If DOGE wants to be effective it really should be going after the big ticket items like medicare or defense, some estimates have medicare at 40% fraud and waste and the DoD can't even pass an audit so no one really knows what %. And that is just getting what we've paid for, not even evaluating if what we've paid for is effective.
Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset voters, and congressional approval. Instead they'll going to disrupt some of the highest ROI small-money grants like food or medicine to impoverished countries because they don't have any representation.
It won't meaningfully reduce the deficit and means we we're signing up for warlords and global instability in the near future.
Medicare fraud perpetuated by individuals is u likely to be that high. Overbilling by hospital corporations and medical device companies could be possible. But corporations aren’t the target of DOGE.
When I got hit by a car in Italy, a CAT scan was a standard part of the triage process. Then I went to the ortho in the US and she was flabbergasted - apparently the bar is much higher to get one here.
I do. I think it's interesting to have scans of parts of my body – brain, body fat/muscle distribution, etc. I also use them as reference for how my body changes over the decades.
(EDIT: Nothing to do with medicare or fraudulent billing. Just pushing back on the "for fun" point. I can fall asleep in those things.)
I expect MRI to be a high capex investment but low cost to run it each time. Maybe someone more knowledgeable might step in.
Of course, to play devil's advocate, using an MRI because you have it might lead to acquiring more MRI machines because of the high usage of the existing ones, I guess.
I used to do MRI experiments in grad school for neuroscience.
One time, I got curious, and did some back-of-the-envelope math on how much they cost. In NYC, an MRI machine drew as much energy in 20 minutes, as my apartment did in a month.
Between electricity, keeping a superconductor cool, and personnel costs, it cost ~$100/hr in a medical facility, 20 years ago.
I don't think there are all that many MRI machines that just sit there, unused, most of the day. There might be some hospitals that want to reserve their MRI machine for emergencies, so that it's less likely that you'll have to wait when you really need it.
Even though they name cost of operation, energy use, cost of spare parts, maintenance and repair as expenses for running an MRI. It looks to me like the biggest cost by far is going to be the acquisition and installation. So if you've invested in an MRI machine you probably want it to be in use as much as possible in order to recoup the cost of the machine.
Sounds like a DEXA scan would be much more appropriate. Less radiation, cheaper, faster, and specificity tailored for measuring body composition. It’s like 40 bucks and five minutes.
Getting an MRI for body composition is like using industrial high precision equipment to measure the length of a hotdog
Just in case anyone else reads this and is confused. MRIs only use radio waves. No ionizing (or visible or even IR) radiation is used. The strong magnetic fields are a risk (due to interacting with metallic items embedded in the body). The contrast agents also can cause some undesirable side effects.
I'm a bit wary of regular DEXA due to the ionizing radiation. MRIs have essentially zero health side-effects if you're not using any contrast agents.
DEXA is definitely cheaper, but a good amount of my time spent in MRIs was due to assisting in various research and QA projects. Unless you're made of money, I wouldn't recommend that to anyone who has to pay. I wish they were cheaper...
That's true. But under a fee-for-service (FFS) model, providers get paid per procedure they do. That gives them an incentive to order more testing, and generally "do more stuff."
There's also an IT angle (relevant for HN!): medical systems don't always talk to each other. Which means that maybe the patient got an MRI last month, in a different health system... but I don't have access to it in my health system, so I order a redundant one.
You mean go after military contractors like SpaceX and Palantir? That would require they actually want to reduce the deficit, not just kill departments that they find evil because of some projected vengeance.
Great recent article which explores how to actually cut $2T of federal expenses (though if course a tally doing so very quickly would cause a recession):
It isn’t about budget but about ideology. Firing prosecutors who investigated Trump, firing FBI agents involved in Jan 6th arrests, firing employees for having pronouns in email signatures, going after agencies that spend <.1% of the federal budget just because they have “diversity” or “aid” in the name, using emergency executive power over vague threats like “drugs”. This is a government takeover and purge of anyone who can be considered disloyal to the administration. This may be a surprise to people who have only ever lived under functional first-world governments and the rule of law, but the rest of the world recognizes it as a story that has played out many times before.
Exactly. An ideology of "the world is out to get me, I shall seek vengeance on them," which honestly, is maybe the farthest thing from what Christians should believe, if they read any of the New Testament. And I think maybe even has been taboo since Hammurabi.
At what cost? Are we counting lives lost, QALYs, who defines the cost-benefit.
I can free up a lot of budget by sacking the entire armed forces and selling the jets to Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. "freeing up a significant fraction of the budget" is not consequence free. If he forces the health insurance industry to reform and extract a sane profit margin above cost of service, he deserves a medal. If he wipes out USAID and stops his competitors being funded for battery car programmes he secured for himself in times past.. Less such.
"waste" is a very emotive term for government spending. Many economists laugh at the belief spending less money is net advantageous as a thing in itself: money makes the world go round. Sometimes you want it spent more than you want it saved.
Presumably positive lives and QALYs. That's the whole point of cutting taxes for many people. I would rather be spending my money on my health than going without while the fed pisses it away on handouts, corruption, and incompetence.
I want to run the heater so my kids aren't cold but cant afford it. Meanwhile my mayor is using my tax dollars to buy 200 home depot sheds for 800k each from a donor.
Yes, the point is spending money, just by the people who earned it.
I can't rebut this without being insulting, or dismissive of the situation you have to live in. I am sorry you are living in such constraint. I continue to believe you are wrong "less tax" will fix your problem but I can say that from the comfort of an economy with a fully hypothicated medicare tax, and something approaching universal health coverage.
I do not believe paying less tax will fix the kind of cynical systematic corrupt behaviour of your mayor, and other tiers of government.
I don't think paying less tax will fix the corrupt behavior of my mayor either, but it would limit my exposure and loss.
Fundamentally, the urge to eliminate taxes and reduce the size of the government is a vote of no confidence. Not just now,but permanently. It's not a vote for reform. I don't think the government leadership has my best interests at heart. I think it would happily take everything I have and leave me to starve in the street if it could.
No, I didn't think my way into it. I initially thought myself into thinking efficient government was possible, then I watched the government callously destroy friends and family. Watched them be eminent domained without compensation. Watched their businesses and retirement plans capriciously taken away, often for no practical reason.
These real world observations demonstrated my theoretical model was flawed.
I would argue it is you that has not seen the balance sheets, absurdly high line items, or worked for a government contractor - else you would 100% agree with his stance on taxation.
A huge chunk of government spending is a horrendous waste/scam and you will likely never understand this unless you take the initiative to look at the spending breakdowns or actually spend a bit of time at a government contractor.
Wanting to cut whatever tax is going to those sheds has nothing to do with for-profit companies. They are not the alternative. The alternative is not having the tax.
The only QALYs that should matter to the US Gov't are American QALYs.
I don't need to be funding $50M worth of condoms to be sent to Gaza. That's a "them" problem, and while there might be second order effects to a population explosion there, I honestly don't care.
He can save a bunch of money and fire everyone! The amount of money doesn’t matter if what is gone is critical. When those things are lost, we will have to rebuild at a higher cost than maintaining.
If he frees up a significant fraction of budget while making the government better and more effective, and not doing anything illegal or wrong, then yes, I'd be happy to eat my words!
Thing is, I checked my twitter feed for the first time in a month, and was recommended Alex Jones, so I can predict how well DOGE is going to work out pretty accurately.
Better for who? Because since the inauguration, lots of marginalized people are facing increasing government harassment, and if any newly freed monies are applied to more of that, then I'd say the government isn't getting any better for a huge swath of society.
Though he absolutely, literally is. The executive branch taking control over finances is unconstitutional, and there are likely a bevy of other things involving laws for conflicts of interest and laws for security clearances.
The only question is what'll happen in response when the criminals control so much of the infrastructure.
As a bonus, Musk is currently breaking the First Amendment as well, as he is both wearing a government hat and actively censoring people discussing what he's doing.
Why the hell should be trust that liar's opinion on what is "waste". He has absolutely no authority to stop any payments that Congress has authorized. Trusting any one person with that much power let alone someone as morally bankrupt as Musk is deeply stupid.
In total, federal workforce compensation amounts to 4.3% of the federal budget. So even if Musk fires literally every single federal employee, I would still say that he would not free up a significant fraction of the budget.
> if Musk frees up a significant fraction of the budget?
Freeing up money is not actually that hard. Doing it in a constructive way is a lot more difficult. I could go in and completely defund roads, airports, social security, public schools, the courts, the military, and save a ton of money.
Then what. What's the big plan? What are we going to do with all this money that will give us a better ROI?
That money was paying for stuff. Some stuff runs smoothly we enough that we take it for granted. Is everything perfect? No, but I'd like to see a little more care when screwing around with important infrastructure and services.
This reminds me of people that join a legacy software project and start proposing that you do a completely rewrite of the system without really understanding why certain decisions were made. It's almost always a total disaster and then someone else needs to come up and clean up after them.
Only if he does so in a way that doesn't actually hurt the millions of people who rely on that money. Only if he does so in a way that doesn't dismantle agencies that spread the US's soft power around the world. Only if he does so in a way that's auditable, transparent, and accountable.
Even if he does manage to find his $2T to cut (which I think is pretty unlikely), he will fail at the above metrics.
But sure, it would be cool to be proven wrong on that. I really hope I'm wrong. Otherwise he'll have hurt a ton of people (that he doesn't care about) and will have set the US back on the world stage decades. Not to mention... hello recession... or worse.
Musk has zero chance of freeing up a ‘significant’ fraction of the budget. 73% of the budget goes to mandatory spending (social security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest payments, and other income assistance programs). Musk will touch zero of this. Trump and the GOP won’t let him. The Democrats too for that matter. And it’s mandatory spending is what has been exploding over the last decade, not discretionary spending
The remaining 27% is split 50/50 between defense and everything else. Musk will not be given access to the DOD. The remaining half of discretionary includes things like transportation, R&D/science funding , education, NASA/SpaceX, climate/energy, etc… essentially a lot of high value investments for our future that slashing would be like shooting ourselves in the foot.
It's so sad and disappointing that no one seems to understand this. It is literally impossible for Musk to cut $2T of spending, at least not without an act of Congress. An act that would likely be career suicide for even the most right-wing reps and senators once their constituents stop receiving their social security checks and health care. And when the bond market collapses when we stop paying interest on our debts.
What words? That this playbook of making promises to then create another crisis to change the subject is well known? That is true and will remain true. Will you read up on the 20th century so you're on the same page as the comment you're replying to?
But how would the words "it's not about the budget, but ideology" but refuted by budget cuts, anyway? I can give you candy in my van, and the candy can be real, but that still doesn't make it about the candy. And freeing up a significant fraction of the budget is hardly saying anything. You can save money by throwing people on the streets and letting them starve. You can make money by letting drug dealers go free and making them give the government a cut of the profits. Maybe not enough to offset the tax cuts to the super rich, or the costs incurred by just setting everything on fire to consolidate wealth for a few sociopaths, but probably "significant". So? That's supposed to be an argument for waving firing prosecutors for political reasons through?
Non-American here, from the outside it seems like the Jan 6 thing was way overblown. It feels like similar things happen in other govt buildings in the USA all the time but the perpetrators were not targeted the same way. Not condoning either, but there seems to be selective govt retribution.
Big rowdy protests on all matter of topics are fine. I actually used to work across from an embassy and they had huge street-closing protests every year. I'd walk straight through them to go grab a sandwich, I never felt unsafe.
This was something else. They stormed the fences, smashed windows, broke into the Capital building, they trashed the place, they beat the shit out of the cops. People died. DC Metro Police officers—let's be clear, they deal with real crime—described this as the most brutal hand to hand combat they'd ever experienced.
I'm not sure what you've heard about America. If you ever have a chance to visit DC, do it, it's a very cool city.
There was zero real prospect of that occurring, especially with broad agreement across the aisle that Trump lost.
It was a protest that got out of hand. Those who committed violence deserved custodial sentences, but the rest who were mere trespassers never should have seen the inside of a jail cell.
"To prepare for the attack on the Capitol, Tarrio and the other leaders of the Ministry of Self Defense established a chain of command, chose a time and place for their attack, and intentionally recruited others who would follow their top-down leadership and who were prepared to engage in physical violence if necessary."
There was zero real prospect of that occurring, especially with broad agreement across the aisle that Trump lost.
I mean, there was a whole plan around certifying the results of the election and it's not entirely clear how many people would have gone along with it if things had gone just a little bit different.
I agree that Jan 6 was not that big a deal. However, Jan 6 was just one part of a larger, nearly successful conspiracy to overturn the election. The conspiracy included pressuring the Vice President to exceed his authority; fraudulent electors; and extorting false claims of fraud from states.
In comparison to other countries where coups are almost normal, for a country that has not come close to that, this was a big shock to the accepted normal. When other countries like Syria overthrow their leaders, you almost go "of course they did", but to see anything approaching that in the US is totally out of left field. That's what makes it a bigger deal than what you want think.
> It feels like similar things happen in other govt buildings in the USA all the time
This is exactly how public perception will instantly normalize things if Trump ever gets the power to throw political enemies out of windows. "Oh this stuff happens all the time. Politicians have always been killing their enemies. Look up Seth Rich and Whitewater. Don't be so naive."
It will happen in the blink of an eye. And then it really is over.
I can assure you, despite superificial anecdotes — nothing similar happens “all the time”. protestors will find their way in buildings, but they typically don’t show up, destroy barricades, get shot, plant explosives. And they certainly don’t do it right as they were attending a rally designed to stroke exactly this situation
Agree with this. Not to condone Jan 6, but the prosecution of those protestors was punitively harsh. People who should have been given simple fines for trespassing were instead given custodial sentences.
I sat on a January 6 jury that voted to convict the accused, who was then sentenced to several years in jail. I watched hours and hours of participant and security camera footage and listened to testimony from a Constitutional lawyer of the Senate and many law enforcement officers who were there that day (and could be identified in the footage).
Most of the Jan 6 trespassers got off pretty easy, especially if they settled. Most of them who made it into the rotunda stood around gaping with dumb looks on their faces, like the proverbial dog that catches the car. They didn’t know what to do and they sensed they shouldn’t be there. Many of them then listened to Capitol police offers in the building and exited.
But many didn’t exit and they formed a tense, violent, and scary mob, in the seat of our government, to disrupt the Constitutional transfer of power. It is amazing that more people didn’t die (a SWAT team quickly dispersed the mob outside the Speaker’s lobby right after the lone shooting) and there were many acts of heroism and smart policing to distract, disorient, and delay the mob, buying more time for evacuation of Members of Congress and for law enforcement to regroup in force. Many in the mob had weapons, which is a couple of felony counts right off the bat (possessing weapons in the Capitol, which is looser than you may think, and possessing weapons in the Secret Service restricted area around POTUS and VPOTUS, which is a felony that doesn’t mess around).
The felonies and misdemeanors at issue in the case I was on were pretty clear and the jury reached its verdict thoughtfully, carefully, and quickly (we all quietly read through the many pages of the counts and judge’s instructions before opening discussion; it was an excellent group of people).
January 6 was an insurrection. Most members of the mob were sad sack idiots, and I can feel sympathy for them as individuals. But if anything, the government did not treat them harshly enough, nor quickly enough.
I am a bit worried about my own safety now, with all the insurrectionists having been pardoned. Fun times.
You had hours of video because the National Guard was intentionally delayed while waiting only 2 miles away from the Capitol. DOD officials were caught lying to Congress about it.
The mob was inside for really only 45-50 minutes. There was hours of video because there’s obviously a huge amount of video evidence from all the devices seized by FBI and from the many cameras inside the Capitol. The prosecution showed us video only relevant to the accused, but there was a lot of it.
Ha. Hours in terms of video footage from multiple devices doesn’t explain the delayed response from the National Guard nor the DOD’s lying about it to Congress. They only had to delay long enough for them to get inside.
1. They got lost.
2. When they got to the House, Cap Police was there, and distracted/delayed them for a few minutes.
3. Officers with guns drawn were on other side of doors.
4. Ashley Bobbitt was shot as soon as she started to climb through the Speaker’s lobby doorway, stopping and upsetting the mob.
5. The Capitol police SWAT came up the stairs into that area a minute or two later and cleared them out.
6. And finally I can’t emphasize this enough: these people were morons.
I don’t really want to argue online with a redpilled HN idiot about Jan 6. If you think Jan 6 wasn’t bad, then you, too, have likely been mislead because you, too, are likely a moron. Or if you’re not a moron, then you’ve just turned heel for the lulz, a moldbug wannabe.
Garret Miller did not have a gun Jan 6. I have contacted Loudermilk to get this corrected.If you look up his case you can see he was not charged with having a weapon. He was searched by an officer when briefly detained on steps leading to entrance on east side. Very easily to prove wrong. The J6 committee report has many inaccurate statements
I find it odd that you’re ok with peaceful insurrections. It’s not ok for a small mob to attempt to overthrow the government, whether they go about it violently or not. (Ironically, the fictional election fraud that was being protested would itself be a peaceful insurrection, so one wonders what supporters of peaceful insurrections would have found to complain about in Biden’s victory!)
You can read the rest of the report if you are still inclined to view this disgraceful episode in US history as a ‘mostly peaceful’ one.
He was carrying zip ties (intent was to tie up house members), a taser, and wearing body armor. Later, he was found guilty of felonies and sent to prison, then pardoned and released by Trump.
That's right, Trump pardoned a guy whos intent was to go into the house of representatives, secure the representatives, and taser them.
Now, to be fair, I think most of the protestors were yokels who had no intent of doing that. It's typical in any protest to have a distribution- from peaceniks to fuck-shit-up people. If all you did was stand outside holding a sign and moved away when asked, I am not worried at all. If you go in an sit in nancy pelosi's chair in her office... that's worrisome but not truly scary. If you go in with weapons and attempt to kidnap representatives... you should go to jail and stay there and not be pardoned.
[update: there are a few factual corrections. It was the senate gallery, not the house chambers, and he stole the flexicuffs from a closet inside the building)
As a non-American I don't think Jan 6 was overblown. It had some real potential for escalation had Pence given in to Trump's demands. At the same time I do think the prosecution was too harsh, though that can be said from just about any crime in the US. Morally Trump is way more responsible for Jan 6 than any of the protestors.
As a non-american I also thought the same. Reading a synopsis of evidence completely changed my mind [1]. Pipe bombs planted at party headquarters to divert the police, maps of tunnels under the Capitol building and so on. Not amateur stuff.
Outside of it being a "thing that happened in a govt building", the goal of Jan. 6th was to prevent the certification of the election, have the results be declared invalid and for Trump to declare himself president instead of Biden.
The fact that this failed doesn't really mean that the underlying intention was just "protesting".
The Floyd riots in Portland a few years ago which got memory holed.
Rioters were shining high power military-grade lasers at peace officers, assaulting cops. They sieged government buildings and destroyed and burned much of their own city. Nothing happened to most of them.
A young boy was shot and killed in Seattle (where a few blocks of the city 'seceded' from the US) and I watched some LARPing teenager dressed like a dollar-store ninja hit a cop in the head with a baseball bat (the ninja turned out to be a local politician's son so I can imagine the punishment levied). The mayor went on TV and described all this madness as a "summer of love".
The behaviour I observed was abhorrent and eclipsed anything that transpired on Jan 6.
Yet it was all conveniently forgotten.
Smashing some doors and windows was child's play in comparison, and the melodrama surrounding 1/6 was over the top. I actually heard someone describe it as "worse than 9/11". They were serious, too.
And you want me to believe the guy on 1/6 with the buffalo horns is somehow comparable to the cowards blinding people with industrial lasers? The Portland riots to this day is some of the most insane footage I've ever seen and the lack of punishment and length of time it was allowed to go on is unbelievable.
Most of the Portland rioters should still be in jail but most got off with a slap on the wrist if they got any punishment at all.
It's an inconvenient truth for some because I remember even middle aged Google engineers were arrested for acting like fools. You would think educated people would know better.
There is a 100% chance some posters on this very website were at the Portland or Seattle riots and somehow have justified that their participation was righteous.
Where on earth are you getting “burned and destroyed much of [Portland]” from? As a Portlander, the biggest effect of the Floyd protestors was boarded up buildings in the 10-block radius around the local county jail, in the middle of a moribund pandemic-era office skyscraper district. Please, if you believe an American city’s been destroyed, at least pause and double-check before making it the centerpiece of an argument.
(Many of those arrested were let off because of insufficient evidence. I think that requiring evidence to convict someone is a good thing.)
I know what I saw, it was repugnant behaviour, don't try and split hairs. The fact that the madness was contained to only 10 blocks is, on the whole, irrelevant.
Oh no, I was disputing the "burned and destroyed" part – don't pick and choose what I said and ignore the rest.
I know what I saw: between 2020 and 2024 I worked at PSU and took a bus that went over the Hawthorne Bridge, went past the Justice Center, and dropped me off near City Hall. Once in a while I went to Pioneer Square to eat lunch. I worked late nights, and on the way back home after midnight I either walked back on Broadway or 4th, to City Hall, and took the same bus back. Those are the "10 blocks" you're talking about. The fact that they were all standing, not burnt, and were in use during business hours is fairly relevant to the conversation.
The worst I saw was the glass broken in the fancy glass entrance to the Oregon Historical Society. The best I saw was murals painted on the boards Apple had put up to protect their store in Pioneer Square.
Portland is the seat of government of the USA now? (I used to live in Kenton/St Johns when the latter was still called Tweakville, although I moved away well before 2020)
American here, nope! It was a huge deal. An attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Not sure what other examples you think were on par but it was the kind of big deal where people went home sick to their stomachs for the day because I've never seen anything like it in my life. A desecration of something sacred.
Yes. Sadly, abusing the justice system to harshly punish your political opponents by forcing them to either accept trumped up charges or bankrupt them is something new here. The circus has been quite the spectacle.
Can you provide examples of when something similar has happened in other US government buildings? I'm American and I can't think of anything, at least not anything that happens "all the time".
Jan 6 was not overblown. Rioters rushed the building, smashed windows, and broke into the offices of Congresspeople and staffers. People were injured and hospitalized. Capitol Police were understaffed and lost control of the situation, and were physically attacked.
Those convicted of crimes due to their part in Jan 6 deserved what they got. It is a disgusting miscarriage of justice that nearly all of them have been pardoned.
"Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
"Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks, according to a Republican close to the White House who was not authorized to publicly discuss private matters and spoke on condition of anonymity. The account was confirmed by an administration official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds."
As near as I can find, some 6 people were arrested for this violent protest by the Secret Service, and some 16 by DC police. Is is vanishingly difficult to find if anyone was subsequently charged and convicted for this event, which was without parallel, at least in my lifetime. This followed the events of May 30, 2020, when the Church of St. John's Episcopal In Lafayette Square, across from the White House, was sent on fire. To date it seems that no one has been arrested or charged for this destruction.
So they didn't even attempt to enter the building and they certainly didn't attempt to overthrow election results? I just cant see how you think these are the same category of event with respect to political impact.
They burned the church and tried to break into the White House forcing an evacuation of the president! The 1/6 riot, by contrast, was by turns both violent and civil, but no one was armed and attempting "to overthrow the election results". In fact the Trump plan of continuous debate over the merits of the election was thwarted by the riot. It was diametrically opposed to his interests and ended up favoring the Democrats. Many questions still linger over the identities of major participants, including the "pipe bomber" and the "scaffold commander", whom the FBI unaccountably never identified. Note that the 1/6 participants were relentlessly tracked by the state for years by some 6000 FBI agents and tried in DC courts, unlike the 2020 rioters aiming to storm the White House.
This one wasn’t restricted to just a govt building, although it did start with the takeover of a police building. Kids were shot and killed. But the rioters were initially aligned with BLM so there was a lot of sympathy from the government and media. Barely anyone was investigated or punished, in contrast to Jan 6th.
They didn't take over the police building. They protested outside it, and the police boarded it up and voluntarily vacated it.
This was basically a very long street protest, which is fundamentally different from taking over the US legislative buildings by force.
No children were shot. A 19-year old named Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr was shot and killed. His killer, an 18-year-old mentally disabled person with a history of conflict with Anderson, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
No matter your ideology, I'm not sure how you can believe this is the same category of thing.
The link I posted has a crime section. There were 5 separate shootings. A 16 year old boy was shot and killed and a 14 year old was shot and in critical condition. From a loss of life due to violence perspective, CHOP/CHAZ was worse.
> From a loss of life due to violence perspective, CHOP/CHAZ was worse.
But from a potential to overthrow the government perspective, Jan 6 was worse. The entire Senate and the Vice President were in that building. The stated goal of the mob was to stop the transfer of power ("stop the steal"). They chanted their methods, which included hanging the Vice President and Speaker of the House, 1st and 2nd in line of succession. They brought a gallows. That's why it was an insurrection and not just a protest.
Most of the shootings had no known relation to the protests except police broadcast they had abandoned the neighborhood. It was predicted this would lead to violence. Protesters did not ask for this.
The 1st shooting was outside the protest area. The killer and victim had a history of conflict.
The 2nd shooting was outside the protest area. The victim said he was attacked by white supremacists.
The location of the 3rd shooting was unclear. The victim refused to talk to police.
The 4th shooting was outside the protest area. The victim refused to talk to police.
The 5th shooting did involve protesters. The 2 boys drove through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. Protesters working as security guards shot at the vehicle in defense.
Their goal was to prevent The Vice President from certifying Biden's electoral college victory as the US constitution mandates. That is a VERY BIG DEAL.
> It feels like similar things happen in other govt buildings in the USA all the time
That is a laughable assertion, most importantly because the job that Congress was doing on Jan 6th, and which the deliberate goal of the protesters was to stop, was the peaceful transfer of power, which is probably the most important (and historically rare) job in a modern democracy.
Saying "but hey, some left wing protesters surrounded a police station" is a ridiculous false equivalence, because what they were trying to accomplish was orders of magnitude different.
The Democrat party is aligned and heavily-overlapping with what everyone is calling "the deep state". And the state is the one that prosecuted those individuals.
That is why everyone is calling out the alternative treatment of the BLM rioters which are heavily-aligned and supported by the Democratic party. If it was indeed the "state" that was impartially and fairly prosecuting and jailing all law-breakers, then the Republicans would have no argument and I'd be the first to disagree with them. But to a lot of us, the bias and double-standards are very obvious, which is why we're supporting them now.
They don't want to be effective. They want to punish and humiliate anyone they don't like, and lie about it because claiming "efficiency" is an easy way to get overly credulous American moderates to look the other way.
Musk also thinks it's funny we all have to say "DOGE" because he is a petty moron with the sense of humor of a spoiled 13 year old gamer from the year 2000.
As someone who witnessed the absurd corruption of the weird fiefdoms carved out by the horrifically inefficient career staff at the Department of State and USAID, I have to say that all this really couldn't happen to a better set of people.
Catching Medicare fraud likely requires a level of automatic data anomaly analysis that's simply beyond all the participants involved, both in terms of getting access to the actual databases and in getting the qualified manpower to build such a system.
If the DoD's auditors can't track down all the expenses, then why would DOGE be any more successful?
I think that the practical solution is to hire more auditors/investigators, and they would end up paying for themselves, but I don’t think Elon would accept a solution that requires more humans and up front cost.
Trump and almost all of Congress doesn't want to touch the entitlements. Bush Jr tried to reform social security and got trounced for it. Since then no one seriously tries to change it because the other side will beat you over the head with it, even if they are half truths.
Voters like to vote themselves "free" things, even if it might destroy the economy.
This has been a known pattern for millennia. Democracy as it is today in the US suffers from the same ills Plato discussed. It is not a good nor sustainable system. It is not the system the founding fathers put in place.
That none of our rulers question it nor propose alternatives is very telling about who runs our society and what their end goals are. The only reason society appears to be improving (and it is on the whole) is due to our incredible technological advancement. That being said, we should be living in a utopia by now if our rulers weren’t parasites.
i will vote for whichever party reforms entitlements and raises taxes, especially less distortionary taxes like on inheritance, property, and consumption.
the estate tax should be 100% of anything over $20 million. If property taxes on homes and land are legal then they should also apply to anyone who ones more than $20 million in shares of public companies.
who manages businesses that are owned by sole owners that pass away?
Who controls Stripe if the Collison brothers perish in a car crash ?
What do you think happens with the customer base, during that transition, exactly ? What happens to the jobs lost?
If i work all my life to give my kids a better future, who's to say that I can't do that ?
"Who controls Stripe if the Collison brothers perish in a car crash ? "
Employees.
"who manages businesses that are owned by sole owners that pass away?"
Whoever they hire.
"If i work all my life to give my kids a better future, who's to say that I can't do that ?"
$20 million is plenty. Taxing someone AFTER they die is the fairest possible time to do so. Insisting you should have control of your assets even after you are dead is pretty absurd when you really think about it.
EDIT: Honestly the minimum could be $100 million or even $1 billion. The goal is to prevent a permanent class of overlords from growing.
>"Who controls Stripe if the Collison brothers perish in a car crash ? "
>Employees.
The controlling interest in a company is determined by shares owned. This reads like you're suggesting that the revenue from inheritance taxes should be given in the form of shares to the employees of whichever company the deceased had ownership of.
I actually think we are talking about different things.
I don't dispute that you are coming from a sincere POV, but my point is that you haven't thought about the 2nd order consequences.
Liquidations are always messy, and usually wipe out value, and result in real losses of jobs and of customers. Have you thought about what happens when a trained operator is moved aside, by a vote of activist staff, to a charlatan (AKA "politician")?
Or, what about the tax consequences to the employees who get the awards ? What cash do they use to pay for the award ? Now employees are forced to sell to have liquidity. Who buys from them? A vicious CEO partnered with a vulture PE? Or maybe a competitor sitting on a pile of cash, with the well connected CEO's hidden knowledge about a founder competitor's health issues, and eagerly anticipating a monopoly upon death?
There's a million ways this goes literal off the rails. No company, no jobs, complete wealth destruction. There is another name for this action, when done without "regulation" support: its called confiscation or nationalization, and its usually done by despots or tyranical govts without respect to human flourising. That tells you all you need to know about this sort of tax.
An immoral action that is not illegal, its still immoral.
The road to serfdom is paved with good intentions.
Whoever purchases the business at auction. Transition? Businesses already need to cope without a CEO for periods, such as injury. Might even go smoother if the executor gets to appoint an acting manager and is able to authorize the CFO to keep paying wages and bills.
Work all your life to give yourself and your kids excessive power over me? I didn't agree to that. Society gets to decide what the social contract is, and a lot of us are not happy that excessive wealth/power is able to be accumulated, negatively affecting our lives. Why are we forced to also accumulate unnecessary wealth in order to defend ourselves? Perhaps a better reward for success is leisure and stress free living and providing an opportunity for another to also succeed and flourish.
Yes, let’s further remove everyone from nature’s only real instinct for selflessness (familial bonds) so we can all become disembodied laborers for our true family: the central planner class in Washington.
I’m sure creating a strong disincentive to value creation won’t affect the economy in any way. Europe is doing so great with their much higher taxes, just look at Norway. By wealth tax hammering their entrepreneurial class the’ve encouraged them to leave so they can fully focus their economy on becoming a natural resource extracting petro-state. A real progressive utopia.
It’s not like we’d be creating a crazy strong incentive for the state to literally kill certain people to stay solvent. Ok, low key maybe we would be…but the Bolsheviks did such a fantastic job with all the private assets they seized.
There’s no possible way this can’t result in a utopian, prosperous, fair society. It works beautifully every time it is tried. Great idea comrade.
Yes, it makes perfect sense. Don't address any of the counterpoints I raised, ignore the implementation details, and just keep repeating that. It sounds like a really great idea.
Artificially creating fairness by eliminating success has no downsides, especially in a competitive anarchic global system. It's gonna feel so good to not have those evil entrepreneurs trying to create too much value in the world to enrich their families. Fairness should be the ultimate end goal for everything, not overall prosperity. Because nature is 100% fair, this totally aligns with reality.
Bad analogy. Money is representative of externalities, of things exchanged by others, like the time they spent working to earn the income, or selling something, and it extends through many levels of transactions in society.
That’s nothing like someone’s good looks, which, by the way, is subjective and has changed over the ages.
Using this logic, having good genes represents an even greater injustice.
As you have said, money is a fuzzy representation of at least some value created via societal transactions.
Genetics, on the other hand, are wholly undeserved, even by the people passing them on. If we aim to champion fairness, I don't see how this cannot be part of the conversation.
Do you actually expect serious responses to your hyperbolically emotional and sarcastic posts? Well, here goes…
The only implementation detail I would change is the flat rate of $20 million. I would peg it to something like GDP per capita or average CoL multiplied by some number of years.
People have come from nothing and gone on to do amazing things. If you can’t get some kind of profit generating company off the ground or at least passive income through wise investing with that kind of windfall, then you quite frankly deserve to work in the proverbial widget factory with the unwashed masses. To wine about that betrays the lack of grit that probably lost you the nest egg on the first place.
The best entrepreneurs are the ones that are interested in learning and building amazing things. The ones in it to hoard wealth saddle the world with bullshit because it’s a bullshit incentive that requires bullshit mechanisms to protect their income stream. Think patent trolls.
If you want to see what fair looks like in nature, look at what every other animal beside humans get when they start life: the risk that around every corner lies a disease, predator, competitor, starvation, grave injury… What presumably sets humans apart and allowed us to thrive is cooperation on larger and larger scales throughout our evolution. Hoarding wealth is antithetical to the very thing that is supposed to make us an exceptional species.
There's a deep irony in both acknowledging that humans thrive on cooperation and building on the work of those that came before us, and yet also wanting to forcibly disrupt that process and centrally re-distribute wealth to less efficient but "fair" means every time someone dies.
"Hoarding wealth" is the entire reason we have capital to invest in new ideas and innovations.
Fairness sounds great of course! Who doesn't like fairness? The problem is, true fairness is neither achievable nor desirable, given the realities of human nature.
When you aim to force it onto the world via centralized authority, it generally results in worse outcomes since it can only be enforced punitively via the stick (instead of the carrot) -- creating even less fair power structures than the ones you aim to disrupt.
The point of my sarcastic posts is to illustrate this fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and how the world actually works. Again, we've tried this a million times, with the receipts to show for the results. It's not good.
Having children inherit the wealth and privilege of their parents is how you get aristocracies and they suck for everyone who isn't an aristocrat which is like 99.9% of the population.
Ironically, aristocracy has more in common with the communist theories in this thread than it does with capitalists giving their kids inheritance. Both communist seizing of assets and aristocratic control of them are about centralized control as opposed to markets which lead to competitive decentralized control.
There’s no market economy on earth with 100% wealth confiscation above any threshold (as being suggested here). Might be wise to infer why that is.
This is a clever play on words, akin to “made with 100% real juice” while 98% is sugar, water, preservative and food dye. Very different framing from “you can inherit e.g. $20 million tax free”. Of course a realistic system would be graduated, not all or nothing around some hard, unchanging limit.
Again, if you want to leave enough to ensure a lifetime of not only survival, but luxury, be my guest. But that is still only in the tens of millions, not hundreds of billions.
A person that didn’t accumulate that wealth likely doesn’t have the experience to manage it. So not only is it being locked away, it will be perverted. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” And that’s before you even consider spoiled brats that get drunk on power like trump or musk.
The idea of such grandiose inheritance seems to be a workaround for “you can’t take it with you.” But your kids are not you. It’s a control fantasy. You can’t prevent all suffering for your children, they will still die alone in their own mind one day.
It’s reasonable to want to minimize that suffering. But there are extremely marginal returns on that once you’re beyond 2 commas of net assets in the current economy. I believe that setting them up for life in such a way actually cripples them, in the shirtsleeves curse way.
> Might be wise to infer why that is.
Part of the reason is that they generate tax revenue from other avenues, like pure wealth taxes, or much higher income tax.
And I doubt you’d be willing to follow all their other examples, like free speech limitations, gun control, immigration, or medical philosophies like euthanasia and abortion. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and is only stated rhetorically, designed to help you realize that you’re comparing apples and oranges.
At the end of the day we do actually need some government services and they need to need paid for as long as we have any semblance of market economy. Staunch libertarians are happy to forego two marshmallows later so long as they can have one now.
We’ve seen that centrally planned communism fails, but that decentralized nodes of aristocracy and oligopoly also fail. I think we’ll eventually see societies try some new things to break out of this dichotomy. It’s not a question of whether or not to distribute, but how.
If money is the representation of the cooperative effort that has come before you, then hoarding wealth is holding human cooperation hostage.
In order for an economy to function, currency needs to, you know, be current. If you lock up current in a capacitor, it’s only potential energy, and it can leach away to nothing. Kinetic energy is what makes things actually happen.
I do agree with you on the dangers of centralized planning. But it’s a necessary evil. Indeed, there could be no wealth to hoard without centralized authority, because it is that authority that gives wealth (in its modern form, fiat currency) its value. Unless you want to go back to warlords, rape, pillage, slavery? Surely the leopards would never eat my face?
At the very least, you need to pay the devil his due in terms of the military that maintain the reality of the nation’s existence and soft power, in order for that fiat currency, economy, and way of life to even function at all. Not to mention all the other agencies that afford our modern quality of life.
That’s not the same as a feudal lord extracting his tribute because we elect the leaders that serve us and place limits on their occupation in the seat of power, as much as it would seem that some people want to do away with that system.
These kinds of vague rumours ("they have evidence" is weasel words) are used to legitimize the development of invasive programs (and software) that profile people; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand... that affected tens of thousands of people (causing children to be removed from their parents, divorces, suicides, etc), mostly justified because of a small group of people defrauding the benefits scheme. The total cost of setting this right is in the billions and increasing, many times more than whatever they saved on fraud.
they have evidence that there is fraud rings of people outside the US posing as citizens and collecting medicare and other welfare.
They'll release that evidence right about the same time they release all the "evidence" that Giuliani had about election fraud. Which they've promised to release hundreds of times before. But never have. Because it doesn't exist.
Are there people outside the U.S. gaming the system? Sure. Are they "rings" or "gangs" or whatever scary name they're using this week? Based on past performance, I have zero faith we'll see any evidence.
> Are they "rings" or "gangs" or whatever scary name they're using this week?
As someone who is very into the "scambaiting" hobby of hunting down identity thieves, phone call scams, etc I would imagine they would look something like these operations you see in India or Russia where you get have an office full of professional thieves calling elderly people and scamming them out of their bank accounts, harvesting data or getting them to sign up for useless subscriptions. In 2023 alone there was $43 billion lost from identity theft. There was $200 billion in fraud from the various covid hardship assistance programs. These programs are huuuge and they have ballooned beyond what is logical in the past few years. Even democrats talk frequently about medicare fraud.
Without commenting on this specific situation, you're very naive to think government/regulatory policies are not exploited in systematic ways by rings/gangs. Have a look at cum-ex dividend fraud in Germany, GST refunds on gold in Australia, carousel/missing trader VAT fraud in the EU, ETS carbon credit fraud in the EU, etc. All multi to tens of billion dollar frauds that were systematically exploited by rings/gangs.
Yes, there’s always fraud but 40% of nearly a trillion dollars a year is an incredibly high number - like the entire Nigerian GDP! It’s simply not possible for that to be happening with a regularly audited public service which routinely finds and successfully prosecutes much smaller fraud operations. That kind of effort would involve hundreds or thousands of people and one of them would slip up.
This is a classic misdirection: fixing Medicare means dealing with the world-record inefficiency of the American healthcare system and paying a little more in taxes. They can’t say that because it’s unpopular with the rich donor class, and if they say services will be cut it’ll be very unpopular with their elderly base, so instead they point to something everyone hates and pretend that it’s big enough to solve the fundamental mismatch.
I also heard tell about underpants gnomes that steal your underpants at night. A lot of people are saying it. Could be anywhere from 1 million to 10 million pairs per year, nobody knows, but we're looking into it.
This is an attack on the government without a legal basis. Evidence can be submitted and process can be followed, he and his team are doing neither are opening themselves up to severe legal consequences. They should research Michael Cohen and Giuliani.
These people have our information, right now, in some drive in their backpack. This will be a scandal for years to come if the nation survives this.
It’s week 2. I think they will have time to go after those big orgs.
But also you’re missing an important theme of the administration. Foreign aid doesn’t go to Americans. Social security and Medicare do. Trump didn’t run a tea party platform.
Of course to do that would require actual coalition building, hard choices that upset voters, and congressional approval. Instead they'll going to disrupt some of the highest ROI small-money grants like food or medicine to impoverished countries because they don't have any representation.
It won't meaningfully reduce the deficit and means we we're signing up for warlords and global instability in the near future.