Why? The Trump administration will do good and bad things, and I hope they succeed at the good things (e.g. cutting waste) and fail at the bad things (e.g. cutting important services).
Show them the American people are more than partisan hacks, and maybe they’ll start pretending they’re not partisan hacks.
Horseshit. They are not being honest about clearing government waste. Any talk of reducing government spending without significant cuts to the military is a fable.
Any minor good things they do will be completely overshadowed by the pilfering of the country for a select few.
hey are not being honest about clearing government waste. Any talk of reducing government spending without significant cuts to the military is a fable.
I’m going to be ready to applaud if they somehow do deliver on their promises in a way that doesn’t screw over important services. I don’t see any way for them to hit the $2T mark that Musk claims w/o very painful cuts to the military, Social Security, and Medicare (which they’re not going to make), but I’ll certainly applaud them for any waste cutting that doesn’t screw over a large subset of the population.
I’m not saying we should stop calling out their BS, I’m saying we should applaud them if they actually do a good thing. How much applause vs boos they get is up to them.
“Cutting waste”, for a conservative, is to reduce public services. They have spent a very long time putting out the idea that the government must turn a direct profit and pretty much none of them have the barest clue of what an indirect effect is. The more they crush public infrastructure the more space there is for private interests to come in and overcharge for services they don’t even really provide(health insurance, for example).
Nothing they do to streamline, especially with Elon must holding the lever, will be a benefit to the working class and the benefit to the owner class will be a few quarters of profits while they continue to descend into a place where there’s no money left for their customers to buy their products.
There is no good coming.
I hold out hope to be pleasantly surprised.
There’s a lot of waste in the government, especially in the military. We need to audit how money is spent, reorient spending culture from “use it or lose it” to rolling over unused funds, and improve reporting so these kinds of waste are caught sooner. I don’t think there’s anywhere near $2T Musk claims there is, but I could believe up to $500B or so in unnecessary spending.
Whether they do that is up to them, but I’ll be ready to applaud them if they somehow pull it off, and criticize when they make boneheaded decisions that screws people over for minimal fiscal benefit.
Is this your first election? Every cycle they shout about wasteful spending, and when they win they increase military spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut important services to cover it, then when that doesn’t cover it they quietly run up the debt just to shout about how high the debt is as soon as they’re replaced.
There’s holding out hope to be pleasantly surprised, and then there’s pretending that there’s even a whisper of a chance that they’ll do the exact opposite of the thing they’ve done for decades.
I want what’s best for the country, specifically the people in it, and the world as a whole.
I hope that trump fails because his stated objectives are abhorrent to common decency, fiscal prudence, and functional governance.
What he calls waste I don’t believe for a second is actually waste. He has done nothing to earn my trust in that or any other regard, and so I don’t. Certainly not enough to trust them with something as broad as “waste”, if the fools who think that any scientific research they don’t see the point of is “waste” like so many of the examples have been.
Listening and judging a politician based on their words and actions isn’t being “partisan”. The electorate can’t even be “partisan hacks”, they’re the one’s whose interests and opinions are supposed to be being represented.
It’s not up to the American people to live up to the expectations of politicians. It’s literally a politicians entire job to live up to ours, and do things that benefit us. If the politicians goal is contrary to that end, I hope they fail.
I’m not gonna wish someone who wants to harm me, my family and my friends luck just so that they might not want to in the future. They need to earn my trust, not the other way around.
If they do nothing for four years and things remain exactly the same as today, I’ll count that as a win. If they yell “psych!” and actually do something good I’ll eat a hat.
What he calls waste I don’t believe for a second is actually waste
I don’t know what he considers waste, but there’s a ton of obvious waste, such as military suppliers (also goes for many government suppliers). I obviously haven’t pored over government financials, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we could find tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of waste by looking for things like this.
That said, what will probably end up happening is that they’ll use it to gut services that are politically inconvenient (e.g. CDC) instead of cutting actual waste. But I’ll hold out hope, because I literally can’t control it anyway and I prefer hope to despair.
The electorate can’t even be “partisan hacks”, they’re the one’s whose interests and opinions are supposed to be being represented.
I take it you haven’t spent much time on social media then… So many people have knee-jerk reactions to things due to their party affiliation instead of the actual facts. Positive things about Biden/Harris get posted on Lemmy and Reddit, and negative things tend to get ignored (inverse is true for Trump).
People like slanting their view of events when it fits their own internal narrative, instead of objectively looking at the facts. That is what I mean by the electorate being “partisan hacks.”
It’s not up to the American people to live up to the expectations of politicians
Sure, but it’s also up to the American people to inform politicians when they are or are not living up to expectations. If they only get negative feedback from those outside their party and positive feedback from those within it, they’ll continue doing things that benefit their party over society as a whole. If members of the opposition party actually applauded when they did something good, maybe they’d do more of that thing. But if all we get is negativity and obstructionism (and yes, that happens on both sides of the aisle), we’ll just get more partisan hackery.
I’m calling for a shift in the public discourse on social media toward constructive feedback instead of partisan nonsense. We can’t change what the big media orgs do, but we can choose what we do and who we support.
My eyes rolled so hard they literally flew out of my head and knocked a wall off the back of my house when I saw your example to justify “hundreds of billions of dollars of waste” was an opinion piece on the $500 toilet seat from 1986.
Spoiler alert: if you read the next few years of news it’s revealed that those stories are almost uniformly exaggerations and misrepresentations driven by Reagan era people who wanted to starve the beast.
Political lies drummed up to justify cutting vital services under the pretenses of “fighting waste”.
You can do whatever you want. I won’t be caught dead cheering for a fascist who wants to rollback civil rights just to give him a fair shot in case he makes a prudent budget cut. Which he won’t, because his platform has openly covered that they want to cut education, healthcare, and science.
But hey, at least you gave the fascists a fair shot despite their open plans for evil, right?
I don’t know what he considers waste, but there’s a ton of obvious waste, such as military suppliers
That’s likely an accounting quirk you linked: if they list 9 screws and a tank for $1M but don’t specify individual prices, in some situations they just approximate it by assuming they cost the average - so they assume the tank costs $100k and each screw costs $100k each.
Waste, in this case, includes important services first and foremost. Medicare and social security are definitely waste. It’s money wasted on people who aren’t buying any of those expensive things that Musk and Trump are selling.
Trump has been consistent about few things, but one of those is not touching Social Security or Medicare. He seems to have drawn a pretty clear line in the sand there, which also significantly limits the options for cuts in the budget since those two are absolutely massive.
Well, he no longer needs to be consistent there. it’s not like he’s (legally) up for re-election or anything.
