4], exfiltrated an unknown amount of private data to Palantir and who knows who else[5,6], and then after permanent damage to the government was done, was closed[7]. It's mission is complete, there's nothing more to hear about them.
I'm sorry if you ever thought DOGE had anything to do with an honest, good-faith effort to reduce government waste. If so, you were lied to. Its purpose was to purge the government of ideological enemies, protect Elon Musk's business interests[8] and lay the groundwork for the transition to authoritarianism.
DOGE shut down and was a farce from the beginning. Typical Musk. He only shut down regulatory parts of the government that were investigating him and stole as much data as he could. A few publicity stunts like installing starlink near the White House.
49 comments
[ 0.34 ms ] story [ 13.4 ms ] threadI've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.
Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.
This is mostly a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_State_Ballroom#Fun...
Vast majority is to be paid for by taxpayers.
See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.
Really? Wasn't it supposed to be 100% funded by Trump's cronies, who of course were doing so completely out of the goodness of their hearts. Why did that shift to 'majority' private funding? Also, if the funding is so on the up and up, why has Trump refused to release a full audit?
The question is why the other half can't seem to do shit about it.
That may make it seem like nothing every changes, and much wind is spent on it. Real change is often so deep and slow that it just isn't even news. That's because politicians don't usually lead, they follow
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost.
Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results.
Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives could affect more voters with the same amount of money, since spreading bullshit is much cheaper than proving it wrong. The right can flood the zone with a firehose of lies, and even if they literally admit these lies, their voters go along.
But a reasonable interpretation of “the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections” is that such a direct causal link exists.
If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
> If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
As a thought experiment, assume we're playing gods and decide to simulate a bunch of universes almost exactly like ours, so we can reliably study how civilizations develop (free from the influence of random chance). Then we evaluate how many of these civilizations had periods of strong corruption, loss in quality of life, and all the other negatives we're experiencing this decade.
My argument is: you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics. Note this doesn't imply that bigger sums of money must lead to victory - especially if the thesis mentioned in my first reply is correct, which I very much assume it is.
If not, I once again fail to see your point - sure, the issues I mentioned occur a lot in poorer countries, I never claimed otherwise! So I still can't see how this relates to my hypothesis.
If it’s not necessary, then the correlation is going to be low. I just described multiple countries’ situations that reduce the correlation. It’s that simple.
(Not to nitpick too much but Russia is constitutionally a democracy; it’s just corrupted such that it’s very difficult for competitors to get on the ballot and there’s a lot of voter suppression.)
Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.
But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
The reality is that spending can keep a candidate from losing an election for dumb reasons (e.g. lack of name recognition), but it can't win an election by itself. There are plenty of examples of the bigger spender losing, both before and after Citizen's United.
^^^ 1000% this right here. Right there with ya (sadly)... Not at all the world we were promised as children. "Star Trek" vs "Mad Max"/"Terminator"? Humanity chose the latter. We ain't gonna survive long enough to escape this planet.
I'm with you, brother/sister.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
The ebbing tide will lower all ships…
The military will still get it's $1.5T+ budget tho. There's always enough money for more bombs.
DOGE was an obvious farce that defunded and destroyed necessary programs on a purely ideological basis[0], intimidated government employees[1], created far more tax waste than it ever found, much less claimed[2,3] disrupted legitimate government functions by firing necessary employees who needed to be rehired[4], exfiltrated an unknown amount of private data to Palantir and who knows who else[5,6], and then after permanent damage to the government was done, was closed[7]. It's mission is complete, there's nothing more to hear about them.
I'm sorry if you ever thought DOGE had anything to do with an honest, good-faith effort to reduce government waste. If so, you were lied to. Its purpose was to purge the government of ideological enemies, protect Elon Musk's business interests[8] and lay the groundwork for the transition to authoritarianism.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
[1]https://www.salon.com/2025/02/06/musks-doge-operation-sued-o...
[2]https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/07/...
[3]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-wall-of-receipts-elon-musk...
[4]https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-gsa-fired-employe...
[5]https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s...
[6]https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/the-independent-whistl...
[7]https://www.nffe.org/press-release/doge-fails-and-shutters-y...
[8]https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-dog...
I mean it was named after a 4chan shitposting meme, why did anyone take it at face value to begin with?