Can you please be more clear on what is being looted in your view? I can see how a lot of money can be made from having the government fund a project that you benefit from. For example DOGE uncovered that Senator Lindsey Graham sits on the board of International Republican Institute which was funded by USAID. I don't see how someone benefits themselves financially by cutting government spending since the revenue stream that they could direct into their pocket has now dried up.
They "uncovered" something that's in financial statements, posted on the agency's website, on the org's website... way to go. You can go read 50 pages of audit that's been publicly available because they got government funding.
You can also see the filings that show that Lindsey Graham doesn't get paid for being on their board, nor do any of their directors, and you can go see what they did spend money on. There's a more or less equivalent org that draws its directors from Democrats like this one does Republicans. Speaking of "uncovering" you can go read the press coverage from 2018 when the first Trump administration pushed to cut the funding of the National Endowment of Democracy (which sits above these two party-associated organizations). Of course this was in a time where the Trump administration actually behaved as if Congress controlled the funding.
For an amusing detail you can read the letter sent by senators at the time defending the NED's funding, and observe the signature of Marco Rubio, who now purports to have taken over USAID in his capacity as Secretary of State.
As far as I can tell there's not even any evidence that DOGE did anything specifically relating to this group beyond just that they killed USAID. DOGE fan Twitter accounts have posted about it, just linking to those same already-available filings. Fans just reading down the list of things USAID funded gets you this same result. It's definitely a good place to go if you want to see a bunch of incurious people posting "head exploding" emojis.
So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?
There’s a very big difference there between “including a statement in diversity” and “your funding gets pulled because you previously included a statement about diversity”. The new administration is essentially pulling funding from everyone who got grants previously based on those criteria.
Who do you think benefits medium term from our best researchers getting less funding? The toll on our economy will only be visible in 15-20 years, and it will be massive.
These money shark guys that have got a hold of our government and economy since 2007 seem to have a long term plan that is specifically designed to destroy the US economy. Its counter intuitive, since their wealth is directly linked, but they have some kind of plan.
This is false. The grants were not approved based on race. The grants were approved based on merit toward the goals of the field of science to which they were submitted. Showing how your work had broader impacts toward a more diverse, equitable and inclusive society was one part of a list of many criteria, recently updated here:
Including statements on diversity, and defunding projects because they have diversity are two very different things.
And yeah, as a white male who sees few women, and even fewer people from minorities other than Chinese and Indian, in the hard sciences (especially computer related), I definitely support efforts to try to include them more. It results in more diverse views of a problem, which often leads to better science.
You call it "injecting dumb politics," but I call it "explaining why I shouldn't believe you'll just hire your buddies." It's an attempt to prevent the grift everyone claims is in research, but it's been politicized by bad-faith non-participants.
I think the claim here is that more actual human suffering is coming out of the status quo which we think needs to be fixed with fairly drastic action.
The Mexican cartels for example do provide aid in predominantly poor parts of the country but there are still many who would say that overall these organizations provide more harm than good.
The US is providing some resources for causes that you and other's support (presumably with a much higher "success" rate than the cartels) but they have also historically funded and perpetuated things that many are not happy with (various conflicts in the middle east come to mind).
Some of us wanted to see dramatic reform and we feel that claims like "grandma is going to starve because she won't get her groceries" are really just an attempt to connect with emotions around the ordeal rather than an honest attempt to point out flaws or discuss potential drawbacks with the current approach.
DOGE did feature prominently in the campaigning and some of us did vote for the full package primarily holding our nose on other parts of the campaign that we were not happy with specifically because we wanted to see this happen.
"that is only 77M out of 334M people in America"
What's your point here? Our system is set up to give outsized power to whoever secures a majority of the electors. There may be a better alternative but are you complaining about the system being flawed or complaining that the numbers didn't go your way? The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.
> The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.
That's actually a little rich in this case, considering how few Republicans accept the results of the 2020 election.
Anyone with gains on stocks who makes $250k (200k single) and sells shares at a capital gain pays NIIT. This has been the case since 2013 and the threshold is not indexed to inflation. I would guess a significant fraction of commenters here have indeed paid this tax (myself included).
Your thesis is that we are having poor educational outcomes due to poor funding of schools. Based on the latest numbers I could find, funding per pupil was $15,591 in 2022. Because of "cost disease", I would hypothesis that it makes sense to adjust for GDP per capita (a teacher in Poland might be just as good as a teacher in America but paid but be paid ~4x less and the primary cost in education is labor). GDP per capita in 2022 was $77,246. So per pupil we spend ~(15,591/77,246) people worth of labor on their education or .201 of a person.
I notice Norway is on the list ahead of us and I often see them being called out as a country with policies and outcomes that are more close to ideal (although to be honest Asian countries dominate the list!) so let's look at their ration..
In 2023 Norway spend $18,207 per pupil while gdp was 87,961 so the ratio there was (18,207/87,961) or .206 of a person. You might say this is higher and it's true but.. it's very close to us and if you use 2022 numbers Norway comes in dramatically below .201.
Right off the bat you will notice that Utah spends the least amount of money per pupil and has the second highest average score while New York has the highest spend and comes in 23rd place.
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I recognize that the data I found is not in any way comprehensive, but do you have any data which indicate that I'm wrong and the issue really does have to do with underfunding?
I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps comparatively more with housing, food, and medicine, then that might also factor into the educational outcome of their pupils, especially if it means parents can spend more time helping their children.
Anecdotally the smallish town I grew up in had good public schools, and many of my teachers lived in nice homes nearby the schools they taught at. The HCOL city I currently live in has (supposedly) poor public schools and one of the issues I hear is that teachers can't afford to live anywhere near them and don't want to commute hours to work, so they have high turnover. If housing weren't so expensive the public schools here might be better while appearing to spend the same amount on education.
> JD Vance has approximately as much policy control in a Trump administration as Kamala Harris would.
VPs don’t have “policy control” but they do have access to the President and the opportunity to influence them. If Trump wins, Vance will be meeting with Trump regularly, and have the opportunity to try to talk Trump into things - I doubt Vance will always succeed, but he probably will sometimes. Whereas a defeated Harris won’t be meeting Trump regularly and so will lack the same opportunity.
This varies from administration to administration. On the economic portfolio, there is zero indication Vance has remit. (From what I can tell, zero involvement in cabinet decisions, for example.)
> From what I can tell, zero involvement in cabinet decisions, for example.
The VP is ex officio a member of the Cabinet of the United States, as as such is involved in "cabinet decisions". (Strictly speaking the US Cabinet, unlike the Cabinet in Commonwealth countries, doesn't actually make decisions, it just recommends decisions to the President, who can either accept the Cabinet's recommendation or choose to overrule it.)
While originally the US Cabinet did not include the VP – George Washington was under the belief the VP was a member of the legislative rather than executive branch, due to the VP's role as President of the Senate, and as such did not belong in the Cabinet, hence he excluded John Adams – by the 20th century it became standard practice for VPs to be included in the Cabinet. Every Cabinet in recent decades has included the VP. Pence as VP was part of Trump's Cabinet, just as Harris as VP is a member of Biden's.
Now, the Cabinet is just a tradition, it is not established or required by law or the Constitution – so any President could at any time abolish it, or alter its membership. If Trump wins, there would be nothing legally stopping him from breaking with tradition and excluding Vance from his Cabinet. But I'm not aware of any concrete evidence suggesting Trump will actually do that.
The VP has a high level of access to the President, independently from being the most senior member of Cabinet (the President is not technically a member). Of course, the VP doesn't have the legal right to meet with the President, so if a President comes to dislike a VP, they have the right to freeze the VP out and refuse to meet with them. But again, no reason at present to suspect Trump would do that to Vance if Trump wins. On the contrary, Trump (not without reason) views Vance as a "mini-me", and as such may be more likely to listen to him than to other potential advisors. Many critics accuse Vance of sycophancy, but for Trump that's less a criticism and more of a positive.
> VP is ex officio a member of the Cabinet of the United States, as as such is involved in "cabinet decisions"
Sorry, I meant agency appointments. Not cabinet decisions. That game is in its last inning right now with both campaigns. From what I know, Vance has not been consulted on economic considerations outside crypto.
I am going to argue slightly on your wording although I fully acknowledge the numbers do line up with your timeline.
RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent).
Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed.
"Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.
My bias is that I don't give mulligans or asterisks to presidents[1]. Every administration faces a unique set of challenges, and some of those will be financial. Most of the others will involve large-scale finances. So I don't grant escapes to administrations that are hit by recession, war, or plague. That's literally part of the job.
How that relates to the (relevant!) factors you raise is that firstly, most of them were knowable at the time. Bush knew that tax revenue was falling when he proposed his tax cuts. He also planned two foreign wars without planning to pay for them. These were choices that were quite obviously, without the benefit of hindsight, going to lead to increased deficits.
Covid was unpredictable, but the administration had choices on how to handle the deficit spending. Notably, they did not choose to increase revenue in any meaningful way. And the administration was not blocked by Congress in this, raising revenue was simply not a concern mooted by the Executive. (They did not even add spring-loaded revenue increase that would trigger when the economy recovered.)
These choices to increase the deficit were made will roughly all the information we have now. Both choices were contemporaneously derided by deficit hawks; it is not a surprise that they raised the deficit.
But again, Dick Cheney was correct that deficits do not matter (to voters).
* 7 days per week although Sunday would only work 3 hr - this was because my boss could provide much more compensation because we were paid 1.5x hourly above 40 hours. He would illegally manually adjust my hours downwards in the computer system to ensure it didn't get too much out of hand :)
* Was promoted to "shift manager" after 6 months (meaningless title)
I agree with nearly all of your points:
* no breaks
* boss monitors waste, quality (customer complaints), service time per order
* regional competitions
* cleaning in downtime
* constant churn training new recruits who would suddenly quit
Your conclusion fast food is difficult seems off to me. The work is repetitive so each individual step requires little thought. To make a sandwhich you put the bread in oven 1 and click button 2 then you put the patty in oven 2 and click button 7. When it comes out you wrap, bag, add napkins, and hand it to the customer. Crucially when your shift is done you go home and don't care. There are no objectives that line employees care about at a quarterly level. You were able to move around the entire day and interact with people rather than being sedentary behind a screen. You didn't have to have any education or work experience beyond completing ~9 grade (compared to CS where the most common path in the US is 3 years of highschool, 4 years of college). Most employees at my location were young, more social, less attached, and better looking than my colleagues in big tech (ok myself included).
I would trade my new line of work for my old in a heartbeat if the compensation and career prospects were comparable.
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