That sounds terrifyingly familiar…
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If Carney gets in, he does have a chance at winning. Probably not, but if Freeland gets in as leader, there’s no chance. So I’m sure that the Liberal Party, like liberal parties everywhere, will choose the leader least likely to get elected as Prime Minister.
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February 25, 2025 (Tuesday)
On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”
Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail—including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments—that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.
So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.
On January 21, 2025, the U.S. Treasury had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.
This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”
As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.
They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say who was in charge of DOGE, a day after Matt Bai reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk’s DOGE employees, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bai reports that Farritor is 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX; Kliger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.
This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, the agency that Trump’s executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of DOGE. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico.
In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that’s designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.
But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.
Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for Homeland Security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid, and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place Musk claims, without evidence, to be cutting: “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, but the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them or to get Democratic votes.
For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”
Shauneen Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) today that 24% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say that two thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. “For what, because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars?” Murphy asked. “The scope of this greed is something that we have never, ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”
At a press conference, House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) called “this billionaire budget resolution.” “I know that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that, instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires, that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve,” Casar said.
It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”
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To be extra clear, the reason those 2/3 of nursing home patients are on Medicaid is that you have two options for paying for a nursing home: self pay or Medicaid. Medicare does not cover the costs of nursing home care. This forces many Americans who aren’t actually poor, but do not have the savings to pay for a nursing home, to intentionally spend themselves into poverty in order to qualify for Medicaid so that they can get the full time care they need in a nursing home. Also, that’s only going to get them into, for the most part, the lower end of nursing homes. Cuts to Medicaid will force personnel cuts at these nursing homes which are already understaffed. This will kill people. This will kill a lot of people.
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We got a good look at what the GOP thinks about killing the elderly and impoverished people during the pandemic. What makes it worse is many mass media outlets refuse to (or are unable to) cover the scope of these policies in a way that resonates like right-wing media talking points:
Keeping in mind most folks don’t read beyond the headlines, “Thousands” doesn’t sound like much. For those who keep reading, they’d need a calculator to come up with a total, because the lack of the regime providing official figures on what they are doing seems to have reporters stumped. 
The other day, Stacey Abrams said about a quarter of a million workers will be affected. What’s in the AP article is not going to stick with anyone like the figure from that podcast. They’ll post a few interviews about individual families affected by this before moving on, but the numbers don’t get released until much later - when it’s too late to shift opinion/motivate the public to act.
Instead of focusing on percentages, alternative pro-democracy news sources need to set a talking point and repeat it. Traditional outlets still make balance/perfect the enemy of good reporting, while spending time debunking lies that the DOGE team already put on blast. We know GOP/MAGA supporters will believe the lies and spread them, even after they’ve been retracted.
This leaves me wondering how long the “wall of receipts” was visible, how many people liked/viewed it, and how widely it was shared. The deletion is akin to retractions for front page newspaper stories being printed a week later, next to the ads for used cars in the back. Maybe I need to start checking out the latest from Meidas Touch and other progressive groups engaging the the backlash against DOGE, because this doesn’t come close to the influence of social media:
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Ah, but they’re all “useless eaters” at this point, anyway; right? /s in case it’s needed.
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No need for the “/s”. Getting rid of the “useless eaters” is literally Fascism 101.
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February 26, 2025 (Wednesday)
This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”
Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.
But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.
Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.
Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.
In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.
Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.
Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.
Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”
Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”
A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.
Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.
But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”
“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”
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Shades of Solzhenitsyn. Never be the first to stop clapping.
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I wonder what’s Americanese for “gulag.”
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Gitmo? Private prison?
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I trust King Tramp to come up with something more catchy.
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Please clap
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Not sure if this is the right topic or not but reading this just keeps bringing me back to the unstoppable “shower thoughts” that started going through my head this morning about the constant and blatantly obvious rhetorical traps I’ve been seeing used lately throughout MSM.
Someone complains about what Musk/DOGE is doing. “So, what you’re saying you don’t want to find waste, fraud, and abuse in government? No wonder you guys lost! What about George Soros?”
Someone complains how Musk is usurping Congressional authority and breaking laws.
“C’mon. That’s because Americans want results now! They don’t want to wait for Congress! Congress has an approval rating of 24%! You’re trying to say this isn’t what the American people want to see?”
Someone complains about the non-partisan public servants being let go.
“So, what you’re saying is that Trump doesn’t have control over the executive branch? That’s insane!”
Someone complains about public service workers having to take a loyalty oath to Trump.
“So, what you’re saying is that some unelected public servants are supposed to (gasp) resist the duly elected president’s agenda? No wonder they are getting fired!”
Someone complains about Trump putting partisan appointees into the military.
“So, what you’re saying is that the president doesn’t control the military?”
Someone complains about Bezos meddling with WaPo’s operations.
“So, what you’re saying is that Bezos shouldn’t run the company he owns how he sees fit? Why should news outlets endorse candidates anyway?”
Someone complains about DEI programs getting cut, or this absurd lawsuit about reverse discrimination.
“So, what you’re saying is that there should be unfair advantages based on skin color, gender, or sexual preferences? You’re saying merit shouldn’t be considered?”
Someone talks about how Trump is lying non-stop at his press conferences.
“So, what you’re saying is you prefer Biden who never gave press conferences because he was basically dead? Trump has had more press conferences and visibility in the past couple weeks than Biden did for his entire presidency!”
Someone complains about all the shady shit Elon is doing.
“So, what you’re saying is that Musk isn’t the most transparent special government employee ever? He’s constantly giving press conferences! This is radical transparency!”
Someone talks about how Trump is violating the constitution.
“Trump isn’t violating the constitution! Biden violated the constitution by being a puppet president while a unelected deep state cabal ran things behind the scenes. You’re telling me that was ok?”
Someone mentions town hall protests in red districts.
“That was just Democratic plants! These weren’t real protesters!”
Someone complains about AGs being fired unconstitutionally.
“So, what you’re saying is American people care about this? Just look at Trump’s approval ratings!”
All these fucking straw men, all this gas lighting, and no matter how many times people say, “no, that’s literally not what I said at all” it doesn’t matter because now the discussion has been derailed.
Every. Damn. Day.
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Someone complains about rfk and the antivaxx loons ending flu research and hears: they’re just allowing the research to be done by corporations who have a better interest in protecting people than governments.
I heard this irl. I care about the person that said it. But I also am a little disgusted with the desperation and denial required for this take.
Said “oh like leaded gas and cigs” and heard “that was the past people know better now.”
Just swallowed my puke and gave up there.
I reject denial as a cope.
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OMFG, I cannot even…
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That was the past, but now corporations actually do have a better interest in protecting people than the American government, because “none at all” is better than whatever the hell this is. 
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Mar-a-Gulago
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Someone had to say it, sadly.
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