"They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders... The border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential. But the big issues... that are exis.tential to our country, that really threaten all of us... neither of them has even taken positions on. The debt, for example. They're both equally bad on the debt. The debt is the the most important issue. $34 trillion. The service on that debt is now larger than our defense budget.... President Trump and President Biden are largely responsible individually for the that debt.... Within 10 years 100% of every dollar collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt. This is really an existential crisis for our country and you don't hear President Biden or President Trump ever talk about it and they have no solutions.... You can vote for Trump and Biden but you're going to get more of this same... They... both had four years in there and... they're not able to avert these this train that's coming at us.... They won't even talk about it because those policies are the products of a corrupt system, and I have the capacity to fix that system...."
Said RFK Jr., in this excellent interview with Ben Shapiro:
Watch the whole interview, and you may decide to presume you will vote for RFK. Trump/Biden can rebut the presumption by sitting down like this for an hour and a half with Ben Shapiro. Biden did an interview with Howard Stern. Do a real interview, Joe.
I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature. If his first 3 years were as bad as the last, spending-wise, I'd be surprised. I don't have relevant data at hand...
He's not wrong. Trump was as bad on COVID as Biden, and Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, are as bad as Democrats on deficit spending.
Trump is better than Biden on basically everything else and I don't agree with RFK that none of them are existential, but Trump got some big stuff wrong and he hasn't given reason to think he won't continue to get them wrong.
He's right, except there's plenty of blame to go around for the accumulation of that debt. Last I checked it's the House what controls the purse strings. In that body we know the Democrats have no issue with wasting money but there are now also mainstream Republicans who actually believe US debt can be accumulated free and without consequence and never has to be paid back...
I don't know if that's an RFKJ oversight or he truly believes Presidents are the ones spending the money. He could be that stupid...
Progressive prices under the underfunded Medicare, unfunded Medicaid, and the umbrella deficit of Obamacares in single/central/ monopolistic solutions.
The RFKJ thing interests Ann but he's just one of those historic but soon to be forgot blips in history that nudges civilization in the wrong direction...
"I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature."
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders
Reproductive rites, civil rights, catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform, diversity (e.g. racism, sexism), and political congruence ("=") are first-order forcings of progressive corruption, including our national, state, and local deficits and debt.
The biggest problem is financial illiteracy of voters. Yes it begins with the obsession of all the swamp dwellers to 'Keep Washington Moving'. They've leaned to ask for more and more and unless they get their way we'll shut it all down (not really) and go to the American people, as an idiot once said. Thus they all must play ball since they wouldn't want to experience the wrath of the voters. They aren't wrong...
Trump made the mistake of refunding private capital without anticipating the conception of the Sino-Fauci pandemic and subsequent medical mandates that crippled human productivity.
Watch the whole interview, and you may decide to presume you will vote for RFK.
Nope, not gonna happen. I've got better things to do with an hour than listen to somebody who doesn't have a prayer of being elected. He's not going to break double digits in the NPV, nor come close to winning a state.
If RFK thinks Trump got rolled on COVID, who does he think is going to have his back against the Deep State and the Uniparty if by some miracle he does get elected outside the two major parties? Trump could barely get his own party to cooperate with him, much less the Democrats, and Biden is doing better only because the Federal bureaucracy generally leans Democrat.
Without a line item veto, the President has two choices: sign the spending bill, or shut down the government. Which one gets the better press coverage?
But this election is about correcting and defeating 2020 voter fraud right. Releasing the J6 political prisoners. Defeating the corrupt lawfare. We can't just "move on". That was the wish of many in 2020, even though the voice inside them said the election was fraudulent. And it was. So we have lived under President who has not accountability to the voters...because he doesn't need us.
RFK is right about vaccines. But he's a screwball on climate change. Not long ago opposed voter ID and defined it as racist.
I have not listened to the interview yet, but I think RFK Jr is not correct re the differences re existential issues. Trump’s views on foreign policy, climate change, trade, energy, manufacturing might, the unelected bureaucracy, in addition to the border, are all existential threats in one way or another. Biden and Trump disagree strongly on all of these. RFK Jr is purposefully (it seems) limiting the differences for his own benefit.
The only time in my life that there was some spending restraint in D.C. was after the 1994 mid-term elections- it lasted until 9/11. The last 23 years, it has been a bipartisan shit-fest. Kennedy isn't wrong, but Kennedy also will be powerless to do anything about it since it is Congress that controls spending or doesn't. The federal government debt is increasing at 1 trillion dollars every hundred days right now with nothing on the horizon to stop it.
Anyone who wore a mask or received the clot shot got rolled on COVID. Anybody idiot that believed HCQ and Ivermectin were poison got rolled. Any moron who believed Trump recommended drinking bleach got rolled. Anybody white woman who put "stay home, save lives" in their FB profile got rolled. They're just to stupid to know it.
COVID was a biological weapon released on purpose...there was no wet market bat soup, and it didn't just slip out of the Fauci/Gates funded Wuhan lab. It was released. The death numbers were bloated. But Democrat governors did use in to clear old folks off blue state Medicare rolls by purposefully contaminating nursing homes.
Immediately after COVID's release, in April 2020, we were told by Democrats if you vote in person in the Wisconsin primary, you're risking your life and could die. Total bullshit. It was the set up for the November absentee voter fraud and breaking state voting laws to get Trump out of office. You could see it coming. And then the BLM 2020 summer of peace was thrust upon us too.
If we "move on" we let them get away with all that 2020 bullshit, and it becomes permanently baked in.
"Last I checked it's the House what controls the purse strings."
You may want to "recheck" your assumption. Biden poked holes through that by forgiving student debt.
That said, both parties have spent and will continue to spend like non-sober sailors. There is no downside for either side, nor for the country until the crap hits the fan. When that occurs remains a mystery, but it will not be pretty. Plan accordingly.
Don't forget Trump exploded the deficit with his tax cuts, which were before COVID. He promised to eliminate the debt within two terms (although he never explained how), but as we've learned time after time, tax cuts for rich people (especially when the econcomy is in pretty good shape) does not pay for themselves.
Ben Shapiro sucks, and Donald Trump knows he can have a serious conversation with whoever he wants.
But I don't have to watch to know that RFK Jr. doesn't have a plan for the debt. No one does. There are exactly two options for most candidates:
1) Immediately announce an end to deficit spending. The bond market crashes into the floor, companies depending on government largesse go bankrupt overnight, the health care system implodes as Medicaid is abolished and Medicare is dramatically curtailed, and countries reliant on American power start cutting deals with Russia and China. But none of that will happen because the oligarchs will use the usual Kennedy solution first, and he still doesn't have major protection bankrolled.
2) Keep doing what you're doing and hope that's enough to not personally be blamed for the collapse.
Some candidates might have other options open, like the massive program for German finances in 1934, but without a mass movement holding at least 30% of Americans it's very unlikely that they will see success. RFK Jr., whatever his other merits, does not have such a following and never will.
True. And as a manager he was an inept fool. Few of his accomplishments lasted. But GOP voters didn't like the competent alternative.
"They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders... The border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential."
If the border is only "vaguely" existential, what's "really" existential? And "woke ideology" is institutionalized by the PTB in many spheres; Trump will at least offer some resistance.
"They're both equally bad on the debt. The debt is the the most important issue. $34 trillion."
True. But the problem is not the candidates, it's the people. They want other people's money. Dems will use their addiction to defeat any small-government GOPer. Hence Trump.
I am obviously not a fan of the mRNA "vaccine." RJK's VP pick, Nicole Shanahan wants to recall the Moderna vaccine. Ben Shapiro was a HUGE clot shot and mandate fan.
The vaccine is Trump's Achilles heel. Fauci and Birx were lying to Trump, and the public the entire time. Even though he helped push its quick release, he never supported mandates, or firing people, or kicking them out of the military. And after those evil fucks vilified ANY type of treatment (HCQ, Ivermectin) what choice did he have? Plus, he was out of office before its distribution when Democrats started shoving the clot shot up everyone's ass. Post release actions by Democrats were in violation of the Nuremberg Code. COVID was the most evil thing that was ever thrust upon Americans in my lifetime.
Ann...RJK Jr. has a place in the debate and he's right on a lot of stuff. But voting for him in 2020 is a hand washing exercise. Hand washing from turning a blind eye to the 2020 voter fraud. Hand washing the lawfare. Voting for Biden is straight up moronic.
The Trump candidacy is bigger than Trump. He just has the strength to handle it. It's not RJK Jr's time, like it wasn't DeSantis' time. The stakes of this battle are bigger than just "moving on".
In Trump World one would simply seek the protection of U.S.C., Title 11 to address troublesome debt issues. In Biden World one would simply arrange for a handy cash infusion from the Chinese.
In the real world, one and all would simply get screwed.
I don’t think anyone with such a rough voice like that can be elected president. Even when I agree with him, he is very hard to listen to. Nails on a chalkboard.
Serious, straight question; why would anyone think that RFKJr has the unique capacity to fix anything? He has no major political party. He has no real platform for negotiating with, or between the major political parties. I feel almost silly asking the question, because any politically-interested middle schooler knows the answer.
Both political parties view RFKJr with suspcion. Even ridicule. Perhaps even loathing. He's not going to win a single electoral vote. Not one. I'm not suggesting that there is no point in so much as a single word of discussion about RFKJr, but close. His only relevance is as a spoiler, of course. So it's only worth talking about him as a spoiler. A nuisance; an annoyance.
Every time I look into his face and his eyes now, I see a profoundly damaged human being. Childhood wrecked by murder. Heroin addiction. Profoundly disrupted family life, marred by infidelity, divorce and suicide. A face marked by a life filled with pain and anger and the consequent resentment (but also privelege, in its own damaging way). He's a guy who should be living quietly in upstate New York with his falconry hobby and advocating for a clean Hudson River and reflecting on what it meant to be a Kennedy.
A question asked out of a lot of ignorance for the wiser ones here.
Regarding the debt as catastrophic.
Was there a point in modern US history, where the debt was previously viewed as catastrophic? (I remember rhetoric about the debt for the past 50 years). Add ten or twenty or thirty years to that point in time. Did we experience a catastrophe?
I recognize the size of today's debt apparently is unprecedented, and that may make this time *truly* catastrophic.
Or is the boy still crying wolf for political purposes?
He's not wrong. Trump was as bad on COVID as Biden,
In the case of COVID, the situations were entirely different. Trump got the start of the pandemic, from when we didn't know anything to when we knew some things but not yet everything. By the time Biden took office, we knew essentially everything (except, apparently, about the vaccinations) - and were also dealing with a much less dangerous variant. And Biden used exactly the same strategies as had been recommended to Trump at the beginning - encouraging lockdowns, masks, of course huge payouts - long after there was no need for any of it.
Did Trump get rolled on COVID response? Yes, he did - no one in public health had ever recommended societal lockdown to control the spread of a pandemic before, particularly once we knew that the only people at significant risk were the same ones at risk from the usual annual flu variants - and we found that out quite fast. So we shouldn't have locked down past, maybe, that initial "two weeks to flatten the curve," which was still at nearly the height of our ignorance - when hospitals were still ventilating as a treatment, for instance. Once we knew the elderly, the sick, and the obese were the only people who were going to die from COVID, everything should have opened up.
And Trump did try to allow that. He tried to kick the decision to the states - and my kids, in Texas, were back in in-person school in August 2020, while or good friends in PA we're still ineffectually Zoom-"learning." But during that exact period, Trump was also embroiled in the Mostly Peaceful Summer and his own reelection campaign and the constant vilification of him in the press for every possible moral offense, and that horrible Fauci was still self-aggrandizing to beat the band and holding himself in contrast to Trump while appearing on World's Sexiest People lists(!?) and so forth.
And then came Biden. And, what, the sea levels began to fall, et bloody cetera. He still wore a freaking mask everywhere, he still encouraged the American people to behave as if they were under an existential health threat, he did NOTHING to encourage the medical community to pursue more research into the vax's efficacy or side effects or to pursue other treatment paths, he continued with the gravy train for non-working perfectly healthy people, and he banged the drum incessantly about how his predecessor had failed to get things under control but he himself had. When all he was actually dealing with was Omicron. Remember how the media tried to get us all worked up about that variant? The one that acted like a cold?
Where would rfk spend less has he gotten the skydragon fixation green energy out of his system we bailed out the stock market in 2008 tried to take over the car companies the infrastructure bamboozle
Serious, straight question; why would anyone think that RFKJr has the unique capacity to fix anything?
I can't remember whether capital-C Chuck is the one I usually agree with or disagree with, but -
100%.
How? How is he going to whip Congress into shape and stop the deficit freight train? How is he going to get the entrenched bureaucracies of the bazillion agencies to dance to his tune? It was a big enough ask for Trump, who had actually run major enterprises in his life. It was in fact too big an ask, as we now know, and all I'm doing now is hoping that he's been spending a good amount of this (I hope) interim examining strategies and building relationships that will make his second go-round more effective than his first.
There is no world in which I would "decide to presume" to vote for RFKJr.
I think it's true that Junior' has no hope of winning the election or even coming close, and should he win it, no hope of forming a meaningful coalition to govern well. I'm pretty sure he's sharp enough to know this, too. And I don't think he's after a VP slot with Trump. Nobody here has apparently asked themselves 'Why is he running?'. The amount of time, money, effort and exposure - why is he doing it? Somehow, I don't think it's just the Kennedy ego, and I don't think it's just to be a spoiler, or a Ross Perot. Most people hate on Perot because of the effect his candidacy had on the outcome, perhaps forgetting why he ran in the first place. He ran in order to point out something that was deeply wrong with the way things were being done with the national economy. I suspect Junior' is, too - and I respect him for that, maybe even like him a little.
Maybe enough to watch the video, sped up to 1.5x, to hear him out. That's a bigger sacrifice than you know - if Porky Pig went to a speech therapist to correct his stutter, he'd sound almost exactly like Ben Shapiro on 1.5x. You can't unhear it. And: I'd never vote for Junior'.
Before Biden entered his dotage, I don't think their temperaments were actually all that different, really. Biden was just a little more impulsive and hotheaded, verbally, than Trump, who does lie, but rarely if ever gets so excited that he busts out dumb, pointless, impulsive lies like the lies that wrecked Biden's first run for President. 90s and early 2000s Biden was glib and a bit of a peacock. Their temperament only seems different today because everything about Biden tends to be slow and doddering, even when he lets loose with peevish anger.
RFK lets it out of the bag. Controlling the border and cutting down on illegal immigration is just a "Minor cultural" issue.
Actually, as shown in the interview, the differences between RFK and Biden are minor. RFK's against the war in Ukraine. He's against covid vaccines. Biden is for both. Otherwise, what is the big difference?
Frankly, if RFK is hurting Biden, more power to him. But I'm afraid he's hurting trump by taking away Anti-Biden protest votes. Why afterall is he running? Probably to help Biden. Like all the Kennnedys he's been a liberal Democrat his entire life. He voted for Hillary and Biden (2020).
RFK lets it out of the bag. Controlling the border and cutting down on illegal immigration is just a "Minor cultural" issue.
Actually, as shown in the interview, the differences between RFK and Biden are minor. RFK's against the war in Ukraine. He's against covid vaccines. Biden is for both. Otherwise, what is the big difference?
Frankly, if RFK is hurting Biden, more power to him. But I'm afraid he's hurting trump by taking away Anti-Biden protest votes. Why afterall is he running? Probably to help Biden. Like all the Kennnedys he's been a liberal Democrat his entire life. He voted for Hillary and Biden (2020).
In the case of COVID, the situations were entirely different. Trump got the start of the pandemic, from when we didn't know anything to when we knew some things but not yet everything. By the time Biden took office, we knew essentially everything (except, apparently, about the vaccinations) - and were also dealing with a much less dangerous variant. And Biden used exactly the same strategies as had been recommended to Trump at the beginning - encouraging lockdowns, masks, of course huge payouts - long after there was no need for any of it.
My theory at the time (Mar 2020) was that Western intel was reporting that the Chinese were freaking out behind the scenes, that they knew it had come from the Wuhan lab, but had no clue what possibly escaped because the lab was a shitshow of incompetence and mismanagement.
Trump basically tried to thread a needle that no one could do: he needed to seem serious about the disease without going overboard into complete meltdown panic. Contrary to the beliefs of some on the right, he couldn't have prevented the lockdowns- not only were they a state decision and would have occurred even if he'd opposed them, but they were popular at the time- so he tried to do the minimum amount of harm, reopen, and gambled that he could get a vaccine out before the election. The last part he would have achieved, if not for being outright screwed by the pharmaceutical companies.
Any other GOP politician would have taken many of the same steps as Trump, put in his position, and the results would likely have been the same, except that they would have lost reelection by a larger margin.
I would bet the largest demographic of the "unvaccinated" are MAGA voters. We're not sheep. Even though Trump considers the vaccine and accomplishment we didn't line up for it. And we know he wouldn't mandate it.
RFK can't go after the clots shots too hard because 1) so many Americans were tricked into or forced to take it, 2) pushed in on young adults and children, 3) virtue signaled "I got the vaccine" on social media. This was big among suburban white women.
Saddest part is this type of personal investment in bullshit prevents honest research about vaccines and the Generation Z autism spike. Trust me. RFK Jr. believes that link is absolutely real. It is a crime perhaps larger than COVID.
They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders...
What did he leave off?
War. Overzealous climate regulations. Homelessness. Inflation. Student loan debt. Taxes and Spending. Crime/Law and Order.
But the biggest issue he doesn't address is the corruption of the political class -- most directly the Democrats. He discusses this in the interview but when it comes down to Trump v. Biden, he can't say that Washington is corrupt and Biden isn't going to do anything about it.
The corruption of our government is THE existential issue we face, as it underlies all of the others, yet Kennedy glosses over it.
Remember how after Trump banned incoming flights from China, Nancy Pelosi went to SF's Chinatown and started licking door handles so she could call Trump racist? What a witch.
Two early indicators told me COVID was complete bullshit. 1) the April 2020 "if you vote in person you might die" crap, and 2) the Wuhan wet market reopened like 3 weeks after the US shut down.
The place where COVID supposedly originated just bleached the floors and "moved on." Meanwhile, the American education establishment pushed lock downs harder that any other institution and fucked up millions of children.
COVID was not only an evil period in American history, it was probably the dumbest. Somehow the line dancing nurses were able to capture the evil and stupidity in their videos. Accidently brilliant.
“COVID was a biological weapon released on purpose...there was no wet market bat soup, and it didn't just slip out of the Fauci/Gates funded Wuhan lab. It was released. The death numbers were bloated. But Democrat governors did use in to clear old folks off blue state Medicare rolls by purposefully contaminating nursing homes.”
I agreed with you up through your calling the Clot Shot a bio weapon (partially created at US taxpayer funds). It’s the next step I disagree with - your claim that it was intentionally released into the public. I have been tracking this reasonably closely since maybe summer of 2021, and don’t recall seeing any evidence of that.
I still prefer the Chinese incompetence and sloppiness theory. The question is, with the Gain of Function research at the WIV (partially funded by Fauci, having developed the SARS-CoV-2 virus, how did it get then released into the (Chinese) public, where it then spread throughout the world? Number one reason that I believe that it was due to Chinese incompetence and sloppiness is that the Chinese had the entire world to release it in, so why do it in the same city where they developed it? Then they tried to hide it at the local, then province, then national level, and couldn’t. Seems more like Communist bureaucratic ineptitude (and coverup) than intentional. Inadvertence, instead of advertence.
Recently, we found that while the WIV has a BSL IV virology lab, and that a BSL IV lab should be used for this sort of research, they also have BSL II labs there, and they may have been using one of them instead, to save money. Or, an earlier theory was that the WIV farmed out the research that developed the virus to a BSL II virology lab a block or so from the Wuhan Wet Market, to save money. That doesn’t seem as likely, since the researchers who appear to have been the Patient Zeros apparently worked at the WIV. I should also note that we have apparently had lab leakages from our own, presumably much better run, BSL IV virology labs.
The reason that I think that Fauci, Collins, et Al, should be tarred and feathered, hung, cut down, drawn and quartered, and had those quarters soaked in acid and burned, is that they never thought about what could go wrong, because very often, if it can go wrong, will go wrong. They couldn’t legally do the research here, so farmed it out to one of the worst countries in the world to have it done. At the time, there weren’t that many countries with BSL IV virology labs, so they picked the one of them from the country most likely to screw up lab safety. Yes, there are other countries known for their general sloppiness in manufacturing and research, but they don’t have BSL IV virology labs. And, instead of my drawing and quartering, Fauci, his last year as a govt employee, apparently earned more than any other government employee, including President Mush For Brains FJB. Why again, are pharmaceutical companies allowed to pay royalties to their regulators, for work by these same government bureaucrats and researchers for work funded by the taxpayers?
Mr Wibble, as is often the case, makes an excellent point:
"My theory at the time (Mar 2020) was that Western intel was reporting that the Chinese were freaking out behind the scenes"
The absolutely crazy over the top Chinese response to Covid was what convinced me that something terrible had escaped the lab. I watched what was happening in China very early on and assumed the worst. It was not an unreasonable assumption, but it turned out to be a bad one.
"The corruption of our government is THE existential issue we face, as it underlies all of the others"
This is true, of course. But corruption is the human condition and utterly inevitable. The real problem we have is that the government has been allowed to grow too large and command too much power. Our constitution was written explicitly to avoid this accumulation of power, and it has lasted longer than any other similar experiment in history. But it has failed. What comes next is anyone's guess. As Adam Smith famously said, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation". The USA will continue to rattle along for a very long time to come I suspect, but the failure is already baked in.
LLR-democratical And Violent Homosexual Rage Rape Fantasist Chuck: "Every time I look into his face and his eyes now, I see a profoundly damaged human being."
Its called a mirror Chuck. You're actually looking in the mirror.
Jamie: "I can't remember whether capital-C Chuck is the one I usually agree with or disagree with,..."
Little "c" "chuck" is the one you usually agree with.
Capital "C" "Chuck" is the LLR-democratical And Violent Homosexual Rage Rape Fantasist with a tendency to also post viciously racist and misogynistic musings.
"And Trump did try to allow that. He tried to kick the decision to the states"
Of course I despise his opponents more etc. etc. but Trump also chided states that opened up supposedly too soon and too dangerously. He misjudged the problem, mishandled the PR, and mismanaged his team. Compare the Atlas and Birx books for illustrations.
War. Overzealous climate regulations. Homelessness. Inflation. Student loan debt. Taxes and Spending. Crime/Law and Order."
Meh. Its a campaign. Its expected RFKjr wouldn't go into any of the areas that would undermine a simple message he is trying to drive home.
The other parties are all the same! Vote 3rd party!
And it makes sense for him to continue to hammer on Covid as it will likely always be easiest place to hit Trump for all the reasons noted in the above thread, with the republican base clearly willing to accept it and move on...as well as significant #'s of independents and former dems, particularly working class/working poor.
""They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders... The border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential."
Concern about "the deficit" will one day become concern about "hyperinflation." Then all bets are off. Whichever party is in charge when inflation becomes hyper will be screwed. But neither party will do anything useful unless forced to by the voters, who don't really know or much care that their future has been sold for some easy benefits today. Most voters still think we can solve the deficit by cutting foreign aid or some other miniscule dollop.
"Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid."
I spent over an hour listening to the last RFK interview posted here; don't know if I can find the time for another one. Please forgive me if somewhere in the new interview is the rebuttal to my opinion.
I also think Trump got rolled on covid, but I agree with Jamie at 8:25; Trump got the first half of the pandemic when information was scarce. I'm sympathetic to his plight. I'd like to know how much of Trump's deficit spending can be laid at the feet of the pandemic.
As to RFK, as I said, I listened to an hour interview of him last week. Nowhere in it did he put forward his plan to address our fiscal peril.
I've also wondered about these trillion dollar deficits. It seems we should have much worse inflation, but we don't. I understand that gravity has no effect on quantum mechanics. Is something like that true for the world's reserve currency when it comes to inflation?....I suppose some day there will be a reckoning, but RFK Jr. would not be my go-to guy to balance the federal budget.....Biden will put the budget out of whack to give students debt relief and to pay migrants' sex change operations. Trump, on the other hand, will put the budget out of whack to build a stronger defense or whatever. They're both big spenders, but I'm somewhat more supportive of the things that Trump wants to spend money on, and that's the choice.
His running mate seems nuttier than him, but I can't help thinking that if I had the vote in the U.S., I would vote for Bobby K. I cling to the unlikely hope that the Electoral College will be tied, and he'll be elected by the House of Representatives. The vote would be by state delegation, not by individual members, and for years the Republicans have had a majority of the delegations. Would they vote for Trump? Minnesota is 50/50; how could they vote for either Trump or Biden?
"Was there a point in modern US history, where the debt was previously viewed as catastrophic? (I remember rhetoric about the debt for the past 50 years). Add ten or twenty or thirty years to that point in time. Did we experience a catastrophe?"
Yes, but here is the thing- we are now at historically high levels of debt vs physical economic output. In that past, we weren't looking at a country guaranteed to add millions of people to Social Security and Medicare, and we weren't routinely running deficits of 5+% of GDP. If you compare the projections from the government itself from those past times, the projections are almost uniformly more optimistic than the reality that unfolded. Right now the projection is that the yearly deficit will run at 6% of GDP each year over the next decade, but based on the past projections, it is all but certain that the reality of the next ten years will be twice as bad at a minimum.
What can't go on indefinitely always ends, and our increase in debt at the federal and state level cannot go on indefinitely- someone will be left holding the bag. I used to think I would be dead when that day arrived, but I am not nearly as confident about that these days.
Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
Don't want him as president, but if he can drag one or both of Trump and Biden into acknowledging the growing debt and to come up with a solution, he will have done well here.
Bruce Hayden said...It’s the next step I disagree with - your claim that it was intentionally released into the public.
You've got a legitimate interesting take on COVID. I wish it was Chinese incompetence or Fauci not planning for the worst. Here are some reasons why I think COVID was released on purpose:
1) There is no human benefit to Gain of Function research, unless you are creating a biological weapon. The wet market was a ridiculous story. Placing the Wuhan lab so close to a wet market was for plausible deniability. It's location was not an accident.
2) A biological weapon serves a different purpose than a nuclear weapon. Biological weapons are about taking control and bringing a population into obedience. You're not trying to kill everyone, you're trying to control them. You can't blow up all the field hands and ditch diggers. They're needed.
3) COVD immediately lead to increased totalitarian censorship throughout the world, and also in America...planned voter fraud. I don't believe these were opportunistic developments on the part of the totalitarians and Democrats. They were planned.
4) It was also planned that this would fast track mRNA technology. This is where Trump really got rolled. mRNA shots were never released prior, because they couldn't get through the clinical studies. All COVID treatments were vilified. Death numbers were bloated. And clot shot participation quickly mandated. Worse in Canada and Australia than the US.
I do not believe the benevolence of powerful people. Especially globalists. If you think it's too evil to do...they'll do it, and more than like have already done it. They all marched lock step in violation of the Nuremberg Code. That wasn't an accident.
Blogger Big Mike said... I think Trump got rolled in COVID-19 too. But he has demonstrated the ability to learn -- Birx put out a book about how she undermined him...everybody. Fauci deservedly gets a lot of heat but Birx is largely unscathed. Pharma fudged data and didn't investigate critical elements because "speed of science". The whole scenario could have been turned into a lesson on deep state and technocratic abuse, but that would require admission it was a shit show.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said... Oh no - watch the Trump-Biden supporters lose their minds.
4/29/24, 7:18 AM
LOL. Absolutely no Trump supporters will lose their minds. April Apple shares the very same hatred of the ill-bred, non-elite "Trump supporters" as typical democrat Party members do.
Trump supporters support Trump for several different reasons, and are well aware of his failures and weaknesses as a president.
People who will lose their minds are the ones who always lose their minds: Democrat Party members, Never-Trump hysterics, and the weaklings who worship every crackpot ass that comes along like RFKjr, AOC, BHO, ETC...
Freder Frederson said... Don't forget Trump exploded the deficit with his tax cuts, which were before COVID.
4/29/24, 7:56
FF here parroting DNC/MSM "misinformation". Or is it "disinformation"? I'm sure you have no idea and just repeat what the Current Thing says to.
From the first months of Trump's presidency, the Treasury was bursting at the coffers with the money coming back into the USA from Trump's change to the overseas corporate tax rate, for one thing. There was more money coming into the government, corporations were making more, and more people were being employed than ever before. Then Covid.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said... We all got rolled on Covid.
Covid was 100% planned and released on purpose. ****************
Maybe they don't care about their own citizens' welfare, but how would the ChiCom leadership know they themselves would be unaffected by the virus they released in their own country?
It's easy for independent candidates to talk about excessive government spending because they don't belong to either major party. (just look at Ross Perot) Any candidate who is either a Democrat or Republican cannot win without the support of their party and both parties have a vested interest in increasing government spending.
Just look at the current federal budget. The pandemic has been over for a couple of years, but we're still at peak Covid spending instead of having gone back to pre-Covid spending levels.
The first sentence of RFK's remarks quoted is transparently false. In addition to the issues Kennedy mentions, Biden and Trump differ on a host of issues, most notably climate change, the environment generally, the role of the federal government in regulation, whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen or not, whether the ongoing risk of election fraud justifies further regulation of the voting process, whether Congress should pass national legislation protecting a woman's right to choose, whether the federal civil service should be gutted or not, whether the carried interest deduction (and other tax breaks for billionaires) should be repealed or not, whether the country needs more Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas or more like Elena Kagan, whether and how the NATO alliance should be supported and whether opposing Russia in Eastern Europe matters, whether the federal government should continue to fund NPR and on, and on and on.
Moreover, although RFK claims that he differs from Trump and Biden on the budget, he has not, to my knowledge, made any substantive suggestion for budget cuts, other than massive cuts to the defense budget based on the withdrawal of US military presence all around the world. Good for him, if he can carry both the policy and political case for that--no US President, once in office and in charge of making decisions, has ever seen fit do do so. Do you, Professor Althouse, think that's a good idea?
The JFK website also lists a number of programs that will obviously cost significant dollars--better public health, federal mortgage subsidies, better child care. Most strikingly, the website says nothing about federal entitlement programs, such as social security and medicare, that all observers believe must be cut back or amended to reduce deficits and in the interview RFK said he viewed social security as sacred and did not discuss medicare.
So Kennedy is completely false on the differences between Trump and Biden, ducks the key budget issues in exactly the way that they do, and relies exclusively on defense cuts that aren't realistic from the perspective or either policy or politics to close the gap.
Why, Professor Althouse, do you find this to be excellent?
Blogger Yinzer said... Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
You're right. Look at what happened during Scott Walker's Act 10 in Wisconsin. He wanted teachers to pitch in for their retirement and health insurance...just like everybody else. The temper tantrum in reaction was epic. When Walker froze UW tuitions you'd have thought the entire system would collapse.
You're right. Once a government employee starts suckling off the tax payer tit, you can't take it away or get rid of it. Like herpes.
If a President wanted to get control of our debt, he would have to veto every omnibus bill sent to his desk. You'd have to be willing to shut down the government for a long period of time, which really isn't a big deal...but the press makes it sound like the end of the world.
The shrieking of white women would be motivation enough to sign the bill and open back up. RJK Jr would sign just to get Elizabeth Warren to shut up.
Anyone who talks about the DEFICIT is fraud. The D's never talk about it. Hacks like Haley, Christie, etc. only bring it up when its used to bash Trump or someone else.
Want to balance the budget? raise taxes. Oh, wait, you don't want to do that. Well then cut defense spending and foriegn aid, Oh wait, you don't want to do that. Well cut domestic programs. Oh wait, you don't want to do that.
And so on.
Maybe you can campaign on cutting social security and medicare. Good luck with that!
its absurd to pose as a budget hawk and sign off on $95 billion for Ukraine and Israel. not to mention to cost of all those sainted "Immigrants" pouring over the border.
We have a massive deficit because the R's don't want to raise taxes, and the D's refuse to cut spending. And both of them love Foreign aid, immigrants, and wars. That's why all the talk is Bullshit.
Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
I don't know where the hell you are getting your information.
but as we've learned time after time, tax cuts for rich people (especially when the econcomy is in pretty good shape) does not pay for themselves.
You haven't learned a damn thing. Every time there've been tax cuts, the amount of revenue brought in increases. Because people spend MORE of their own money.
"I don't know where the hell you are getting your information."
I don't know either, but, well.... here's what your link says:
"His austerity measures helped cool monthly inflation in the first three months of the year, falling from a three-decade high of 26% in December. Milei used high inflation to further skim costs by letting public wages and pensions fall far behind monthly rises in consumer prices.
The effort is, according to Milei, paying off. The president went on national television Monday night to trumpet the country’s first quarterly fiscal surplus since 2008."
..."Economists are more cautious. They interpret the fiscal surplus as good news but worry about its sustainability...."
It would seem they're in a pretty strong recession right now which isn't surprising, but the good news is that annual inflation rate is down from over 200%, which most people think of as 'bad'. Don't recessions usually pre-sage economic recoveries? (Not an economist) What would you propose Milei do? They measure their inflation rates there by the month, just to keep the numbers reasonable.
Ann Althouse said... "I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature."
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
Does he talk about the budget battle Trump had with Paul Ryan and Mitch MCConnel?
If you don’t address that and try to blame Trump for the spending you are not being honest.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said... Oh no - watch the Trump-Biden supporters lose their minds.
And watch the Desantis supporters conveniently forget that Desantis and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell all teamed up to force Trump to sign a pork barrel filled bullshit budget and they refused to fund the border wall.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math.
There are about 161 million registered voters -- whoever wins the next election will most likely need around 80 million votes or more to win.
Now, it is not particularly easy to get at least 80 million people to agree about anything. Which is basically why we have political parties, to organize the huge amount of effort to reach out to hundreds of millions of people across this rather huge country and get them to agree about something.
Jill Stein is a much better candidate than RFK Jr, but she will never appeal to 80 million American voters, so she won’t win either. RFK Jr has a small percentage of support in a small part of the country. His goal is not to win, but just to spoil things for others.
He's not going to take a meaningful number of votes from anyone. He is a joke. He is Connor Roy from Succession.
Yeah, I got about halfway through and Junior' telling us all about how he knows exactly who to fire in the Federal Bureaucracy to make it hum like a Swiss clock, and then he started in with the amazing accomplishments of father and uncle, as expected. But I didn't once hear a concrete plan to fix an existential problem, mostly just deflections back to how both Trump and Biden have failed at what he's going to do correctly. So I signed off.
I really don't think that Junior', for all his accomplishments (and he has some notable ones), will do as well as Ross Perot did, because his message isn't as focused and clear. And with that dysphonia, he's just hard work to listen to.
Tax cut deficits are far less harmful than govt spending deficits. All taxpayers are producing wealth, and have good ideas on how to improve their own lives with more cash/ lower taxes. No new bureaucracy, almost immediate effect, including reducing personal debt or other personal or business investment.
This grows the economy in a wealth creating way, maybe $100 million in tax cuts increasing the economy by 2%, so up to $102 million. All too often, $100 mln in govt spending balloons to $200 million for a good worth only $100 mln, a loss of $100 mln.
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I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature. If his first 3 years were as bad as the last, spending-wise, I'd be surprised. I don't have relevant data at hand...
He's not wrong. Trump was as bad on COVID as Biden, and Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, are as bad as Democrats on deficit spending.
Trump is better than Biden on basically everything else and I don't agree with RFK that none of them are existential, but Trump got some big stuff wrong and he hasn't given reason to think he won't continue to get them wrong.
He's right, except there's plenty of blame to go around for the accumulation of that debt. Last I checked it's the House what controls the purse strings. In that body we know the Democrats have no issue with wasting money but there are now also mainstream Republicans who actually believe US debt can be accumulated free and without consequence and never has to be paid back...
I don't know if that's an RFKJ oversight or he truly believes Presidents are the ones spending the money. He could be that stupid...
Progressive prices under the underfunded Medicare, unfunded Medicaid, and the umbrella deficit of Obamacares in single/central/ monopolistic solutions.
The RFKJ thing interests Ann but he's just one of those historic but soon to be forgot blips in history that nudges civilization in the wrong direction...
"I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature."
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders
Reproductive rites, civil rights, catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform, diversity (e.g. racism, sexism), and political congruence ("=") are first-order forcings of progressive corruption, including our national, state, and local deficits and debt.
The biggest problem is financial illiteracy of voters. Yes it begins with the obsession of all the swamp dwellers to 'Keep Washington Moving'. They've leaned to ask for more and more and unless they get their way we'll shut it all down (not really) and go to the American people, as an idiot once said. Thus they all must play ball since they wouldn't want to experience the wrath of the voters. They aren't wrong...
And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid
We all got rolled on COVID, some of us way more than others...
Oh no - watch the Trump-Biden supporters lose their minds.
Trump made the mistake of refunding private capital without anticipating the conception of the Sino-Fauci pandemic and subsequent medical mandates that crippled human productivity.
The next generation inherits the debt but also the means to repay it, namely the bonds.
All they have to do is promise ice cream and Joe is there.
Trump got rolled because he trusted the wrong people.
Thats on them.
They hated Trump more than they liked the USA.
Ship Birx off to the Ukraine. Maybe she can help.
Watch the whole interview, and you may decide to presume you will vote for RFK.
Nope, not gonna happen. I've got better things to do with an hour than listen to somebody who doesn't have a prayer of being elected. He's not going to break double digits in the NPV, nor come close to winning a state.
If RFK thinks Trump got rolled on COVID, who does he think is going to have his back against the Deep State and the Uniparty if by some miracle he does get elected outside the two major parties? Trump could barely get his own party to cooperate with him, much less the Democrats, and Biden is doing better only because the Federal bureaucracy generally leans Democrat.
Without a line item veto, the President has two choices: sign the spending bill, or shut down the government. Which one gets the better press coverage?
Trump didn't want to get labelled the Herbert Hoover of Covid. The media did it anyway, no matter how much he spent.
I'm an RFK Jr. fan, and I'm glad he is running.
But this election is about correcting and defeating 2020 voter fraud right. Releasing the J6 political prisoners. Defeating the corrupt lawfare. We can't just "move on". That was the wish of many in 2020, even though the voice inside them said the election was fraudulent. And it was. So we have lived under President who has not accountability to the voters...because he doesn't need us.
RFK is right about vaccines. But he's a screwball on climate change. Not long ago opposed voter ID and defined it as racist.
I have not listened to the interview yet, but I think RFK Jr is not correct re the differences re existential issues. Trump’s views on foreign policy, climate change, trade, energy, manufacturing might, the unelected bureaucracy, in addition to the border, are all existential threats in one way or another. Biden and Trump disagree strongly on all of these. RFK Jr is purposefully (it seems) limiting the differences for his own benefit.
Five minutes of Ben Shapiro is too big an ask. An hour and a half of Ben Shapiro is out of the question.
The only time in my life that there was some spending restraint in D.C. was after the 1994 mid-term elections- it lasted until 9/11. The last 23 years, it has been a bipartisan shit-fest. Kennedy isn't wrong, but Kennedy also will be powerless to do anything about it since it is Congress that controls spending or doesn't. The federal government debt is increasing at 1 trillion dollars every hundred days right now with nothing on the horizon to stop it.
And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
Anyone who wore a mask or received the clot shot got rolled on COVID. Anybody idiot that believed HCQ and Ivermectin were poison got rolled. Any moron who believed Trump recommended drinking bleach got rolled. Anybody white woman who put "stay home, save lives" in their FB profile got rolled. They're just to stupid to know it.
COVID was a biological weapon released on purpose...there was no wet market bat soup, and it didn't just slip out of the Fauci/Gates funded Wuhan lab. It was released. The death numbers were bloated. But Democrat governors did use in to clear old folks off blue state Medicare rolls by purposefully contaminating nursing homes.
Immediately after COVID's release, in April 2020, we were told by Democrats if you vote in person in the Wisconsin primary, you're risking your life and could die. Total bullshit. It was the set up for the November absentee voter fraud and breaking state voting laws to get Trump out of office. You could see it coming. And then the BLM 2020 summer of peace was thrust upon us too.
If we "move on" we let them get away with all that 2020 bullshit, and it becomes permanently baked in.
Women let RFK Jr grab them by the pussy, it looks like.
How true. In ten years, we as a nation are done.
Except for the fact I am closing in on 70 yo.
I have heard this same thing once before, well twice. Maybe more then twice, but not more than 10 times. I'm sure, mostly, I think.
"Last I checked it's the House what controls the purse strings."
You may want to "recheck" your assumption. Biden poked holes through that by forgiving student debt.
That said, both parties have spent and will continue to spend like non-sober sailors. There is no downside for either side, nor for the country until the crap hits the fan. When that occurs remains a mystery, but it will not be pretty. Plan accordingly.
Shapiro talks too fast.
Don't forget Trump exploded the deficit with his tax cuts, which were before COVID. He promised to eliminate the debt within two terms (although he never explained how), but as we've learned time after time, tax cuts for rich people (especially when the econcomy is in pretty good shape) does not pay for themselves.
Ben Shapiro sucks, and Donald Trump knows he can have a serious conversation with whoever he wants.
But I don't have to watch to know that RFK Jr. doesn't have a plan for the debt. No one does. There are exactly two options for most candidates:
1) Immediately announce an end to deficit spending. The bond market crashes into the floor, companies depending on government largesse go bankrupt overnight, the health care system implodes as Medicaid is abolished and Medicare is dramatically curtailed, and countries reliant on American power start cutting deals with Russia and China. But none of that will happen because the oligarchs will use the usual Kennedy solution first, and he still doesn't have major protection bankrolled.
2) Keep doing what you're doing and hope that's enough to not personally be blamed for the collapse.
Some candidates might have other options open, like the massive program for German finances in 1934, but without a mass movement holding at least 30% of Americans it's very unlikely that they will see success. RFK Jr., whatever his other merits, does not have such a following and never will.
AA: "he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid."
True. And as a manager he was an inept fool. Few of his accomplishments lasted. But GOP voters didn't like the competent alternative.
"They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders... The border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential."
If the border is only "vaguely" existential, what's "really" existential? And "woke ideology" is institutionalized by the PTB in many spheres; Trump will at least offer some resistance.
"They're both equally bad on the debt. The debt is the the most important issue. $34 trillion."
True. But the problem is not the candidates, it's the people. They want other people's money. Dems will use their addiction to defeat any small-government GOPer. Hence Trump.
We all got rolled on Covid.
Covid was 100% planned and released on purpose.
I am obviously not a fan of the mRNA "vaccine." RJK's VP pick, Nicole Shanahan wants to recall the Moderna vaccine. Ben Shapiro was a HUGE clot shot and mandate fan.
The vaccine is Trump's Achilles heel. Fauci and Birx were lying to Trump, and the public the entire time. Even though he helped push its quick release, he never supported mandates, or firing people, or kicking them out of the military. And after those evil fucks vilified ANY type of treatment (HCQ, Ivermectin) what choice did he have? Plus, he was out of office before its distribution when Democrats started shoving the clot shot up everyone's ass. Post release actions by Democrats were in violation of the Nuremberg Code. COVID was the most evil thing that was ever thrust upon Americans in my lifetime.
Ann...RJK Jr. has a place in the debate and he's right on a lot of stuff. But voting for him in 2020 is a hand washing exercise. Hand washing from turning a blind eye to the 2020 voter fraud. Hand washing the lawfare. Voting for Biden is straight up moronic.
The Trump candidacy is bigger than Trump. He just has the strength to handle it. It's not RJK Jr's time, like it wasn't DeSantis' time. The stakes of this battle are bigger than just "moving on".
President Trump and President Biden are very different in their temperaments... but the issues that they differ on are in a very very narrow band.
They guy that set himself on fire in Manhattan last week thought the same thing.
Sick to death of NBC leftists screaming about how they think RFK jr. is a nut job.
These same hive-minders have no problem with the corrupt and vile Biden family.
In Trump World one would simply seek the protection of U.S.C., Title 11 to address troublesome debt issues. In Biden World one would simply arrange for a handy cash infusion from the Chinese.
In the real world, one and all would simply get screwed.
I don’t think anyone with such a rough voice like that can be elected president. Even when I agree with him, he is very hard to listen to. Nails on a chalkboard.
Biden can't do an interview unless he is getting a tongue bath.
Serious, straight question; why would anyone think that RFKJr has the unique capacity to fix anything? He has no major political party. He has no real platform for negotiating with, or between the major political parties. I feel almost silly asking the question, because any politically-interested middle schooler knows the answer.
Both political parties view RFKJr with suspcion. Even ridicule. Perhaps even loathing. He's not going to win a single electoral vote. Not one. I'm not suggesting that there is no point in so much as a single word of discussion about RFKJr, but close. His only relevance is as a spoiler, of course. So it's only worth talking about him as a spoiler. A nuisance; an annoyance.
Every time I look into his face and his eyes now, I see a profoundly damaged human being. Childhood wrecked by murder. Heroin addiction. Profoundly disrupted family life, marred by infidelity, divorce and suicide. A face marked by a life filled with pain and anger and the consequent resentment (but also privelege, in its own damaging way). He's a guy who should be living quietly in upstate New York with his falconry hobby and advocating for a clean Hudson River and reflecting on what it meant to be a Kennedy.
A question asked out of a lot of ignorance for the wiser ones here.
Regarding the debt as catastrophic.
Was there a point in modern US history, where the debt was previously viewed as catastrophic? (I remember rhetoric about the debt for the past 50 years). Add ten or twenty or thirty years to that point in time. Did we experience a catastrophe?
I recognize the size of today's debt apparently is unprecedented, and that may make this time *truly* catastrophic.
Or is the boy still crying wolf for political purposes?
He's not wrong. Trump was as bad on COVID as Biden,
In the case of COVID, the situations were entirely different. Trump got the start of the pandemic, from when we didn't know anything to when we knew some things but not yet everything. By the time Biden took office, we knew essentially everything (except, apparently, about the vaccinations) - and were also dealing with a much less dangerous variant. And Biden used exactly the same strategies as had been recommended to Trump at the beginning - encouraging lockdowns, masks, of course huge payouts - long after there was no need for any of it.
Did Trump get rolled on COVID response? Yes, he did - no one in public health had ever recommended societal lockdown to control the spread of a pandemic before, particularly once we knew that the only people at significant risk were the same ones at risk from the usual annual flu variants - and we found that out quite fast. So we shouldn't have locked down past, maybe, that initial "two weeks to flatten the curve," which was still at nearly the height of our ignorance - when hospitals were still ventilating as a treatment, for instance. Once we knew the elderly, the sick, and the obese were the only people who were going to die from COVID, everything should have opened up.
And Trump did try to allow that. He tried to kick the decision to the states - and my kids, in Texas, were back in in-person school in August 2020, while or good friends in PA we're still ineffectually Zoom-"learning." But during that exact period, Trump was also embroiled in the Mostly Peaceful Summer and his own reelection campaign and the constant vilification of him in the press for every possible moral offense, and that horrible Fauci was still self-aggrandizing to beat the band and holding himself in contrast to Trump while appearing on World's Sexiest People lists(!?) and so forth.
And then came Biden. And, what, the sea levels began to fall, et bloody cetera. He still wore a freaking mask everywhere, he still encouraged the American people to behave as if they were under an existential health threat, he did NOTHING to encourage the medical community to pursue more research into the vax's efficacy or side effects or to pursue other treatment paths, he continued with the gravy train for non-working perfectly healthy people, and he banged the drum incessantly about how his predecessor had failed to get things under control but he himself had. When all he was actually dealing with was Omicron. Remember how the media tried to get us all worked up about that variant? The one that acted like a cold?
I do not accept the "He's not wrong."
Where would rfk spend less has he gotten the skydragon fixation green energy out of his system we bailed out the stock market in 2008 tried to take over the car companies the infrastructure bamboozle
He is not wrong about the debt, but there is no reason to believe that he is serious about resolving the problem, or capable of doing so.
Only the swedes got the covid response remotely right the rest were fooled by imperial college and the u washingtons projections
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
I think Trump got rolled in COVID-19 too. But he has demonstrated the ability to learn, which beats Kennedy and Biden alike.
Serious, straight question; why would anyone think that RFKJr has the unique capacity to fix anything?
I can't remember whether capital-C Chuck is the one I usually agree with or disagree with, but -
100%.
How? How is he going to whip Congress into shape and stop the deficit freight train? How is he going to get the entrenched bureaucracies of the bazillion agencies to dance to his tune? It was a big enough ask for Trump, who had actually run major enterprises in his life. It was in fact too big an ask, as we now know, and all I'm doing now is hoping that he's been spending a good amount of this (I hope) interim examining strategies and building relationships that will make his second go-round more effective than his first.
There is no world in which I would "decide to presume" to vote for RFKJr.
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
I think Trump got rolled in COVID-19 too. But he has demonstrated the ability to learn, which beats Kennedy and Biden alike.
I think it's true that Junior' has no hope of winning the election or even coming close, and should he win it, no hope of forming a meaningful coalition to govern well. I'm pretty sure he's sharp enough to know this, too. And I don't think he's after a VP slot with Trump. Nobody here has apparently asked themselves 'Why is he running?'. The amount of time, money, effort and exposure - why is he doing it? Somehow, I don't think it's just the Kennedy ego, and I don't think it's just to be a spoiler, or a Ross Perot. Most people hate on Perot because of the effect his candidacy had on the outcome, perhaps forgetting why he ran in the first place. He ran in order to point out something that was deeply wrong with the way things were being done with the national economy. I suspect Junior' is, too - and I respect him for that, maybe even like him a little.
Maybe enough to watch the video, sped up to 1.5x, to hear him out. That's a bigger sacrifice than you know - if Porky Pig went to a speech therapist to correct his stutter, he'd sound almost exactly like Ben Shapiro on 1.5x. You can't unhear it. And: I'd never vote for Junior'.
Of course Trump got rolled on Covid, so did every man, woman and child.
Before Biden entered his dotage, I don't think their temperaments were actually all that different, really. Biden was just a little more impulsive and hotheaded, verbally, than Trump, who does lie, but rarely if ever gets so excited that he busts out dumb, pointless, impulsive lies like the lies that wrecked Biden's first run for President. 90s and early 2000s Biden was glib and a bit of a peacock. Their temperament only seems different today because everything about Biden tends to be slow and doddering, even when he lets loose with peevish anger.
Someone is searching for a way to avoid voting for Tump.
Blogger WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
Covid was 100% planned and released on purpose.
Yup.
RFK lets it out of the bag. Controlling the border and cutting down on illegal immigration is just a "Minor cultural" issue.
Actually, as shown in the interview, the differences between RFK and Biden are minor. RFK's against the war in Ukraine. He's against covid vaccines. Biden is for both. Otherwise, what is the big difference?
Frankly, if RFK is hurting Biden, more power to him. But I'm afraid he's hurting trump by taking away Anti-Biden protest votes. Why afterall is he running? Probably to help Biden. Like all the Kennnedys he's been a liberal Democrat his entire life. He voted for Hillary and Biden (2020).
RFK lets it out of the bag. Controlling the border and cutting down on illegal immigration is just a "Minor cultural" issue.
Actually, as shown in the interview, the differences between RFK and Biden are minor. RFK's against the war in Ukraine. He's against covid vaccines. Biden is for both. Otherwise, what is the big difference?
Frankly, if RFK is hurting Biden, more power to him. But I'm afraid he's hurting trump by taking away Anti-Biden protest votes. Why afterall is he running? Probably to help Biden. Like all the Kennnedys he's been a liberal Democrat his entire life. He voted for Hillary and Biden (2020).
We don't have a Covid lockdown. That's over. Who cares?
In the case of COVID, the situations were entirely different. Trump got the start of the pandemic, from when we didn't know anything to when we knew some things but not yet everything. By the time Biden took office, we knew essentially everything (except, apparently, about the vaccinations) - and were also dealing with a much less dangerous variant. And Biden used exactly the same strategies as had been recommended to Trump at the beginning - encouraging lockdowns, masks, of course huge payouts - long after there was no need for any of it.
My theory at the time (Mar 2020) was that Western intel was reporting that the Chinese were freaking out behind the scenes, that they knew it had come from the Wuhan lab, but had no clue what possibly escaped because the lab was a shitshow of incompetence and mismanagement.
Trump basically tried to thread a needle that no one could do: he needed to seem serious about the disease without going overboard into complete meltdown panic. Contrary to the beliefs of some on the right, he couldn't have prevented the lockdowns- not only were they a state decision and would have occurred even if he'd opposed them, but they were popular at the time- so he tried to do the minimum amount of harm, reopen, and gambled that he could get a vaccine out before the election. The last part he would have achieved, if not for being outright screwed by the pharmaceutical companies.
Any other GOP politician would have taken many of the same steps as Trump, put in his position, and the results would likely have been the same, except that they would have lost reelection by a larger margin.
AstraZeneca just admitted in court is COVID vaccine can cause deadly blood clots.
I would bet the largest demographic of the "unvaccinated" are MAGA voters. We're not sheep. Even though Trump considers the vaccine and accomplishment we didn't line up for it. And we know he wouldn't mandate it.
RFK can't go after the clots shots too hard because 1) so many Americans were tricked into or forced to take it, 2) pushed in on young adults and children, 3) virtue signaled "I got the vaccine" on social media. This was big among suburban white women.
Saddest part is this type of personal investment in bullshit prevents honest research about vaccines and the Generation Z autism spike. Trust me. RFK Jr. believes that link is absolutely real. It is a crime perhaps larger than COVID.
They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders...
What did he leave off?
War.
Overzealous climate regulations.
Homelessness.
Inflation.
Student loan debt.
Taxes and Spending.
Crime/Law and Order.
But the biggest issue he doesn't address is the corruption of the political class -- most directly the Democrats. He discusses this in the interview but when it comes down to Trump v. Biden, he can't say that Washington is corrupt and Biden isn't going to do anything about it.
The corruption of our government is THE existential issue we face, as it underlies all of the others, yet Kennedy glosses over it.
Remember how after Trump banned incoming flights from China, Nancy Pelosi went to SF's Chinatown and started licking door handles so she could call Trump racist? What a witch.
Two early indicators told me COVID was complete bullshit. 1) the April 2020 "if you vote in person you might die" crap, and 2) the Wuhan wet market reopened like 3 weeks after the US shut down.
The place where COVID supposedly originated just bleached the floors and "moved on." Meanwhile, the American education establishment pushed lock downs harder that any other institution and fucked up millions of children.
COVID was not only an evil period in American history, it was probably the dumbest. Somehow the line dancing nurses were able to capture the evil and stupidity in their videos. Accidently brilliant.
“COVID was a biological weapon released on purpose...there was no wet market bat soup, and it didn't just slip out of the Fauci/Gates funded Wuhan lab. It was released. The death numbers were bloated. But Democrat governors did use in to clear old folks off blue state Medicare rolls by purposefully contaminating nursing homes.”
I agreed with you up through your calling the Clot Shot a bio weapon (partially created at US taxpayer funds). It’s the next step I disagree with - your claim that it was intentionally released into the public. I have been tracking this reasonably closely since maybe summer of 2021, and don’t recall seeing any evidence of that.
I still prefer the Chinese incompetence and sloppiness theory. The question is, with the Gain of Function research at the WIV (partially funded by Fauci, having developed the SARS-CoV-2 virus, how did it get then released into the (Chinese) public, where it then spread throughout the world? Number one reason that I believe that it was due to Chinese incompetence and sloppiness is that the Chinese had the entire world to release it in, so why do it in the same city where they developed it? Then they tried to hide it at the local, then province, then national level, and couldn’t. Seems more like Communist bureaucratic ineptitude (and coverup) than intentional. Inadvertence, instead of advertence.
Recently, we found that while the WIV has a BSL IV virology lab, and that a BSL IV lab should be used for this sort of research, they also have BSL II labs there, and they may have been using one of them instead, to save money. Or, an earlier theory was that the WIV farmed out the research that developed the virus to a BSL II virology lab a block or so from the Wuhan Wet Market, to save money. That doesn’t seem as likely, since the researchers who appear to have been the Patient Zeros apparently worked at the WIV. I should also note that we have apparently had lab leakages from our own, presumably much better run, BSL IV virology labs.
The reason that I think that Fauci, Collins, et Al, should be tarred and feathered, hung, cut down, drawn and quartered, and had those quarters soaked in acid and burned, is that they never thought about what could go wrong, because very often, if it can go wrong, will go wrong. They couldn’t legally do the research here, so farmed it out to one of the worst countries in the world to have it done. At the time, there weren’t that many countries with BSL IV virology labs, so they picked the one of them from the country most likely to screw up lab safety. Yes, there are other countries known for their general sloppiness in manufacturing and research, but they don’t have BSL IV virology labs. And, instead of my drawing and quartering, Fauci, his last year as a govt employee, apparently earned more than any other government employee, including President Mush For Brains FJB. Why again, are pharmaceutical companies allowed to pay royalties to their regulators, for work by these same government bureaucrats and researchers for work funded by the taxpayers?
Mr Wibble, as is often the case, makes an excellent point:
"My theory at the time (Mar 2020) was that Western intel was reporting that the Chinese were freaking out behind the scenes"
The absolutely crazy over the top Chinese response to Covid was what convinced me that something terrible had escaped the lab. I watched what was happening in China very early on and assumed the worst. It was not an unreasonable assumption, but it turned out to be a bad one.
In the long run, maybe sooner, the border invasion will prove to be as damaging as the debt.
"The corruption of our government is THE existential issue we face, as it underlies all of the others"
This is true, of course. But corruption is the human condition and utterly inevitable. The real problem we have is that the government has been allowed to grow too large and command too much power. Our constitution was written explicitly to avoid this accumulation of power, and it has lasted longer than any other similar experiment in history. But it has failed. What comes next is anyone's guess. As Adam Smith famously said, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation". The USA will continue to rattle along for a very long time to come I suspect, but the failure is already baked in.
LLR-democratical And Violent Homosexual Rage Rape Fantasist Chuck: "Every time I look into his face and his eyes now, I see a profoundly damaged human being."
Its called a mirror Chuck. You're actually looking in the mirror.
Jamie: "I can't remember whether capital-C Chuck is the one I usually agree with or disagree with,..."
Little "c" "chuck" is the one you usually agree with.
Capital "C" "Chuck" is the LLR-democratical And Violent Homosexual Rage Rape Fantasist with a tendency to also post viciously racist and misogynistic musings.
"And Trump did try to allow that. He tried to kick the decision to the states"
Of course I despise his opponents more etc. etc. but Trump also chided states that opened up supposedly too soon and too dangerously. He misjudged the problem, mishandled the PR, and mismanaged his team. Compare the Atlas and Birx books for illustrations.
Kevin: "What did he leave off?
War.
Overzealous climate regulations.
Homelessness.
Inflation.
Student loan debt.
Taxes and Spending.
Crime/Law and Order."
Meh. Its a campaign. Its expected RFKjr wouldn't go into any of the areas that would undermine a simple message he is trying to drive home.
The other parties are all the same! Vote 3rd party!
And it makes sense for him to continue to hammer on Covid as it will likely always be easiest place to hit Trump for all the reasons noted in the above thread, with the republican base clearly willing to accept it and move on...as well as significant #'s of independents and former dems, particularly working class/working poor.
""They're mainly culture war issues — abortion... guns, the border... woke ideology... transgenders... The border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential."
Right. Why sweat the little stuff?
Concern about "the deficit" will one day become concern about "hyperinflation." Then all bets are off. Whichever party is in charge when inflation becomes hyper will be screwed. But neither party will do anything useful unless forced to by the voters, who don't really know or much care that their future has been sold for some easy benefits today. Most voters still think we can solve the deficit by cutting foreign aid or some other miniscule dollop.
"Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid."
I spent over an hour listening to the last RFK interview posted here; don't know if I can find the time for another one. Please forgive me if somewhere in the new interview is the rebuttal to my opinion.
I also think Trump got rolled on covid, but I agree with Jamie at 8:25; Trump got the first half of the pandemic when information was scarce. I'm sympathetic to his plight. I'd like to know how much of Trump's deficit spending can be laid at the feet of the pandemic.
As to RFK, as I said, I listened to an hour interview of him last week. Nowhere in it did he put forward his plan to address our fiscal peril.
I've also wondered about these trillion dollar deficits. It seems we should have much worse inflation, but we don't. I understand that gravity has no effect on quantum mechanics. Is something like that true for the world's reserve currency when it comes to inflation?....I suppose some day there will be a reckoning, but RFK Jr. would not be my go-to guy to balance the federal budget.....Biden will put the budget out of whack to give students debt relief and to pay migrants' sex change operations. Trump, on the other hand, will put the budget out of whack to build a stronger defense or whatever. They're both big spenders, but I'm somewhat more supportive of the things that Trump wants to spend money on, and that's the choice.
His running mate seems nuttier than him, but I can't help thinking that if I had the vote in the U.S., I would vote for Bobby K. I cling to the unlikely hope that the Electoral College will be tied, and he'll be elected by the House of Representatives. The vote would be by state delegation, not by individual members, and for years the Republicans have had a majority of the delegations. Would they vote for Trump? Minnesota is 50/50; how could they vote for either Trump or Biden?
Tea parties tried to call attention to the debt and look what they did to them.
"Was there a point in modern US history, where the debt was previously viewed as catastrophic? (I remember rhetoric about the debt for the past 50 years). Add ten or twenty or thirty years to that point in time. Did we experience a catastrophe?"
Yes, but here is the thing- we are now at historically high levels of debt vs physical economic output. In that past, we weren't looking at a country guaranteed to add millions of people to Social Security and Medicare, and we weren't routinely running deficits of 5+% of GDP. If you compare the projections from the government itself from those past times, the projections are almost uniformly more optimistic than the reality that unfolded. Right now the projection is that the yearly deficit will run at 6% of GDP each year over the next decade, but based on the past projections, it is all but certain that the reality of the next ten years will be twice as bad at a minimum.
What can't go on indefinitely always ends, and our increase in debt at the federal and state level cannot go on indefinitely- someone will be left holding the bag. I used to think I would be dead when that day arrived, but I am not nearly as confident about that these days.
Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
Don't want him as president, but if he can drag one or both of Trump and Biden into acknowledging the growing debt and to come up with a solution, he will have done well here.
Bruce Hayden said...It’s the next step I disagree with - your claim that it was intentionally released into the public.
You've got a legitimate interesting take on COVID. I wish it was Chinese incompetence or Fauci not planning for the worst. Here are some reasons why I think COVID was released on purpose:
1) There is no human benefit to Gain of Function research, unless you are creating a biological weapon. The wet market was a ridiculous story. Placing the Wuhan lab so close to a wet market was for plausible deniability. It's location was not an accident.
2) A biological weapon serves a different purpose than a nuclear weapon. Biological weapons are about taking control and bringing a population into obedience. You're not trying to kill everyone, you're trying to control them. You can't blow up all the field hands and ditch diggers. They're needed.
3) COVD immediately lead to increased totalitarian censorship throughout the world, and also in America...planned voter fraud. I don't believe these were opportunistic developments on the part of the totalitarians and Democrats. They were planned.
4) It was also planned that this would fast track mRNA technology. This is where Trump really got rolled. mRNA shots were never released prior, because they couldn't get through the clinical studies. All COVID treatments were vilified. Death numbers were bloated. And clot shot participation quickly mandated. Worse in Canada and Australia than the US.
I do not believe the benevolence of powerful people. Especially globalists. If you think it's too evil to do...they'll do it, and more than like have already done it. They all marched lock step in violation of the Nuremberg Code. That wasn't an accident.
But corruption is the human condition and utterly inevitable.
We thought globalization would export our values to China.
Instead we imported China's to the US.
#NukeTheWEF
Old and slow said...
"He is not wrong about the debt, but there is no reason to believe that he is serious about resolving the problem, or capable of doing so."
I agree. And anyone who says they can solve the problem is lying to you or themselves.
And, no, I don't know how it eventually resolves. But it will, and it will almost certainly be painful. But it's a long way down the road.
Blogger Big Mike said...
I think Trump got rolled in COVID-19 too. But he has demonstrated the ability to learn
--
Birx put out a book about how she undermined him...everybody.
Fauci deservedly gets a lot of heat but Birx is largely unscathed.
Pharma fudged data and didn't investigate critical elements because "speed of science".
The whole scenario could have been turned into a lesson on deep state and technocratic abuse, but that would require admission it was a shit show.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
Oh no - watch the Trump-Biden supporters lose their minds.
4/29/24, 7:18 AM
LOL. Absolutely no Trump supporters will lose their minds. April Apple shares the very same hatred of the ill-bred, non-elite "Trump supporters" as typical democrat Party members do.
Trump supporters support Trump for several different reasons, and are well aware of his failures and weaknesses as a president.
People who will lose their minds are the ones who always lose their minds: Democrat Party members, Never-Trump hysterics, and the weaklings who worship every crackpot ass that comes along like RFKjr, AOC, BHO, ETC...
Freder Frederson said...
Don't forget Trump exploded the deficit with his tax cuts, which were before COVID.
4/29/24, 7:56
FF here parroting DNC/MSM "misinformation". Or is it "disinformation"? I'm sure you have no idea and just repeat what the Current Thing says to.
From the first months of Trump's presidency, the Treasury was bursting at the coffers with the money coming back into the USA from Trump's change to the overseas corporate tax rate, for one thing. There was more money coming into the government, corporations were making more, and more people were being employed than ever before. Then Covid.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
We all got rolled on Covid.
Covid was 100% planned and released on purpose.
****************
Maybe they don't care about their own citizens' welfare, but how would the ChiCom leadership know they themselves would be unaffected by the virus they released in their own country?
I'm reminded of the chemtrails conspiracy theory.
It's easy for independent candidates to talk about excessive government spending because they don't belong to either major party. (just look at Ross Perot) Any candidate who is either a Democrat or Republican cannot win without the support of their party and both parties have a vested interest in increasing government spending.
Just look at the current federal budget. The pandemic has been over for a couple of years, but we're still at peak Covid spending instead of having gone back to pre-Covid spending levels.
Jamie,
It is entirely incorrect to write "...the start of the pandemic, from when we didn't know anything ...".
The only people who "didn't know anything" at that point were those who had forgotten Ebola, MERS, H1N1, and a very long line of predecessor panics.
The first sentence of RFK's remarks quoted is transparently false. In addition to the issues Kennedy mentions, Biden and Trump differ on a host of issues, most notably climate change, the environment generally, the role of the federal government in regulation, whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen or not, whether the ongoing risk of election fraud justifies further regulation of the voting process, whether Congress should pass national legislation protecting a woman's right to choose, whether the federal civil service should be gutted or not, whether the carried interest deduction (and other tax breaks for billionaires) should be repealed or not, whether the country needs more Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas or more like Elena Kagan, whether and how the NATO alliance should be supported and whether opposing Russia in Eastern Europe matters, whether the federal government should continue to fund NPR and on, and on and on.
Moreover, although RFK claims that he differs from Trump and Biden on the budget, he has not, to my knowledge, made any substantive suggestion for budget cuts, other than massive cuts to the defense budget based on the withdrawal of US military presence all around the world. Good for him, if he can carry both the policy and political case for that--no US President, once in office and in charge of making decisions, has ever seen fit do do so. Do you, Professor Althouse, think that's a good idea?
The JFK website also lists a number of programs that will obviously cost significant dollars--better public health, federal mortgage subsidies, better child care. Most strikingly, the website says nothing about federal entitlement programs, such as social security and medicare, that all observers believe must be cut back or amended to reduce deficits and in the interview RFK said he viewed social security as sacred and did not discuss medicare.
So Kennedy is completely false on the differences between Trump and Biden, ducks the key budget issues in exactly the way that they do, and relies exclusively on defense cuts that aren't realistic from the perspective or either policy or politics to close the gap.
Why, Professor Althouse, do you find this to be excellent?
Blogger Yinzer said...
Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
You're right. Look at what happened during Scott Walker's Act 10 in Wisconsin. He wanted teachers to pitch in for their retirement and health insurance...just like everybody else. The temper tantrum in reaction was epic. When Walker froze UW tuitions you'd have thought the entire system would collapse.
You're right. Once a government employee starts suckling off the tax payer tit, you can't take it away or get rid of it. Like herpes.
If a President wanted to get control of our debt, he would have to veto every omnibus bill sent to his desk. You'd have to be willing to shut down the government for a long period of time, which really isn't a big deal...but the press makes it sound like the end of the world.
The shrieking of white women would be motivation enough to sign the bill and open back up. RJK Jr would sign just to get Elizabeth Warren to shut up.
Anyone who talks about the DEFICIT is fraud. The D's never talk about it. Hacks like Haley, Christie, etc. only bring it up when its used to bash Trump or someone else.
Want to balance the budget? raise taxes. Oh, wait, you don't want to do that.
Well then cut defense spending and foriegn aid, Oh wait, you don't want to do that.
Well cut domestic programs. Oh wait, you don't want to do that.
And so on.
Maybe you can campaign on cutting social security and medicare. Good luck with that!
its absurd to pose as a budget hawk and sign off on $95 billion for Ukraine and Israel. not to mention to cost of all those sainted "Immigrants" pouring over the border.
We have a massive deficit because the R's don't want to raise taxes, and the D's refuse to cut spending. And both of them love Foreign aid, immigrants, and wars. That's why all the talk is Bullshit.
Regarding the deficit; note the recent success by the new president in Argentina, who was able to remove total government departments, slashing costs to the point of creating a positive GDP in that country for the first time in decades. I doubt that a US president could get away with that, unfortunately!
I don't know where the hell you are getting your information.
but as we've learned time after time, tax cuts for rich people (especially when the econcomy is in pretty good shape) does not pay for themselves.
You haven't learned a damn thing. Every time there've been tax cuts, the amount of revenue brought in increases. Because people spend MORE of their own money.
Every. Time.
@Freder Freerson says at 16:12:
"I don't know where the hell you are getting your information."
I don't know either, but, well.... here's what your link says:
"His austerity measures helped cool monthly inflation in the first three months of the year, falling from a three-decade high of 26% in December. Milei used high inflation to further skim costs by letting public wages and pensions fall far behind monthly rises in consumer prices.
The effort is, according to Milei, paying off. The president went on national television Monday night to trumpet the country’s first quarterly fiscal surplus since 2008."
..."Economists are more cautious. They interpret the fiscal surplus as good news but worry about its sustainability...."
It would seem they're in a pretty strong recession right now which isn't surprising, but the good news is that annual inflation rate is down from over 200%, which most people think of as 'bad'. Don't recessions usually pre-sage economic recoveries? (Not an economist) What would you propose Milei do? They measure their inflation rates there by the month, just to keep the numbers reasonable.
Ann Althouse said...
"I may be wrong here, but IMO a large chunk of Trump's spending was due to covid and the subsequent funding bills signed into law under his signature."
Listen to the whole RFK interview. He talks about that. And he thinks Trump got rolled on Covid.
Does he talk about the budget battle Trump had with Paul Ryan and Mitch MCConnel?
If you don’t address that and try to blame Trump for the spending you are not being honest.
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
Oh no - watch the Trump-Biden supporters lose their minds.
And watch the Desantis supporters conveniently forget that Desantis and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell all teamed up to force Trump to sign a pork barrel filled bullshit budget and they refused to fund the border wall.
Lilly, a dog said...
Five minutes of Ben Shapiro is too big an ask. An hour and a half of Ben Shapiro is out of the question.
Daily Wire is destroying itself right now.
It is entirely predictable that they will have RFK on to pretend Trump and Biden are the same.
Shapiro is a Con Inc traitor and wants Biden reelected.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math.
There are about 161 million registered voters -- whoever wins the next election will most likely need around 80 million votes or more to win.
Now, it is not particularly easy to get at least 80 million people to agree about anything. Which is basically why we have political parties, to organize the huge amount of effort to reach out to hundreds of millions of people across this rather huge country and get them to agree about something.
Jill Stein is a much better candidate than RFK Jr, but she will never appeal to 80 million American voters, so she won’t win either. RFK Jr has a small percentage of support in a small part of the country. His goal is not to win, but just to spoil things for others.
He's not going to take a meaningful number of votes from anyone. He is a joke. He is Connor Roy from Succession.
LLR-democratical Rich: "Now, it is not particularly easy to get at least 80 million people to agree about anything."
Agreement is meaningless. Much easier to simply generate 81 million marked ballots for tabulation...at least it is for one party in particular.
Yeah, I got about halfway through and Junior' telling us all about how he knows exactly who to fire in the Federal Bureaucracy to make it hum like a Swiss clock, and then he started in with the amazing accomplishments of father and uncle, as expected. But I didn't once hear a concrete plan to fix an existential problem, mostly just deflections back to how both Trump and Biden have failed at what he's going to do correctly. So I signed off.
I really don't think that Junior', for all his accomplishments (and he has some notable ones), will do as well as Ross Perot did, because his message isn't as focused and clear. And with that dysphonia, he's just hard work to listen to.
Trump is the word
Oh Drago, here you are again pushing Kremlin chanting points.
Rich the serial liar.
Tax cut deficits are far less harmful than govt spending deficits. All taxpayers are producing wealth, and have good ideas on how to improve their own lives with more cash/ lower taxes. No new bureaucracy, almost immediate effect, including reducing personal debt or other personal or business investment.
This grows the economy in a wealth creating way, maybe $100 million in tax cuts increasing the economy by 2%, so up to $102 million. All too often, $100 mln in govt spending balloons to $200 million for a good worth only $100 mln, a loss of $100 mln.
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