US: News & Discussions

American Enclave in Middle East - Gaza

This is President Trump’s idea who always thinks out of box. He does not want Palestinians to settle in Gaza. They can go and move to any Arab country, who are their supporter anyway. His idea is to empty the historical strip of Gaza land and rebuild it as a Florida or French Riviera on the Mediterranean.

Beautiful idea but not feasible. Nobody wants the 2 million politicalized Palestinians. Wherever they go they become a political liability and economic disaster. Even the Pharos of Egypt about 2700 years back loved this narrow strip of land as a natural wonderland. It can be rebuilt as a vacationing spot with nothing less than a trillion dollar in investment.

But this idea is full of holes with no feasible solution. First, nobody wants the Palestinians. Second, surrounded by hostile Arabs, nobody will like vacationing there. Third, who will fund the holiday type of build. Fourth, yearly cost of running the place will far exceed the income.

Hence, let us dump the idea and not talk about it.
 
Psacha123 said:
Wow, they really going after Medicare.
USAID is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to this!


View: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887184902543577590?s=46
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I am not sure how far Elmo and his team of interns can go with his DOGE thingy tho. It is not easy to do even 10% of what (cost cutting, firing federal employees etc) he and his buddies have promised. But then again, Elmo is gaining access to a lot govt data and even social security details of millions of Americans which might be of great help for his future business interests so he probably does not even care. He is still being kept in check by the orange man for now - let us see how long this hierarchy lasts.
 
crazywithmath said:
Just how many variations of this meme are you in possession of?
Click to expand...

I have a whole folder, for the Middle Kingdom I have 3 variations, posted the most appropriate one for our beloved wumao, but below are two Traditional renditions of the ((( Eternal Han )))

PeasantHanMerchant.webp



Grorious Han Merchant.webp

Ofc and a master piece i found on the internet, ((( Da Jooz ))) also fear their Pro Plus Max 1 billion strong version
OY-VEY-WHAT-ARE-YOU.webp
 
Azaad said:
For levying a 10% tariff on Chinese products & preventing access to the US markets thru Canada & Mexico ? Sure , if you say so.
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Well, Biden was trying to build a coalition against Russia and China, and trump is breaking all coalitions. Thats what democrats claim.
 

View: https://twitter.com/Brian_Riedl/status/1886930945107759544?s=19

“Why aren’t you cheering Trump & DOGE? I thought you wanted spending and deficit cuts!"

Because I’ve been doing this for 25 years and can’t be tricked by gimmicky nonsense. Trump’s first term added $8 trillion in enacted spending hikes and tax cuts to the deficit - half of which was unrelated to the pandemic. This time around, Trump has proposed roughly $8 trillion more in tax cuts and spending hikes over the decade. And right now, a GOP Congress is preparing to abandon most reconciliation cuts and instead add $325 billion this year in new spending. We’re headed towards $4 trillion deficits within a decade.

So, no, I don’t get excited when DOGE cancels $1 billion in govt contracts. Or saves $3 billion in federal workforce reductions out of a $7,000 billion budget. Not when Trump and Congress are also preparing to add $800 billion more annually in proposed new tax cuts and spending.

And no, the huge savings are not coming. Even (unrealistically) eliminating 20% of the federal workforce would save $60 billion, and overhauling federal systems to sharply reduce payment errors may save perhaps $80 billion (and is probably unlikely too). For all of DOGE’s bluster, administrative and executive reforms would at best save 1-2% of federal spending and offset only a small fraction of Trump’s red ink agenda.

That leaves trying to unilaterally impound spending such as USAID—which is wildly illegal—or actually going to Congress to pare back spending the constitutional way. But Trump has already taken Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, border (and interest) off the table, which is 2/3 of all spending and is driving deficits. And the GOP Congress seems ready to give up on cutting the remaining one-third of spending. Want to cut spending and the deficit? How about they stop passing budget-busting bills. Don’t brag about your coupon-clipping frugality at the same time you are buying a $250,000 Ferrari. I’m not going to cheer Trump and DOGE for adding “only” $750 billion to deficits instead of $800 billion. We’re still going backwards.

I’ve spent decades studying the federal budget. I know that $7 trillion(!) behemoth inside and out – where the money really goes, and where the savings opportunities lie. So I can also detect bullshitters who talk tough about trillion-dollar spending cuts without doing their homework. It’s the ones who claim most spending goes to undefined “waste,” federal salaries, immigrants, foreigners, Ukraine, or non-working welfare recipients. It’s the ones who claim we can easily balance the budget or cut $1 trillion without specifying exactly what line-items to cut. Or that we can return to 2019 spending levels for each program, which means a 20% inflationary cut, defaulting on the federal debt, and kicking off every senior who has since retired into Social Security and Medicare. It’s all hot air and empty bluster. Tough talk without following through on anything substantive. Just wait until you see the final deficit numbers in October.

And this is why GOP movements to cut spending always fail. They make absurdly ambitious promises without doing their homework, understanding where the money goes, and specifying real plans to fix it. You can’t significantly cut the deficit just by cutting waste, firing bureaucrats, and defunding immigrants and foreigners. There are no easy short cuts. You have to stop cutting taxes and then address Social Security, Medicare, defense, and a lot of other popular programs. Wake me when the GOP goes there.

So, no, I will not get excited about a couple billion in DOGE savings on one hand while Trump pushes Congress to add $8 trillion over the decade in tax cuts and spending with the other hand. I’m not that gullible.
Click to expand...

The remedies to cut the budget deficit is embedded in the second tweet. Like the enlosed tweet I've quoted in full, it's long but a very interesting read to those who're interested in knowing the reason the US will never ever cut the budget deficits but will substantially add to it for a whole host of reasons.

In other words they're one mega disaster like a war with a peer adversary & not the one sided wars they waged in Afghanistan & Iran away from bringing down the entire edifice. Alhamdulillah, theirs & our wish will be fulfilled.

On a different note I'm also struck by the similarly fragile nature of the Chinese economy. They're a major war away from bringing down their edifice too.

Coming to Trump, I can't help but see the parallels to our man in Paxtan Dimran & the fanatical support he commands from a substantial percentage of the population.

If the PA is the villain in the latter, the oligarchy controlling the Deep State is in the former. No wonder the unwashed there are so desperate & fed up with their lot in life , that they clung more to hope than reason & threw their lot behind someone who's totally out of his depths in most matters & is there only for self aggrandizement . As true for Paxtan as it is for the US.

Old man Marx of - "Capitalism will collapse at its high point ," may well be at the cusp of vindication for all the bad economic theory he unleashed in an unsuspecting world.

As an Indian, we've no cause to complain about either Trump or Dimran. Our experiences with the former have been transactional & cordial. Hope for more of the same while Dimran is our man in Paxtan as I've written before.

If we don't end up losing a whole lot of infrastructure in the upcoming war, among the few countries which can benefit tremendously from a post Sino US war is India .

OTOH if we do lose a lot of infrastructure we've built mostly in the last 2-3 decades especially in the last decade, the blame will mostly be laid at the door step of Leaderji. Ironically he's responsibile for building all that infrastructure in the first place in the last decade.
 

View: https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1887262467455066582?s=19


View: https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1887263563875819751?s=19

I suspect what these guys know but aren't being honest about is that this is pure vendetta by Trump in dismantling the tentacles of the DS.

In the process it also harms US interests but then the previous regime & its backers during Trump's first term & during the time he was out of office , should've known that all those dirty tricks by the dirty tricks department should've been off US limits.

The moment they deployed these resources to settle scores within is the day they spelt the doom of these resources.

Such things are never hidden for long & when the other party finds out, you better bet he's not the severely vindictive type else this is what you'd be facing & as Trump & his team have promised this is only the beginning.
 

View: https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1887254143255126343?s=19

It's true that going after the NSF and USAID will penalize good and important work, and I'm sure it's also true that heavily politicized work only make up a relatively small share of the money they give, but the left needs to understand that if you politicize research in such a heavy-handed and "in your face" way, this is what's going to happen eventually.

We actually warned you repeatedly that it was going to happen, but you just kept doing it and now it's time to reap what you sow. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for academics because, even though I think this effort will have really bad consequences on people I like and whose research I think is valuable, the truth is that even people doing good work acted like cowards by refusing to speak up against the politicization of academia. Academia ultimately depends on the rest of society and you can't just ostensibly take a side in political debates and hope that people are going to continue to fund you forever.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that you should refrain from saying the truth just because it provides ammunition to one side against the other, but let's be real that's not what we're talking about when you pretend that people who promote "indigenous modes of knowing" as a viable alternative to modern science or some such nonsense are doing real scholarship as opposed to activism.
Click to expand...

Bingo!
 
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