7 ms·

Federal cuts disrupt repairs to iconic U.S. trails

192 points by geox 2y ago

rcpt 2y ago
Brookings Institute has a good plot showing how much federal spending is being cut by this administration: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expendit... Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  And between legal costs and the farm bailout for the tariffs, it shouldn’t be surprising that this “efficiency” administration is blowing out our deficit by a few trillion dollars.
  - mikrl 2y ago
    >it shouldn’t be surprising The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system. The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too. Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something. I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.
    - curiousgal 2y ago
      > We are free to hold them in North America You are, as long as you're not brown.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > You are, as long as you're not brown I’m brown. I’m fine. This administration is at war with Americans who aren’t rich. My taxes are being cut. I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. They’re mostly white. But they’re not rich.
        jancsika 2y ago
        > I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. I don't understand this sentence. Are you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump? I’m buying cropland from creditors. They can sell it because the farmers are behind on their loans. They’re failing to make payments because we’re in a trade war. As an ethical limit, yes, I look up the property owner and have only been buying if they’re registered Republican. That doesn’t mean they voted for Trump. (Though they’re all in heavily Trump-voting precincts.) And I don’t think people should lose their farms just because of how they voted. But it does increase the chances I’m not profiting from someone who had nothing to do with a mess they found themselves in versus someone who sort of brought it on themselves.
        throwup238 2y ago
        Thank you for doing the lord’s work.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        I’m doing work that makes me money. It’s entirely orthogonal to my skin tone. My point is this administration isn’t helping poor white men, the folks who voted for him, he’s just advantaging those who were lucky enough to start this imperial transition with capital on hand.
    - sorcerer-mar 2y ago
      Don’t let internet memes like “luxury beliefs” do too much of the heavy lifting of actual thinking for ya
      - mikrl 2y ago
        It’s an apt description of a perennial feature of politics. People have a pain in the foot, so they shoot a hole in it and complain about having a bullet wound. Is there better, less charged terminology?
        hydrogen7800 2y ago
        More like: they are no longer starving, and can now tend to the pain in their foot. I've heard similar versions of this argument, usually something about modern poor people having it pretty good because they have microwave, while Carnegie didn't. >I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. [0] We're now complaining about people studying painting, poetry, etc. [0]https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
        mikrl 2y ago
        That Adams quote is nice, and has a similar historical flavour to some of Milton Friedman’s arguments. That said, choosing a field of study only has the risk of bankrupting yourself. The excesses of the 21st century, whether that’s blowing up the supply chains that got you out of stagflation, or injecting Maoist rhetoric into academia, will have a much larger and more destructive blowback.
    - mullingitover 2y ago
      The defense of this regime's economic strategy (particularly the market crash and looming economic hardships) is doing political horseshoe theory and entering Maoist territory with surprising speed. "You'll be rich because we're so good with the economy" has raced over to "We've been rotting in decadent lifestyles, true strong patriots will be happy to sacrifice for the glory of the fatherland."
      - UncleMeat 2y ago
        Yeah its remarkable. "Tons of people globally are screwing screws into iphones. We are going to bring those jobs here." "Inexpensive goods from overseas aren't actually prosperity. You don't want these things." "You probably didn't earn your job in the government anyway." True decadence is looking at a society that is broadly functioning and deciding "we need a fight" and blowing it up just for some aggressive notion of dominance.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        That's an authoritarian one in general, though, not just Maoist by any means.
    - rgbrenner 2y ago
      This is the fallacy of composition. A party is made up of diverse independent groups who are demanding different things. When one of those groups gets "comfortable", it allows other groups to become (relatively) louder and steer the party toward their demands. It's not all the same person, getting comfortable and making up problems.
    - deeg 2y ago
      > they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something. Does this mean that when we're all poor the Right will stop demonizing trans people?
    - rco8786 2y ago
      > The left wing excesses of the 2010s What on earth does that even mean
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        99% of the time, it means that the speaker is deeply offended that trans people exist.
        mikrl 2y ago
        Hating LGBT people is itself a luxury belief. The spendthrift belief is to just not care what people do with their personal lives, what bathroom they use, etc. And, of course, comprehensive sex ed that reduces the negative externalities of human sexuality on society, and doesn’t interfere with the positive.
        naenin 2y ago
        > what people do with their personal lives This isn't the issue. What people choose to do in their personal lives should be accepted or at least tolerated, as long as it's not harming anyone. > what bathroom they use This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women. > etc. This includes males in women's prisons, males in women's changing/locker rooms, males in women's sports. All of which are violations against women. It isn't about "hating LGBT people" as you suggest, but about compelling males to respect women's and girls' boundaries. For far too long, a subset of males have been getting away with not doing so, just because these males express a desire to be female. It's quite absurd that it's taken Trump of all people to attempt to rectify this. The political left should have reeled in their activists, who were promoting all this, a long time ago.
        mikrl 2y ago
        Look at that, our luxury beliefs collide! Mine, lax and libertarian, perhaps too unconcerned with traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Yours, worried and authoritarian, focused on an imaginary moral panic propagated by reactionary Internet forums. So, which luxury belief costs more? Mine might require a transition to single user bathrooms, yours depriving a gender minority of liberty…
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Yeah and the military is a third of our budget and no one in politics ever wants to cut that. There’s so much excess spending there we could cut $300 billion a year from it and still be the world’s bully. China builds infrastructure in other countries as a carrot to insinuate themselves in global affairs but we just build military bases as a stick. Seems like the former is a little bit better even if both approaches have issues.
  - jimt1234 2y ago
    And, remove the tax exemption for churches and religious organizations. It's out of control. A friend of mine told me her church bought a five-story office building. They dedicated the minimum amount of office space to "religious services", and they rent out the rest of the offices. They pay no taxes on anything related to this office building.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      > They pay no taxes on anything related to this office building. Was a Deacon at a church that bought a strip mall (fire sale price). They had to pay regular taxes on income from the other businesses. Even the church's own thrift and book sales had to collect and pay sales tax. Perhaps that church is committing tax fraud?
      - mikestew 2y ago
        Perhaps that church is committing tax fraud? Perhaps it’s the third-or-fourth-hand story telling.
        potato3732842 2y ago
        >Perhaps it’s the third-or-fourth-hand story telling. Likely after having passed through several motivated reasoning filters along the way.
      - Loughla 2y ago
        That church is 100% committing tax fraud. One of the non-profit colleges I worked at owned farm ground and buildings they rented out. They had to pay taxes on the rental income.
- xnx 2y ago
  You didn't even mention the immense new tax giveaways to the rich.
  - marcusverus 2y ago
    We are living in a post-argument rhetorical landscape. Untruths aren't stated openly, they're baked into words via the constant abuse of of the english language. It's sad to see how many are utterly defenseless.
- chgs 2y ago
  Was always going to be when you looked at the areas he promised not to cut. But 70 million Americans don’t think that way.
- mikevm 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - wildrhythms 2y ago
    Where are the Marxists?
    - throwaway173738 2y ago
      Calling someone a communist or socialist is the latest duckspeak from minitrue. It’s intended to suppress all thought. It’s also intended to be impossible to refute. It’s like if you were trying to muscle in on a cave dive rescue of some kids and suggested the rescuers use your submarine, and then they tell you your submarine is useless, so you insinuate that they are pedophiles. It’s a meaningless tar-baby statement meant to distract from meaningful discussion.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      I mean Fox news removed the stock market ticker and started saying saying 'we will be poor and we will be happy' and 'we shouldn't be consuming so much stuff' so the Fox News/Trump administration talking heads?
    - fnordpiglet 2y ago
      The irony of these statements is Harris’ father is an actual Marxist who doesn’t speak to his daughter partially because she is an ideological opposite. I feel like either - A) people hurling Karl Marx around have never actually read and considered his writings B) they are being intellectually dishonest and creating the pretext for ideological oppression Or, mostly likely c) all of the above I am sad our future has taken this turn into darkly oppressive dystopia. I still think we can save things and get back to a world where all political views hash out compromise, but I fear we aren’t going in the right direction with no clear leader of right minded cooperation emerging from the cacophony. I mourn that my daughter will live in the world the conservative right is constructing for her generation - one that rolls back everything my grandparents generation gifted to me.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all. It always ways. It is a media campaign where significant damage is caused to a large number of programs - with the claim that they are cutting expense. But actually none of these cuts will cause any meaningful reduction in government or deficit because these programs never were the big ticket items. The biggest ticket item is tax handouts to the rich. They are not touching that. Many people can see through this presidential scam. But the MAGA cult is so full of vitriol and hatred for others that they don't see the scam. They don't realize that MAGA voters are themselves being scammed by their beloved Trump. And thus, we still have always Trumpers. America is just a sad country right now.
- Covzire 2y ago
  The USA is rocketing towards bankruptcy, it's just not sustainable.
  - criddell 2y ago
    It’s my understanding that debt is mostly held in the US by Americans and that a country that runs a debt in a currency it controls isn’t anything like household debt. That said, what would it mean for the US to go bankrupt?
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    No, it's not. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of many people who get ginned up about this. Debt is the most powerful tool of a nation. The US is a sovereign, the sovereign. The country can borrow until the faith and credit in our ability to pay is lost. There's no such thing as bankruptcy, you can default or print money. The US is rocketing towards depression. Slowing down the velocity of money is the single worst thing you can do for an economy. We're implementing the largest tax increase in history, taking away pensioner benefits, and pushing the cost of healthcare up, nuking consumer demand. There's no adults keeping Trump away from doing stupid shit -- he'll set off an economic death spiral.
    - marcusverus 2y ago
      We're spending a trillion a year to service debt. The equivalent of ~45% of all income tax revenues. Utter insanity.
      - ttyprintk 2y ago
        A lot of Trump supporters would identify the super-rich as the right demographic to pay that.
        marcusverus 2y ago
        If you took everyone with >100M in net worth, put them up against the wall, and seized every dime they own, you'd get ~30T (in a best-case scenario). Even if you used it to pay off the debt, we'd still be running trillion-dollar deficits every year. If our debt and deficits are a revenue problem, they are objectively insoluble.
- rainsford 2y ago
  > Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending. Maintaining things like hiking trails and parks is incredibly cheap compared to the benefits they produce in terms of intangibles like well being and related economic activity. The National Parks Service for example helps generate a huge amount of tourism dollars that exceeds their budget several times over. > It's an ideological purge... See that's the part I really struggle with. Cratering foreign aid has an obvious ideological component, but who hates hiking trails? Like I'm sure there are a few people who hate the outdoors and a handful of oligarchs who want to privatize everything, but where's the constituency for it?
  - davidw 2y ago
    > Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending. And especially when they're targeting the IRS. What use is it cutting 1% if you lose 10% of your revenue because you don't have the resources to pursue outright cheats or lawyered-up people.
    - KennyBlanken 2y ago
      The IRS makes a huge profit margin on average from audits on the 1%-and-up folks because so many of them are cheating on their taxes. Even before all this, the IRS was spending most of its auditing resources on auditing the poor - especially people using the earned income credit - and losing thousands of dollars or more on each audit because they either didn't find anything, or it was an inconsequential amount of money.
    - rainsford 2y ago
      The IRS cuts are the most obvious ones, since they will clearly end up losing the government far more money than they save. But it would be an interesting, if challenging, project to try to do the same kind of thing with other government agencies. And unlike the IRS, most federal agencies don't generate revenue directly for the government but likely have indirect economic benefits. National parks generate tourism dollars, funding for science research leads to new advances with economic impact, etc. The "savings" from the cuts assumes the money is being set on fire with no economic benefits, but even if you disregard the obvious direct impacts like federal employees or recipients of federal dollars buying stuff just like everyone else, the impact of the service being provided is almost certainly non-trivial if admittedly harder to measure. Any reasonable approach to efficiency and cost cutting needs to take that into account.
- 9283409232 2y ago
  It's sabotage under the cover of efficiency.
- rco8786 2y ago
  Find the government doing something you disagree with. Call it "fraud" and axe it. Announce to the world how much "fraud" you found. Rinse. Repeat.
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    All the while not prosecuting anyone for all the "fraud" you're finding.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    That's right from the dictator's basic playbook: They never say 'I'm jailing / prosecuting these people to suppress my enemies', they accuse them of fraud, corruption, etc. Xi Jinping did it in China, the new dictator in Saudi Arabia did it, ... it's an old one. Note that dictators are vulnerable - they still need to justify themselves to the public.
- paganel 2y ago
  They need to win any ideological battle that they can get in order to start the "assault" against Medicaid and Medicare, which I guess it's where most of the money goes to (that and the Military, but I don't think they'll drastically touch that, no matter the current discourse). In other words, if you show people that the Government can be dismantled little by little without any big revolution coming their way, then they'll next have the impetus to go for the jugular, i.e. Medicaid and Medicare.
- HankB99 2y ago
  The budget for the NPS is so small that if they shut it down, the effect on the deficit would be too small to measure. But someone would still need to manage those properties so it would be "necessary" to sell them off to private interests. I really hope that's not going to happen, but that fits with strangling the parks for the necessary resources needed to operate. (And then mandating that they remain open.)
swalling 2y ago
These cuts are particularly nasty because federal spending on public trail maintenance is already razor thin. A ton of the Pacific Crest Trail and other scenic trails are already primarily maintained by volunteer groups doing work like log clearing, brush removal, and tread work. Trail users ourselves—hikers, mountain bikers, or trail runners—already put in hundreds of volunteer hours every season doing the basic trail work, and that's just regular seasonal maintenance. Significant work rebuilding parts of the Appalachian Trail and PCT after wildfires or hurricanes will likely not happen this year, or for years to come, unless volunteers fill in more gaps.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I kind of like the idea of the people using the trails paying for them in kind.
  - Matheus28 2y ago
    Yeah, let’s make road users spend a couple days a year pouring asphalt as well. It’s only fair
    - Freedom2 2y ago
      We should also make sure that anyone who hasn't paid the trail toll or contributed physically are not allowed to use it, it's also only fair.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      The difference of course is that almost everyone uses or benefits from the economy of roads. Relatively very few people use trails and they use them for personal enjoyment.
      - throwaway173738 2y ago
        The real difference is that people in cities pay huge amounts of tax to support the roads out to a relatively few houses in the country. Roads are the biggest outlay in every county I’ve lived in.
IronCoder1 2y ago
[flagged]
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Yeah but why do all that when those at the top could just fight over our dwindling resources.
- ck2 2y ago
  lol "new economic realities" "short-term layoffs" by 2028 there will be millions (more) people living out of their cars and doing Amazon/Walmart deliveries during the day the new difference is they will have 4-year college degrees while homeless
almog 2y ago
If you searched for "Arizona Trail southern terminus" you'll see what the terminus looks like today: a beautiful* monument shadowed by a half built useless wall that cost way more than the government spending to maintain some of the most beautiful trails in the world. These cuts would not just put trail users (which aren't just hikers but also firefighters, hunters) in danger but also cause damage to national parks and national forests as trail users would have to find alternate routes that go off trail. * It is, in my opinion, the most scenic terminus of all national scenic trails. The (half built) ugliness of the looming wall is an insult to the beauty of the American West.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
The government has unions right? I'm surprised by now that no one called for a strike. Sure, it'd be rendered illegal, but if your job is being cut haphazardly, what have you got to lose?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hotep99 2y ago
  The whole point is to get rid of government employees. Going on strike is just volunteering your members for the chopping block.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Yes, it's a prisoners dilemma. But solidarity is pretty important here no matter what. We forget that the best case scenario in such a dilemma is to all work together. They know already that they cannot literally fire every employee in order to keep operating.
- pmags 2y ago
  NPR: "Trump signs order ending union bargaining rights for wide swaths of federal employees" -- https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5343474/trump-collective-bargaining-unions-federal-employees https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5343474/trump-collectiv...
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >It notably excludes law enforcement. "Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain I hate this timeline. But yea, we are well overdue for a reminder on why we made unions to begin with. For their sakes they better hope all these lawsuits save them from much more disruptive actions.
- rsfern 2y ago
  It’s been illegal for Feds to strike for a long time, regardless of union membership. The federal employees unions have been pretty active in coordinating legal action though - IIRC both main lawsuits leading to reinstatement of the probationary employees who were fired were coordinated by unions
outside1234 2y ago
Going to be four years of "finding out" what Federal Employees that were cut actually did
throw0101d 2y ago
Meanwhile the Interior Secretary, who oversees the National Parks Service, insists on freshly baked cookies: > Interior Secretary Doug Burgum likes chocolate-chip cookies—preferably freshly baked and still warm. > This peculiar fact became the talk of the Department of Interior in recent weeks after his chief of staff, JoDee Hanson, made an unusual request of the political appointees in his office: Learn to regularly bake cookies for Burgum and his guests, using the industrial ovens at the department headquarters. * http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/burgum-cookies/682319/ http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archi... On Burgman: > How rich? Forbes estimates Burgum’s net worth to be at least $100 million—enough to place him among the most loaded 2024 hopefuls (only Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy are richer), but far from enough to qualify for our World’s Billionaires list. * https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/11/15/just-how-rich-is-gop-presidential-candidate-doug-burgum/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/11/15/just-how... > Burgum sold the company to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001. While working at Microsoft, he managed Microsoft Business Solutions. He has served as board chairman for Australian software company Atlassian and SuccessFactors. Burgum is the founder of Kilbourne Group, a Fargo-based real-estate development firm, and also is the co-founder of Arthur Ventures, a software venture capital group. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum

192 points by geox 2y ago

rcpt 2y ago

Brookings Institute has a good plot showing how much federal spending is being cut by this administration: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expendit... Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
And between legal costs and the farm bailout for the tariffs, it shouldn’t be surprising that this “efficiency” administration is blowing out our deficit by a few trillion dollars.
- mikrl 2y ago
  >it shouldn’t be surprising The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system. The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too. Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something. I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.
  - curiousgal 2y ago
    > We are free to hold them in North America You are, as long as you're not brown.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > You are, as long as you're not brown I’m brown. I’m fine. This administration is at war with Americans who aren’t rich. My taxes are being cut. I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. They’re mostly white. But they’re not rich.
      - jancsika 2y ago
        > I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. I don't understand this sentence. Are you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump? I’m buying cropland from creditors. They can sell it because the farmers are behind on their loans. They’re failing to make payments because we’re in a trade war. As an ethical limit, yes, I look up the property owner and have only been buying if they’re registered Republican. That doesn’t mean they voted for Trump. (Though they’re all in heavily Trump-voting precincts.) And I don’t think people should lose their farms just because of how they voted. But it does increase the chances I’m not profiting from someone who had nothing to do with a mess they found themselves in versus someone who sort of brought it on themselves.
        throwup238 2y ago
        Thank you for doing the lord’s work.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        I’m doing work that makes me money. It’s entirely orthogonal to my skin tone. My point is this administration isn’t helping poor white men, the folks who voted for him, he’s just advantaging those who were lucky enough to start this imperial transition with capital on hand.
  - sorcerer-mar 2y ago
    Don’t let internet memes like “luxury beliefs” do too much of the heavy lifting of actual thinking for ya
    - mikrl 2y ago
      It’s an apt description of a perennial feature of politics. People have a pain in the foot, so they shoot a hole in it and complain about having a bullet wound. Is there better, less charged terminology?
      - hydrogen7800 2y ago
        More like: they are no longer starving, and can now tend to the pain in their foot. I've heard similar versions of this argument, usually something about modern poor people having it pretty good because they have microwave, while Carnegie didn't. >I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. [0] We're now complaining about people studying painting, poetry, etc. [0]https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
        mikrl 2y ago
        That Adams quote is nice, and has a similar historical flavour to some of Milton Friedman’s arguments. That said, choosing a field of study only has the risk of bankrupting yourself. The excesses of the 21st century, whether that’s blowing up the supply chains that got you out of stagflation, or injecting Maoist rhetoric into academia, will have a much larger and more destructive blowback.
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    The defense of this regime's economic strategy (particularly the market crash and looming economic hardships) is doing political horseshoe theory and entering Maoist territory with surprising speed. "You'll be rich because we're so good with the economy" has raced over to "We've been rotting in decadent lifestyles, true strong patriots will be happy to sacrifice for the glory of the fatherland."
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Yeah its remarkable. "Tons of people globally are screwing screws into iphones. We are going to bring those jobs here." "Inexpensive goods from overseas aren't actually prosperity. You don't want these things." "You probably didn't earn your job in the government anyway." True decadence is looking at a society that is broadly functioning and deciding "we need a fight" and blowing it up just for some aggressive notion of dominance.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      That's an authoritarian one in general, though, not just Maoist by any means.
  - rgbrenner 2y ago
    This is the fallacy of composition. A party is made up of diverse independent groups who are demanding different things. When one of those groups gets "comfortable", it allows other groups to become (relatively) louder and steer the party toward their demands. It's not all the same person, getting comfortable and making up problems.
  - deeg 2y ago
    > they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something. Does this mean that when we're all poor the Right will stop demonizing trans people?
  - rco8786 2y ago
    > The left wing excesses of the 2010s What on earth does that even mean
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      99% of the time, it means that the speaker is deeply offended that trans people exist.
      - mikrl 2y ago
        Hating LGBT people is itself a luxury belief. The spendthrift belief is to just not care what people do with their personal lives, what bathroom they use, etc. And, of course, comprehensive sex ed that reduces the negative externalities of human sexuality on society, and doesn’t interfere with the positive.
        naenin 2y ago
        > what people do with their personal lives This isn't the issue. What people choose to do in their personal lives should be accepted or at least tolerated, as long as it's not harming anyone. > what bathroom they use This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women. > etc. This includes males in women's prisons, males in women's changing/locker rooms, males in women's sports. All of which are violations against women. It isn't about "hating LGBT people" as you suggest, but about compelling males to respect women's and girls' boundaries. For far too long, a subset of males have been getting away with not doing so, just because these males express a desire to be female. It's quite absurd that it's taken Trump of all people to attempt to rectify this. The political left should have reeled in their activists, who were promoting all this, a long time ago.
        mikrl 2y ago
        Look at that, our luxury beliefs collide! Mine, lax and libertarian, perhaps too unconcerned with traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Yours, worried and authoritarian, focused on an imaginary moral panic propagated by reactionary Internet forums. So, which luxury belief costs more? Mine might require a transition to single user bathrooms, yours depriving a gender minority of liberty…
SequoiaHope 2y ago
Yeah and the military is a third of our budget and no one in politics ever wants to cut that. There’s so much excess spending there we could cut $300 billion a year from it and still be the world’s bully. China builds infrastructure in other countries as a carrot to insinuate themselves in global affairs but we just build military bases as a stick. Seems like the former is a little bit better even if both approaches have issues.
- jimt1234 2y ago
  And, remove the tax exemption for churches and religious organizations. It's out of control. A friend of mine told me her church bought a five-story office building. They dedicated the minimum amount of office space to "religious services", and they rent out the rest of the offices. They pay no taxes on anything related to this office building.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    > They pay no taxes on anything related to this office building. Was a Deacon at a church that bought a strip mall (fire sale price). They had to pay regular taxes on income from the other businesses. Even the church's own thrift and book sales had to collect and pay sales tax. Perhaps that church is committing tax fraud?
    - mikestew 2y ago
      Perhaps that church is committing tax fraud? Perhaps it’s the third-or-fourth-hand story telling.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        >Perhaps it’s the third-or-fourth-hand story telling. Likely after having passed through several motivated reasoning filters along the way.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      That church is 100% committing tax fraud. One of the non-profit colleges I worked at owned farm ground and buildings they rented out. They had to pay taxes on the rental income.
xnx 2y ago
You didn't even mention the immense new tax giveaways to the rich.
- marcusverus 2y ago
  We are living in a post-argument rhetorical landscape. Untruths aren't stated openly, they're baked into words via the constant abuse of of the english language. It's sad to see how many are utterly defenseless.
chgs 2y ago
Was always going to be when you looked at the areas he promised not to cut. But 70 million Americans don’t think that way.
mikevm 2y ago
[flagged]
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  Where are the Marxists?
  - throwaway173738 2y ago
    Calling someone a communist or socialist is the latest duckspeak from minitrue. It’s intended to suppress all thought. It’s also intended to be impossible to refute. It’s like if you were trying to muscle in on a cave dive rescue of some kids and suggested the rescuers use your submarine, and then they tell you your submarine is useless, so you insinuate that they are pedophiles. It’s a meaningless tar-baby statement meant to distract from meaningful discussion.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    I mean Fox news removed the stock market ticker and started saying saying 'we will be poor and we will be happy' and 'we shouldn't be consuming so much stuff' so the Fox News/Trump administration talking heads?
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    The irony of these statements is Harris’ father is an actual Marxist who doesn’t speak to his daughter partially because she is an ideological opposite. I feel like either - A) people hurling Karl Marx around have never actually read and considered his writings B) they are being intellectually dishonest and creating the pretext for ideological oppression Or, mostly likely c) all of the above I am sad our future has taken this turn into darkly oppressive dystopia. I still think we can save things and get back to a world where all political views hash out compromise, but I fear we aren’t going in the right direction with no clear leader of right minded cooperation emerging from the cacophony. I mourn that my daughter will live in the world the conservative right is constructing for her generation - one that rolls back everything my grandparents generation gifted to me.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
nine_zeros 2y ago
> Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. It's an ideological purge, nothing to do with efficiency at all. It always ways. It is a media campaign where significant damage is caused to a large number of programs - with the claim that they are cutting expense. But actually none of these cuts will cause any meaningful reduction in government or deficit because these programs never were the big ticket items. The biggest ticket item is tax handouts to the rich. They are not touching that. Many people can see through this presidential scam. But the MAGA cult is so full of vitriol and hatred for others that they don't see the scam. They don't realize that MAGA voters are themselves being scammed by their beloved Trump. And thus, we still have always Trumpers. America is just a sad country right now.
Covzire 2y ago
The USA is rocketing towards bankruptcy, it's just not sustainable.
- criddell 2y ago
  It’s my understanding that debt is mostly held in the US by Americans and that a country that runs a debt in a currency it controls isn’t anything like household debt. That said, what would it mean for the US to go bankrupt?
- Spooky23 2y ago
  No, it's not. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of many people who get ginned up about this. Debt is the most powerful tool of a nation. The US is a sovereign, the sovereign. The country can borrow until the faith and credit in our ability to pay is lost. There's no such thing as bankruptcy, you can default or print money. The US is rocketing towards depression. Slowing down the velocity of money is the single worst thing you can do for an economy. We're implementing the largest tax increase in history, taking away pensioner benefits, and pushing the cost of healthcare up, nuking consumer demand. There's no adults keeping Trump away from doing stupid shit -- he'll set off an economic death spiral.
  - marcusverus 2y ago
    We're spending a trillion a year to service debt. The equivalent of ~45% of all income tax revenues. Utter insanity.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      A lot of Trump supporters would identify the super-rich as the right demographic to pay that.
      - marcusverus 2y ago
        If you took everyone with >100M in net worth, put them up against the wall, and seized every dime they own, you'd get ~30T (in a best-case scenario). Even if you used it to pay off the debt, we'd still be running trillion-dollar deficits every year. If our debt and deficits are a revenue problem, they are objectively insoluble.
rainsford 2y ago
> Turns out all the cuts are only a fraction of a percent of the federal budget. Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending. Maintaining things like hiking trails and parks is incredibly cheap compared to the benefits they produce in terms of intangibles like well being and related economic activity. The National Parks Service for example helps generate a huge amount of tourism dollars that exceeds their budget several times over. > It's an ideological purge... See that's the part I really struggle with. Cratering foreign aid has an obvious ideological component, but who hates hiking trails? Like I'm sure there are a few people who hate the outdoors and a handful of oligarchs who want to privatize everything, but where's the constituency for it?
- davidw 2y ago
  > Looking at it another way, the cuts are actually decreasing overall efficiency since they're cutting things that deliver decent benefits given that they only cost a small fraction of federal spending. And especially when they're targeting the IRS. What use is it cutting 1% if you lose 10% of your revenue because you don't have the resources to pursue outright cheats or lawyered-up people.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    The IRS makes a huge profit margin on average from audits on the 1%-and-up folks because so many of them are cheating on their taxes. Even before all this, the IRS was spending most of its auditing resources on auditing the poor - especially people using the earned income credit - and losing thousands of dollars or more on each audit because they either didn't find anything, or it was an inconsequential amount of money.
  - rainsford 2y ago
    The IRS cuts are the most obvious ones, since they will clearly end up losing the government far more money than they save. But it would be an interesting, if challenging, project to try to do the same kind of thing with other government agencies. And unlike the IRS, most federal agencies don't generate revenue directly for the government but likely have indirect economic benefits. National parks generate tourism dollars, funding for science research leads to new advances with economic impact, etc. The "savings" from the cuts assumes the money is being set on fire with no economic benefits, but even if you disregard the obvious direct impacts like federal employees or recipients of federal dollars buying stuff just like everyone else, the impact of the service being provided is almost certainly non-trivial if admittedly harder to measure. Any reasonable approach to efficiency and cost cutting needs to take that into account.
9283409232 2y ago
It's sabotage under the cover of efficiency.
rco8786 2y ago
Find the government doing something you disagree with. Call it "fraud" and axe it. Announce to the world how much "fraud" you found. Rinse. Repeat.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  All the while not prosecuting anyone for all the "fraud" you're finding.
- mmooss 2y ago
  That's right from the dictator's basic playbook: They never say 'I'm jailing / prosecuting these people to suppress my enemies', they accuse them of fraud, corruption, etc. Xi Jinping did it in China, the new dictator in Saudi Arabia did it, ... it's an old one. Note that dictators are vulnerable - they still need to justify themselves to the public.
paganel 2y ago
They need to win any ideological battle that they can get in order to start the "assault" against Medicaid and Medicare, which I guess it's where most of the money goes to (that and the Military, but I don't think they'll drastically touch that, no matter the current discourse). In other words, if you show people that the Government can be dismantled little by little without any big revolution coming their way, then they'll next have the impetus to go for the jugular, i.e. Medicaid and Medicare.
HankB99 2y ago
The budget for the NPS is so small that if they shut it down, the effect on the deficit would be too small to measure. But someone would still need to manage those properties so it would be "necessary" to sell them off to private interests. I really hope that's not going to happen, but that fits with strangling the parks for the necessary resources needed to operate. (And then mandating that they remain open.)

swalling 2y ago

These cuts are particularly nasty because federal spending on public trail maintenance is already razor thin. A ton of the Pacific Crest Trail and other scenic trails are already primarily maintained by volunteer groups doing work like log clearing, brush removal, and tread work. Trail users ourselves—hikers, mountain bikers, or trail runners—already put in hundreds of volunteer hours every season doing the basic trail work, and that's just regular seasonal maintenance. Significant work rebuilding parts of the Appalachian Trail and PCT after wildfires or hurricanes will likely not happen this year, or for years to come, unless volunteers fill in more gaps.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I kind of like the idea of the people using the trails paying for them in kind.
- Matheus28 2y ago
  Yeah, let’s make road users spend a couple days a year pouring asphalt as well. It’s only fair
  - Freedom2 2y ago
    We should also make sure that anyone who hasn't paid the trail toll or contributed physically are not allowed to use it, it's also only fair.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    The difference of course is that almost everyone uses or benefits from the economy of roads. Relatively very few people use trails and they use them for personal enjoyment.
    - throwaway173738 2y ago
      The real difference is that people in cities pay huge amounts of tax to support the roads out to a relatively few houses in the country. Roads are the biggest outlay in every county I’ve lived in.

IronCoder1 2y ago

[flagged]

SequoiaHope 2y ago
Yeah but why do all that when those at the top could just fight over our dwindling resources.
ck2 2y ago
lol "new economic realities" "short-term layoffs" by 2028 there will be millions (more) people living out of their cars and doing Amazon/Walmart deliveries during the day the new difference is they will have 4-year college degrees while homeless

almog 2y ago

If you searched for "Arizona Trail southern terminus" you'll see what the terminus looks like today: a beautiful* monument shadowed by a half built useless wall that cost way more than the government spending to maintain some of the most beautiful trails in the world. These cuts would not just put trail users (which aren't just hikers but also firefighters, hunters) in danger but also cause damage to national parks and national forests as trail users would have to find alternate routes that go off trail. * It is, in my opinion, the most scenic terminus of all national scenic trails. The (half built) ugliness of the looming wall is an insult to the beauty of the American West.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

The government has unions right? I'm surprised by now that no one called for a strike. Sure, it'd be rendered illegal, but if your job is being cut haphazardly, what have you got to lose?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hotep99 2y ago
The whole point is to get rid of government employees. Going on strike is just volunteering your members for the chopping block.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Yes, it's a prisoners dilemma. But solidarity is pretty important here no matter what. We forget that the best case scenario in such a dilemma is to all work together. They know already that they cannot literally fire every employee in order to keep operating.
pmags 2y ago
NPR: "Trump signs order ending union bargaining rights for wide swaths of federal employees" -- https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5343474/trump-collective-bargaining-unions-federal-employees https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5343474/trump-collectiv...
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >It notably excludes law enforcement. "Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain I hate this timeline. But yea, we are well overdue for a reminder on why we made unions to begin with. For their sakes they better hope all these lawsuits save them from much more disruptive actions.
rsfern 2y ago
It’s been illegal for Feds to strike for a long time, regardless of union membership. The federal employees unions have been pretty active in coordinating legal action though - IIRC both main lawsuits leading to reinstatement of the probationary employees who were fired were coordinated by unions

outside1234 2y ago

Going to be four years of "finding out" what Federal Employees that were cut actually did

throw0101d 2y ago

Meanwhile the Interior Secretary, who oversees the National Parks Service, insists on freshly baked cookies: > Interior Secretary Doug Burgum likes chocolate-chip cookies—preferably freshly baked and still warm. > This peculiar fact became the talk of the Department of Interior in recent weeks after his chief of staff, JoDee Hanson, made an unusual request of the political appointees in his office: Learn to regularly bake cookies for Burgum and his guests, using the industrial ovens at the department headquarters. * http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/burgum-cookies/682319/ http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archi... On Burgman: > How rich? Forbes estimates Burgum’s net worth to be at least $100 million—enough to place him among the most loaded 2024 hopefuls (only Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy are richer), but far from enough to qualify for our World’s Billionaires list. * https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/11/15/just-how-rich-is-gop-presidential-candidate-doug-burgum/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2024/11/15/just-how... > Burgum sold the company to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001. While working at Microsoft, he managed Microsoft Business Solutions. He has served as board chairman for Australian software company Atlassian and SuccessFactors. Burgum is the founder of Kilbourne Group, a Fargo-based real-estate development firm, and also is the co-founder of Arthur Ventures, a software venture capital group. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Burgum