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?
It’s well known that government agencies spend way more than they need to in order to keep their funding the next year. Spending needs aren’t consistent every year, so they try to smooth over the differences by purpurchasing things before EOY or retaining staff they don’t technically need in case their spending needs are higher next year.
That’s stupid and wasteful. I don’t know how wasteful, but I do know there’s an incentive for an agency to expand its budget. It may not come in the form of $500 toilets, but you don’t have to look any further than the TSA to find excesses.
fascists
Trump is no more a fascist than Harris is a communist. I don’t like rhetoric like this, and I urge you to stop with the name calling. I absolutely don’t like Trump and I like his base even less, but I do not believe he’s a fascist, but he is a populist nationalist, which is its own brand of dangerous.
Regardless, I already voted against him twice and can’t do much to stop him, so the best thing is to discuss ways he can use his position for good.
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.
Perhaps.
I worked at a company that sold equipment to the military, and almost all of our military sales happened near the end of the year. They wanted their own SKU with guaranteed compatibility for their software, so we charged them extra for it (to be fair, maintaining compatibility did take extra dev work). They never seemed to push back on pricing, unlike our commercial customers who kept clamoring for lower SKUs with a lower cost.
Due to that experience, I highly doubt government agencies are getting anywhere near the best price. And why should they care? It’s not like they get a bonus for spending less, but they do risk cuts if they spend less. With no reason beyond obligation to keep costs down, I could absolutely believe each agency could cut about 10% by just being more careful about expenses, some more, some less. With yearly spending of ~$7T, $500B is actually rounding down from that estimate.
It’s not necessarily because of expensive toilets, but I do know companies overcharge the government because they can. We did it to an extent, and I think we were one of the better actors because my boss’s (the CEO) dream has always been to supply our military, and that’s basically the entire reason he created the company (we only sold commercially when military sales dried up due to spending cuts in that dept). We later hired a vet just to get our foot back in the door despite booming commercial sales.
