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jambalaya8 5 hours ago [-]
Welp, I am just glad I have no debts or loans myself; paid all my student loans off well over a decade ago. Excited to not have a credit rating whatsoever.
rowens794 1 hours ago [-]
You still have a credit rating and you should be biased towards being indebted in the current environment. The likely path out is inflation, which decreases the real value of debt.
jambalaya8 58 minutes ago [-]
I don't actually. I paid the last of my monthly student loan payments off in 2013 when I was an ex-pat. The rest had long ago fell off my credit report. I know this because I pulled my credit and was told I have none also by a couple of apartment owners, when I looked at places.
I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.
Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
bamboozled 5 hours ago [-]
This admin has done basically the opposite of everything it said it would do…who could’ve guessed?
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
What? Basically everything they’ve done was laid out in project 2025. The people who voted for this were warned about exactly what has happened.
mikestew 5 hours ago [-]
"Why u surprised, bro? Project 2025, duh!" meme needs to die, it's a lazy answer. You know full well what OP is talking about. Where's the $2 gasoline? Why does the debt keep going up with the party of fiscal restraint in charge? No more foreign wars, eh? Etc. There's nothing wrong with reminding folks what was said on the campaign stump.
CursedSilicon 5 hours ago [-]
Why remind people of the lies? We all knew they were lies. And the people who believed the lies will not have their minds changed
There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
No, I disagree. The reason I bring up project 2025 is because we knew this would happen. The actions this administration is taking are exactly what people who were paying attention said they would do.
Why does this matter? Because anyone claiming "this isn't what I voted for" is lying. They weren't tricked, they weren't deceived by his alluring words, they made a choice knowing what the consequences would be. And now that the consequences are here, they want to cry and pretend like they didn't know. Like a child touching a hot stove.
bamboozled 4 hours ago [-]
The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
preg_match 2 hours ago [-]
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in
It seemed this way because it was so obviously outrageous. Well, here we are... not outrageous now.
But it was never a conspiracy. The Heritage Foundation is the largest Conservative think-tank in America. They basically write GOP policy and have been for decades. They're not some tiny group of weirdos. They guided basically all of the policy change during the Reagan administration. You know? Ronald Reagan? The blueprint of the modern GOP? Yeah, he didn't come up with that. The Heritage Foundation did.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
> The issue was that Project 2025 seemed like something conspiracy theorists believed in, I didn't see Trump go on Rogan with a folder called Project 2025 and read through it with him and discuss the real plans outlined in the book.
And in 2016, I may have been sympathetic to this argument. By the time 2024 had rolled around, we had already endured the trainwreck of his first administration, his failures while handling covid, several dozen other major scandals, oh and that insurrection he attempted on January 6th.
So I have no sympathy for anyone who claims they believed what he promised. None whatsoever.
> There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
Look, ultimately here is where I disagree: I am not willing to give any of his supporters the benefit of the doubt anymore. I don't believe for a second that they thought he would cut spending or get the debt down or whatever - he didn't even try in his first term, why would his second be different? Pointing at his promises like they believed them is just giving them cover for their own choices.
> The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
This, we agree on. I personally believe most of his supporters voted for him specifically for the violence and pain he is inflicting on people. That's the only part of his platform that has been consistent, and it's the only part that has been delivered. Ultimately, that is what his voters want and support. They want to hurt their fellow citizens because they hate them. Whether that traces back to decades of Fox News, "economic grievances", whatever, it doesn't matter.
0xy 6 hours ago [-]
Unlimited spending will never cease as both parties are heavily incentivized to spend, pork barrel and defer desperately needed reform.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
jghn 6 hours ago [-]
This is correct yet also obscures an important point.
The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true.
I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
0xy 5 hours ago [-]
The spending floodgate cannot be turned off or reduced, only directed towards the current admin's pet projects and away from the previous admin's pet projects. This is true for both parties.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
You are conveniently ignoring the other half of finance - one party includes plans to actually pay for what they want to spend while the other cuts revenue to make rich people happy.
This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
0xy 53 minutes ago [-]
Biden's infra plan was $550bn in new spending, which was offset in only $50bn of new revenue and $110bn of spending reductions. So, on net, it was massively inflationary and toasted the budget.
That was just one proposal with half a trillion.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5 hours ago [-]
The “spending floodgates” have not materially changed direction in any of the last four administrations. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, debt service and the military. Besides those five factors everything else is only a quarter of national spending and I think you will find if you look that those other categories don’t move around from admin to admin as much as you might think either.
preg_match 2 hours ago [-]
The spending floodgates have been reduced in the past. Under democratic presidents.
0xy 51 minutes ago [-]
Clinton made a serious effort to pay down the debt, but none of the Democrats since did.
Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.
jghn 5 hours ago [-]
I don't believe I said otherwise. And yet, your response doesn't at all touch on my other point.
By the time Trump leaves office, the whole federal government will be completely trashed, up to and including the East Wing of the White House being torn down to a hole in the ground.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
frogperson 5 hours ago [-]
Citizens United ruined the great american experiment. if you have seen the chart of campaign financing since CU, you would understand. Politicians have zero need to represent citizens because they know unlimited funds are available for marketing to keep/earn your seat.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
qeternity 5 hours ago [-]
It is still people, not money, who votes for them over and over again…
oth001 5 hours ago [-]
Well when the choice is between two corrupt and/or bribed politicians...
adamredwoods 6 hours ago [-]
I don't understand how US Republicans talk about fiscal conservation, yet allow rampant profligacy. They must have a different agenda than the one they speak of.
nielsbot 6 hours ago [-]
What they always really mean is tax cuts for those who need it least
jleyank 6 hours ago [-]
"Talk" and "Walk" aren't the same word although they rhyme. And they only refer to Democrats, who are the only ones with agency in government (Murc's Law).
pstuart 6 hours ago [-]
When they engage in financial conservation it's cover for destroying programs they don't like. The fact that they are cheering on yet another incredibly stupid, expensive, and pointless war proves that they are not "fiscal conservatives."
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral, the electorate will be angry they don't have cake (unless the taxes are applied disproportionally to the top income and wealth percentiles), and we'll be right back to irresponsible policy. I don't have much hope for the US, but at least the bond market are the adults in the room currently. Congrats to those who strip mined the country successfully.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
> New representation will get voted in because of the current macro, will have to raise taxes to pay down the debt to prevent an eventual debt spiral
That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
rhelz 5 hours ago [-]
I'm old enough to remember when people said that the debt Ronald Reagan racked up would never be repaid. Which means I also am old enough to remember Clinton turning record deficits into record surpluses.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. It can be paid back, you just have to go after it. It's a choice not to. Forward curves go up because we choose to not reduce the debt? All consumer borrowing costs go up accordingly (consumer debt and mortgages are priced off of US treasuries)? A crisis occurs and there isn't any borrowing capacity left to get to the other side? Sucks to suck, try to suck less in the future. Natural consequences are an important component of the learning process.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
exabrial 6 hours ago [-]
This started long before Trump. Ironically things quite stable under Clinton. 2nd term Bush not so great, 2nd term Obama not great, Trump post covid not great, Biden was terrible, Trump 2.0 terrible.
The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
pstuart 5 hours ago [-]
I loathed the actions of DOGE but believe that "government efficiency" (yeah, lily oxymoronic) should be baked into everything the government does, most importantly, even the programs that one supports.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
_djo_ 5 hours ago [-]
The Democrats have, in the past forty years, been the only party to have consistently been able to reduce the deficit, even creating a surplus by the end of Clinton's presidency.
They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]
Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.
This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.
The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.
The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does. For example, the overhead for Social Security is between 0.5% and 1%. I.E, less than the mutual funds in my 401k charge per yeah for "administrative fees."
When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
_djo_ 5 hours ago [-]
Correct. It's also often forgotten how much the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) had done to make government more streamlined and efficient between 1993 and 1998. That took care of pretty much all the low-hanging fruit that those behind DOGE falsely believed was still there.
qzx_pierri 5 hours ago [-]
>The federal government is actually quite efficient in what it does.
This has to be bait
preg_match 2 hours ago [-]
This isn't a refutation or even an argument. If something was obviously incorrect, you would think it would be trivial to prove wrong. But, evidently not.
The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally.
The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
When things are monitored to such a degree that a startup I was at couldn't bring doughnuts to a meeting because NASA was gonna there and that could possibly be a bribe, I don't know about efficient, but there's a reason why DOGE couldn't really find any waste.
0xy 5 hours ago [-]
Democrats support the exact same pork barreling.
conartist6 6 hours ago [-]
The challenge now is that we have to have a vision for what we want to build.
0xy 6 hours ago [-]
The East Wing argument is such a weird hill to die on. Even Obama era staffers admitted it was embarrassing to welcome foreign dignitaries to a muddy patch of grass rather than a fit for purpose room.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
Jtsummers 6 hours ago [-]
The major issue with the East Wing was how it was done, not that it was done ("it": renovations in general, possibly even tear down and full rebuild). Also the costs have been ballooning and the "no taxpayer funding" claim turned out to be a lie.
Rapzid 3 hours ago [-]
> It's also majority private sector funded
See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.
Die on? It's absolutely a symbol of the incompetent, corrupt and destructive admin--it's not just the dollars.
We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.
Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.
rhelz 5 hours ago [-]
How embarrassing is it to welcome foreign dignitaries to a building which has been partially torn down? I man, if he actually had replaced it with a ballroom, that would be different.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
0xy 5 hours ago [-]
There's a long history of the reflecting pool having severe algae issues dating back to the early 2000s. Obama spent $30m on repairs that ultimately failed. Is your argument that the pool continuing to fail as it has done under successive governments is exclusively the fault of the admin that has far larger and far more serious points to criticism them on?
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 5 hours ago [-]
The argument is that massive fuckups are solely the responsibility of the party that initiated them when said party goes out of their way to avoid the established mechanisms for proposing, approving, and implementing those plans.
If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.
But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.
There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.
Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
Rapzid 3 hours ago [-]
Don't forget the part where you then direct the DOJ to arrest and prosecute citizens inspecting the botched repair to THEIR POOL(as in the people's pool) so everyone in the admin can CYA and save face.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
This debt problem was long before Trump and this is why the US dollar is being printed straight to $0, until it loses its reserve currency status.
jambalaya8 6 hours ago [-]
It really already did lose its reserve status, in a manner of speaking. There isn't ever going to be a gold standard again (even if there is, would the actual gold have the sort of real life uses it had when the gold standard was around? Not like people fill teeth with it anymore unless you are some sort of thug).
unrented7977 4 hours ago [-]
Gold is a fantastically useful element. It's vastly more useful today as our knowledge and application of chemistry has improved.
It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.
I fought hard for a long time to keep my street addresses off of the major credit agencies for my personal protection/privacy; I have used mail receivers since roughly 2002 but only really succeeded in about 2008.
Believe me, when COVID hit, I had wanted to go buy or build a small house on a small plot of land. I did weeks of research on homesteading, and grabbed a ton of books on self-sufficiency farming. I put a lot of thought into dealing with the idea of the burden of credit to any bank, in the six years after covid started, before returning to the east coast for work.
There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base
Why does this matter? Because anyone claiming "this isn't what I voted for" is lying. They weren't tricked, they weren't deceived by his alluring words, they made a choice knowing what the consequences would be. And now that the consequences are here, they want to cry and pretend like they didn't know. Like a child touching a hot stove.
There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
It seemed this way because it was so obviously outrageous. Well, here we are... not outrageous now.
But it was never a conspiracy. The Heritage Foundation is the largest Conservative think-tank in America. They basically write GOP policy and have been for decades. They're not some tiny group of weirdos. They guided basically all of the policy change during the Reagan administration. You know? Ronald Reagan? The blueprint of the modern GOP? Yeah, he didn't come up with that. The Heritage Foundation did.
And in 2016, I may have been sympathetic to this argument. By the time 2024 had rolled around, we had already endured the trainwreck of his first administration, his failures while handling covid, several dozen other major scandals, oh and that insurrection he attempted on January 6th.
So I have no sympathy for anyone who claims they believed what he promised. None whatsoever.
> There was basically two competing agendas, one was kept more secretive because they knew it wasn't popular, and then there was the campaign promises, which IMO is what people believed in, apparently.
Look, ultimately here is where I disagree: I am not willing to give any of his supporters the benefit of the doubt anymore. I don't believe for a second that they thought he would cut spending or get the debt down or whatever - he didn't even try in his first term, why would his second be different? Pointing at his promises like they believed them is just giving them cover for their own choices.
> The shocking part for me is believing a conman would be telling you the truth this time around, I'd say most people voted to just hurt the other side / own the libs though.
This, we agree on. I personally believe most of his supporters voted for him specifically for the violence and pain he is inflicting on people. That's the only part of his platform that has been consistent, and it's the only part that has been delivered. Ultimately, that is what his voters want and support. They want to hurt their fellow citizens because they hate them. Whether that traces back to decades of Fox News, "economic grievances", whatever, it doesn't matter.
Social Security hurtles towards a cliff while it has a 'fix everything easily' button because no large scale reform is possible until it's the very last minute or far too late, then a sloppy and terrible solution is rammed through full of more pork.
The popular narrative is that one party is the party of fiscal responsibility and the other is fiscally wasteful. But the data don't really bear that out, and it's arguable that the opposite may be true.
I'd contend that yes they both need to be incentivized as such, but also a necessary but not sufficient step is to halt the narrative that one party is the one who cuts the waste.
This is not the same, even though it may be tempting to cry “both sides” and throw your hands up.
That was just one proposal with half a trillion.
Clinton was also not a Democrat if you compare him to current Democrats. His admin was more right wing than the Trump administration. Clinton's crime bill, serious immigration crackdowns. I mean, Trump did partial criminal justice reform in his first term. That's the complete opposite of the Clinton crime bill, which skyrocketed incarceration.
Clinton's IIRAIRA bill laid out the blueprint currently being utilized for rapid deportations. In fact, 'expedited removal' is a core feature of the bill. Also, he architected the concept of administrative warrants currently being used by ICE for deportations.
I've never felt so alienated from the leaders of my industry, from my politicians, and from my fellow citizens. Ya'll should have known better. It is the information age, all ignorance is willful ignorance.
America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
That debt is never getting paid, I'm afraid.
I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?
Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....
The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.
Can't mortgage the economic future of the US forever (which is what treasuries are, borrowing against future US taxpayer revenue), as the bond market is actively demonstrating. Something will give, even if that is "monetizing the debt" and a soft default, with US purchasing power rapidly declining (you thought everyone didn’t like inflation before? Hooboy just wait). Pick your crisis adventure, the message is this fiscal policy is unsustainable.
The only real solution is to enforce the actual debt ceiling, the begin lowering it a few hundred billion each year, destroying things we don't need. Require all new spending be funded by the 2.5x destruction of existing spending and departments.
That has been one of many failures of the Dems to both pursue and socialize.
They've also been the only party to have successfully reduced the cost of government and made it more efficient in the process. Clinton's bipartisan National Partnership for Reinventing Government was what DOGE claimed to be, as it sharply cut the number of federal government staff without affecting delivery. [0][1]
Obama and Biden were less effective than Clinton, but still drove the deficit down toward the end of their terms, and Obama in particular tried to implement a series of reforms to improve efficiency such as creating 18F which saved a bunch on government software contracts in the years it was active. The Republicans have not seriously done anything similar, and DOGE doesn't count because from the start it was clear it wasn't a serious attempt to reduce actual waste but an ideologically-motivated exercise run by unskilled and inexperienced people.
This isn't to say Democratic administrations have been all good or that the Democratic Party hasn't also loved its pork, but overall at least when in control of the presidency the party has tended to stabilise America's finances, improve tax revenue collection, make government more efficient, and reduce deficit spending far more than the Republicans have.
The Democrats retain at least some elements of their technocratic side, but the Republicans have gone all-in on populism and thrown theirs out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/ls1088
When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.
That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
This has to be bait
The idea that the government is inherently inefficient is an idea that GOP just made up ~50 years ago to justify tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts which, by the way, got us into this debt mess. This all started with Reagan, who royally fucked our government fiscally.
The only people who have been able to control the deficit are, surprise surprise, democratic administrations. Just look at the numbers, ignore the propaganda. This stuff is cut-and-dry.
It's also majority private sector funded, and numerous admins have made substantial changes to the White House.
Bush 2 and Obama made substantial renovations to the White House, as did Clinton.
Trump has a massive and growing pile of rightful criticism and you're focusing on a project which costs 1/1,000th the cost of the Iran War and Obama staffers admit is necessary? Priorities?
See if you can spot the ethical problems and corruption in that. It's there, I promise you. Look hard.
This is mostly a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_State_Ballroom#Fun...
Vast majority is to be paid for by taxpayers.
We should be very suspicions of the potential corruption caused by companies and individuals giving money to Trump's pet project.
Finally, we can criticize multiple things at the same time.
But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.
No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.
If there's a problem with a plan then there's a problem with the plan. If there's a problem with the implementation then there's a problem with the implementation.
But when you bypass that entire process and go roll out a bunch of changes and efforts that you claim will be flawless and dole out no-bid contracts that balloon past their estimates despite ending in complete or near complete failures then that's entirely on the leadership that kicked it off.
There is no transparency here and it's not even possible to point to specific things that went wrong because it's effectively all undocumented and intentionally done outside of the existing systems and rules. And it happens again and again with different projects.
Each time it's the leadership's fault because they chose to step outside the normal processes and accountability leaving us with no way to learn from mistakes made during the exercise beyond "the processes exist for a reason, stop ignoring them".
It's probably more in demand as a commodity today than it ever has been.