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You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.
‘Removing the room for argument’
That’s already been done. I don’t know all the details, but Trump seems to have direct authority over USAID. In theory, he/DOGE could take even a cursory look at what programs they fund and make some decisions from a rational basis. But it doesn’t seem like they have a real methodology, it’s just ‘XYZ is corrupted by the woke left, burn it all down’.
I’m fine with making things more efficient, when it comes to aid programs, grants, and regulations, I want people to be arguing over the merits. What I don’t want is for it to be all-or-nothing situation. It doesn’t have to be that way, it would be better if it wasn’t, and I simply don’t agree with your framing.
The other side of that is that leaving room for arguments just leads to the deed never actually getting done.
Imagine a situation where a patient is morbidly obese. He weighs 500 lbs. if he doesn’t lose weight, he dies. Do you start by “negotiating” about how many cheat days he gets? How many sugary drinks he’s allowed to have? How many times he gets to eat dessert? Or do you hand him a strict diet plan that tells him that if he wants to see 2035, he needs to drink only water, not eat more than 2200 calories a day, and he can’t go over. When you start from the position that the cure is negotiable, you end up coming up with excuses to continue the behaviors or in this case the spending habits because if there are loopholes, then you’ll tend to find ways to squeeze more and more programs into the loopholes and not end up doing any actual cutting. If things that are national defense are okay, everything becomes national defense. Just like if you start allowing people to declare cheat days, every day will eventually meet the criteria for a cheat day.
This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."
But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.
Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.
*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors
If we can break the katascopocracy and stop funding foreign coups and dictators that's good enough for me.
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The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, in a social context where the taboo on political violence has been trampled to nonexistence. Many millions of people are openly cheering for political assassins at this present moment. Many millions more have already demonstrated their willingness to shred the basic constitutional, legal and social protections of those fellow Americans they consider their outgroup, without apparent limit.
If you think "a lot of economic turmoil" is survivable under these conditions, it seems to me that you are stretching optimism beyond the bounds of credibility.
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I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars. To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars. I don’t believe that’s going to last as long as we think it will, and large amounts of liabilities are going to make the process much harder because we’ll be dealing with several crises at once.
First, Theres the inflation from trillions of dollars that will be eventually dumped when the world switches to Petroleum-Yuan or whatever currency we eventually trade oil in. Then you have people and even entire countries suddenly not getting the expected benefits as they’ve long since become dependent on them. You also have millions of people who have been doing essentially make-work jobs and have few marketable skills.
The combination is going to be a poly crisis that will probably crater the US economy and possibly the world economy as well. Add in people used to the government tit no longer getting their benefits, government workers looking for work with no skills that mean anything outside of the government/NGO environment, now needing help or working minimum jobs, needed services no longer happening because the costs are too high to justify showing up. Teachers get low wages now, but if we have 20% inflation and no teacher can afford to be a teacher.
"Economic collapse" covers a range of outcomes from Mad Max to austerity. If this economic apocalypse described really is looming, then DOGE is in chair of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A project to streamline federal bureaucracy - even if successful - is not going to cover budgetary shortfalls, reverse the rise of China, or bring back
the 60sUS manufacturing dominance. It's not even going to cushion the fall. Neither is cutting foreign aid to zero.Which bring me back to my point: the US has the tools to manage its fiscal issues, but there is no good faith fiscal conservatism in the US when it comes to Federal politics. There are serious conservative proposals for bringing spending under control, but they have no traction with actual politicians. If you think harsh fiscal discipline is the only way to save America from economic disaster, you should be yelling at your leaders to stop grandstanding over trivial savings and a) raise taxes b) cut entitlements. The 'every little bit helps' excuse is, in fact, wrong.
To illustrate what I mean, we have the current House GOP's budget proposal. Now, it's just a proposal and it probably undergo major changes, but it does demonstrate what I am talking about. Johnson has floated cuts to Medicaid (hey, something substantial!) among other things, but not in aid of deficit reduction. No, the plan is to cash in all of the savings (and likely then some) on tax cuts that will increase the deficit.
So let's not pretend DOGE is about radical measures to save money.
If this analysis is correct, it is a huge argument in favor of US foreign involvement. It suggests we are getting absolutely staggering returns for our role as global hegemon and the fact that it isn't coming in the form of annual tribute is immaterial. Pretty much the last thing you'd want to be doing is running around alienating people by abruptly cutting off trade and aid.
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Teachers get paid fine and they’re always going to to be first in line for government backed pay increases. They’re just a big and sympathetic constituency that thinks they should be paid like doctors and lawyers.
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Sorry, what banking scams are being legalized? (asking for a friend)
The story I'm seeing, is that with the CFPB getting destroyed, banks have free reign to do whatever they want. The fact that banks can't reorder your transactions to extract the most fees from you is attributed to the CFPB. They've also been the ones up Silicon Valley's ass about their crypto projects. The accusation is that the CFPB debanked SV startups trying to get some sort of blockchain based crypto banking off the ground.
The fear is that SV will reinvent banks, but on a computer and with crypto (and hookers and blackjack), but without all the "protections" that normal banks have to provide. Like FDIC insurance, or making sure their mortgage backed securities aren't fraudulent... anyways. They'll all run FTX style scams with their customer's money because they can, and then everyone is worse off, the economy is wrecked, and everyone loses all their money.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I also just don't trust the people making it they've so bankrupted their credibility with me, and the things they are willing to spend their political capital on are straight out of a Slaaneshi cultist meeting. So even if they are right, it's just the bad I've accepted I'll have to take with the good.
Yes, that particular reg is in fact the CFPBs. It's their thalidomide, though the prospect of banks screwing you on fees is a lot less convincing than the prospect of babies with no arms. Getting rid of them would bring us back to the Wild West days of... 2009.
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I see -- I struggle to ascribe enough competence to something like the CFPB to think that they'd actually be doing anything useful, but... maybe I guess.
Anyways, can't concerned parties just, like -- not put their money in the SV/hookers/blow banks, and prefer the normal stodgy banks (that steal your money less directly, by being TBTF and F'ing every so often) -- if they are concerned?
I think their fear is that when you have a regulated and an unregulated market, the unregulated market always out competes and destroys the regulated one. So there won't be any "just don't put your money in the silly fake Silicon Valley bank" because they'll earn all the money and just buy your bank anyways. You know... before they lose it all gambling on leveraged Doge-coin futures or giving a few trillion to Democrats.
There's a good SBF joke I'm reaching for, but I don't think it's quite there; something like:
"Hey guys, I've got this great Ponzi scheme going on -- check it out! Can I get some hookers & blow now?"
"Sorry Sam, nerd-schemes don't really count -- best we can do is some Adderall and a freaky math chick"
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I take this point, and it’s certainly true that this kind of decisive action can be gummed up, but I’m not sure it applies here. It seems like the administration has free rein on program approval, they don’t have to negotiate with anybody.
To extend your metaphor, it’s like if the doctor, instead of establishing a strict calorie limit and diet plan, simply said ‘Stop eating!’. You don’t have to be that harsh, you can take a second to come up with a plan that makes sense to you, and enforce it with an iron hand.
Except that “doing it on a rational basis” means getting information about the programs, having public criteria, and sitting down with the heads of the various programs. Word of mouth will quickly out what kinds of programs (say defense) that Trump won’t cut. Then suddenly for no reason at all, everything in USAID is defense related. If you cut than later perhaps restore, there’s a good chance of most of the cuts sticking because you didn’t start out negotiating, you started by laying down the law.
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From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.
DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.
“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”
“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”
All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.
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After living through the first Trump presidency, this falls on deaf ears. The standard arguments as soldiers rebuttal to anything Trump did, no matter how reasonable, no matter how within the norms of his predecessors, no matter how legally justified was "He's opening himself up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way." But that's just how it looks with you have a media ecosystem that is basically an extension of the DNC, Judges in the middle of nowhere who feel they can exceed their authority issuing national injunctions on spurious grounds, and a bureaucracy hostile to the President as a person, much less his agenda, and a security state that spreads misinformation about it's own commander in chief.
Trump 47 is basically doing things completely different than Trump 45, and still that tired old soldier of an argument "He's opening himself up to attacks by doing it this way" gets trotted out.
There is no counterfactual where Trump is not "opening himself up to attack", except perhaps if he didn't walk away from Butler PA. But it turns out, the best defense is a strong offense.
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How was it supposed to be a slam-dunk? You know that USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, and the only reason we know any of this, is from who started complaining when they lost their funding.
There are some psy-ops to this effect, but I'm yet to see anyone express this sentiment organically.
Aren’t USAID programs and their funding all a part of the public record? The websites not working, but I believe you could previously just search stuff up.
There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...
But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.
You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.
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So, Mike Benz has been doing a victory lap over USAID. He did this Joe Rogan episode like a year ago before it was in the spotlight, and he's been slowly plodding along over the last who knows how long with his own dinky little podcast or substack or whatever.
To say his profile has exploded is an understatement.
But the thing listening to Mike Benz makes clear, is none of this is as simple as reading the public records. I might only be able to summarize the shenanigans with lots of they, like we know who they are. Mike Benz dives into memos, NGOs, executives, revolving doors between organizations, etc, etc. And somehow, when you stop summarizing everything with they like you are talking about a secret cult, and start naming names and citing specific policy directives, it sounds even more schizophrenic.
Because none of this shit has "Destabilize Hungary" in the memo field of the check. It has nice sounding things like funding the arts, or health, or "training". But then it turns out absolutely all of it actually goes towards people critical of Victor Orban, and attempting to change the culture out from under him such that his positions are unthinkably evil.
"Politics is downstream of culture" often gets attributed to Andrew Breitbart. But it turns out the CIA and USAID have been playing that game longer than Andrew was even alive, including in our own country.
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