The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Kaelik]

Worth remembering this will be the last time Democrats ever have a majority, and we will be a fully one party GOP state from here on out.

Republicans have responded to a loss like they always do, making it illegal for people to vote in extremely aggressive ways in all the state legislatures they control, which also include a bunch of "blue" states that won't ever be blue again.

Meanwhile, democrat have agreed that in fact, voting is not as important as the historic tradition of doing whatever segregationists want.

[Kaelik]

Bidens acting solicitor general just let the supreme court know that the Biden justice department agrees with the Trump teams brief to the SC about why the state if Arizona should throw out ballots.

Democrats. We totally (don't) care about voting rights.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

At least we're getting Evangelion references out of it.

[MGuy]

I think we're well past any reasonable period of time for Dems to negotiate with themselves over what's going to be coming through reconciliation. Covid relief would've been late coming if it had been passed the day Biden got inaugurated and everyday it doesn't get passed the numbers in it should have gone up to compensate. Even so it's going into a vote more or less intact this week. Still unclear on the state of the minimum wage hike.

[PhoneLobster]

I think it's already been mentioned that Biden openly stated he didn't think he was going to get the minimum wage through.

The again. He did also just recently openly state that he "likes children more than people"...

[Kaelik]

I think it's already been mentioned that Biden openly stated he didn't think he was going to get the minimum wage through.

The again. He did also just recently openly state that he "likes children more than people"...

Technically he CLOSEDLY said that in a private meeting with governors and then it was leaked.

But he did openly open up a child jail that Trump closed and then brave truth teller no spin Psaki explained that it's not children in cages because the facility will "follow the same standards as every other HHS facility."

So that's fun!

[Kaelik]

Well, lots of bad shit going on!

Domestic:

Domestically, Biden did pass a Covid bill that was less than he promised and didn't have the minimum wage he immediately abandoned, but is mostly good, but also, a huge part it is really really bad. Get to that in a bit. But now Biden is trying to avoid lowering the medicare age to 60 (a thing he promised) has never mentioned the public option, and bailed on the $15 minimum wage while underdoing his promise on the covid relief. He also hasn't even done the measly 10k student debt relief he promised. He also hasn't decriminalized Marijuana like he promised, apparently because it's too much work to sign a piece of paper that should have been drafted before he was president, so he hasn't had the energy to do it yet. But he did have time to fire and marginalize a bunch of his staffers for smoking weed at some point in their life because the cops told him all weed smokers are dangerous.

I briefly want to talk about why that is. People in power, like Biden, like Pelosi, don't want to carry through on even the easy promises the could keep, and never want to spend political power or even use unilateral powers to do the things they promised. Because if they did all the things they promised, then you would have watched them do a bunch of things and then you would realize that in the NEXT 3 years they could do more. Right now Bernie Sanders is pressuring Biden to lower the medicare age to 60 because Biden doesn't want to do it. This was a Biden campaign promise! But as long as Bernie Sanders has to pressure Biden just to do the things he promised, then Sanders can't pressure Biden to do any of the OTHER things he should be doing. That's the point of refusing to even do what you promised. It limits even pressure to the things you want, so then you can spend 4 years barely almost doing your promises and at the end of it no one spent even a single second trying to get you to do things you could have done but didn't want to do. But this only works if you try really hard to not do your promises for years.

So anyway, passing laws is hard (but not as hard as democrats like to pretend) so domestically he probably won't do much more than COVID in this time frame. But what else is going on domestically? Well it turns out, the police are getting way more arms and supplies from the military under Biden then they ever did under Trump. Absolutely fuck democrats so fucking much. Cops are bad, there should be no cops, and the Biden admin wants more cops and bigger weapons for those cops. Also the COVID relief bill has a bunch of state and city aid, and it's mostly going to cops! Fuck everything.

Biden has also managed to appoint basically every single attorney that has ever worked at Amazon or Facebook into the Department of Justice. Good fucking times.

Random tiny side note, Biden said no Keystone Pipeline, but also, it's just being illegally used to pump oil and no one is trying to stop it.

Immigration

Now on to the middle between domestic and foreign policy: Immigration! Joe Biden is just Donald Trump in a blue hat! Joe Biden is still turning away 100% of aslyum seekers who are adults at the border without a hearing because "COVID" immigration restrictions to keep out a disease don't make any goddam sense when you have millions of people with the disease inside your country! But it's a convenient excuse to just not give people hearings, so Biden's in favor of it. Also Biden's DHS secretary, in addition to giving speeches about how much he loves ICE, is still building the wall. I guess "Build Back Better" was about Trump's wall. Oh also he criticized "sanctuary cities" for existing and he wants more prosecutions of undocumented immigrants.

Also Biden just set the refugee cap for the year at..... the same number Trump set it at. In November he promised 125k (this is already insanely too fucking low). Then in February he promised 60k. Now that he's actually officially setting the limit it's..... 15k. Remember what I said about them not even wanting to keep their own promises? This caused completely 100% justified outrage from lots of liberal groups, and lots of democratic politicians who immediately started throwing his campaign statements about the soul of the nation in his face. Psaki, doing her duty as a comms secretary lied her fucking ass off immediately as the admin fake back pedaled. She claimed that the previous announcement was an announcement that they totally definitely were going to change the number to a higher number, and never meant the number they actually legally set and announced, and they will totally change this number in the future, and also it's only because Trump didn't fund the department enough to process all the applications! (This is also a lie, because in fact we have processed tons of applications of people who just perpetually sit waiting on the list because of the refugee cap.) Also the asylum seekers at the border overwhelmed our refugee system! (Also a lie because these are different systems with no interaction.) The real truth of course is what they said at first, that as long as people are yelling at them about border control, they didn't think it was politically a good idea to do the moral correct thing of keeping even his stepped down promises. Note, that Psaki's promise they totally will increase the number in the future has no binding authority, so the actual limit is in fact still 15k and if people stop yelling at them for even one entire second it will stay that number for the rest of the year.

Now let's use asylum seekers at the border to transition into foreign policy!

Foreign Policy

Why are all these people fleeing their countries! Well a big chunk of it is people fleeing.... THE BIDEN PLAN. Because when the US steps in to create right wing dictators and then fund their police forces, as we did in 2009-2016 with Honduras, it produces a lot of refugees! (not that we stopped in 2016, just that Biden was not a prime instigator in our continued aid after that point). But Biden was personally responsible for the 2014 tour and then 2015 Biden Plan to.... well basically give the right wing dictators doing privatization a bunch of weapons and training for their police and military to root out communists drug dealers. Turns out they used it to fuck people up and create a bunch of refugees. (This was not limited to Honduras and was also applied to Columbia and elsewhere, but Honduras, as a the current source of a lot of refugees and also a place that had a coup of a democratic leader to install a dictator after Biden was VP that the US supported is a prime example).

So what is the plan for the future? Let's ask Anthony Blinken, the worst mother fucking monster in the Biden administration (a real fucking effort to get there) and also the Secretary of State. He will tell us that the thing to do is.... do a coup in Venezuela and also maybe Bolivia again. Because you see, the Bolivian government he wants us to know is engaged in a POLITICAL PROSECUTION of the previous president. You know, the one who was 7th in line to the office and then took it when every single person who was a member of MAS all were not allowed to take it because the military said no. The one who immediately issued decrees allowing the consequence free murder of protestors and then ordered the military and cops to start shooting. The one who put out an arrest warrant for Evo Morales (a president who actually won an election and wasn't doing murders) and who tried multiple times to ban the political party MAS which makes up most of the legislature and has won every single election since indigenous people were given the right to vote. The one who cancelled elections several times and only caved when the entire capital city was locked down with protestors for days so no food could even come in. So yes, Blinken thinks that someone who engaged in a coup and multiple murders should not be prosecuted. After all, what if the US needs her to support our next coup of Bolivia?

But hey, maybe the plan to do neoliberal hellscapes in Latin America won't work out, but surely this guy has good ideas in the Middle East right!

HAHAHAHA I'm kidding of course.

In Yemen, the KSA and their allies, like the UAE, are continuing to do genocide. They have a total blockade of the country that they brag about publicly. People are dying to Cholera from all the water treatment plants being destroyed. It's probably the worst ongoing human rights crisis in the world. The Biden admin made an announcement they would stop all "offensive" support of KSA. But when the Obama admin first started supporting KSA we were flying mid air refuels for their bombers and giving them target info and Joe Biden told us it was a purely defensive support operation. So what "offensive" actions are prohibited? Seemingly none, because several democratic senators have spent the weeks since this announcement trying to get that information, and the Biden admin has to this point refused to tell them what it even is. But hey, we can always trust the Biden admin to make good on any promises, so let's check to see what the Biden admin position is on the blockade..... oh Blinken just claims there is no blockade so the US isn't going to try to stop that blockade the KSA brags about and now we are selling a few billion dollars of arms to the UAE so they can kill some more people in Yemen.

Iraq: No we will not leave the country even though they have ordered us to and we are now just occupying a sovereign country again.

Iran: Blinken and the Biden admin has taken the position that the way we get back into the deal with Iran is that Iran has to come into full compliance with the deal we broke, and then trust our word that we will then lift the many illegal sanctions we have on them. Unsurprisingly, Iran does not seem to share this opinion. The US, as the party in the wrong, still insists on total subjugation of everyone else. Oh, also Israel attacked Iranian nuclear power facilities and the US is defending them and supporting them as always.

Also a ways back the US bombed an Iraqi militia paid by the nation of Iraq because we were mad that a completely unrelated Iraqi Militia shot at us. We killed 22 people in our bombing who never even attacked us and were doing security for Iraq because we BELIEVED they were FUNDED by Iran, but also we actually don't have any evidence of that. This could go in Iran because we think they might have received money from Iran (that's our reason for killing them) or it could be Iraq, because they were paid by the Iraqi government to do security, or they could be Syria, because we bombed them in Syria.

Afghanistan: Biden had a ceremony to commemorate the end of the war in Afghanistan. He's TOTALLY going to pull out all the troops. Of course, Obama had the same ceremony in 2014. That didn't take. Maybe it will take this time because in the last 6 years we've funded a bunch of death squads, so we can turn over the ongoing work of killing Afghanis to them and pull out everything except our funding infrastructure for the death squads and special ops teams. As we know, Biden is so good about keeping his promises and cares so much about not doing imperialism.

Anyway, Biden is committing mass murders on the orders of millions of people because he refuses to do a TRIPS waiver for vaccines, so tons of factories that could produce the vaccine can't because the Biden admin thinks Pfizer profits are more important than the lives of non americans.

[Harshax]

The pull-out unequivocally from Afghanistan, in September, is a win. Yes? Feels like a win, so, rhetorical.

[Kaelik]

The pull-out unequivocally from Afghanistan, in September, is a win. Yes? Feels like a win, so, rhetorical.

Biden literally made a promise to stop supporting the KSA that apparently did nothing and Obama "ended the war in Afghanistan" in 2014 in a way that did not in fact end the war.

April is probably the wrong time to be happy about something that might happen in September.

If Afghanistan moves from permanently occupied country to a country we merely fund death squads in and special ops in that will be an improvement, though there is probably room to question how much, we haven't been "occupying" Syria but we've been doing making it worse for a while, but if that comes to pass after it happens would be the time to declare it a win because the US has a certain amount of historical "leaving" announcements that dont correlate to any actual leaving.

[Kaelik]

It has been brought to my attention that I forgot to mention that Biden announced US support for the US (Obama) installed dictator in Haiti, a thing that doesn't surprise, but is at least worth acknowledging alongside various coup attempts and support for other US installed and/or supported dictators, and that Biden has requested an increase in the military budget over anything Trump asked for, because democrats are equally intent on imperialism and pouring endless money down the maw of the military industrial complex.

[deaddmwalking]

OR
Asking for money for the military defrays accusations that he is 'defunding the military', which is the only government institution that actually has majority approval.

Confidence in Institutions

[Kaelik]

Oh well as long as we just pour endless money down the maw of the military industrial complex while underfunding every other part of the country because we want to "defray accusations" of doing good things.

As long as the bad things you do are because you are too afraid to do good things, that makes them good things instead, and doesn't mean you are definitely bad.

I want to stress that in fact, if your plan once president is to do every bad thing with 51% support because you are too terrified to do anything good, that you are a terrible genocidal monster who should not be president. But also, instead of just pointing out the stupidest polls in the world that don't even support your claims, you could look at for example instead of whether people "have confidence" you could look at if they want to GIVE IT MORE MONEY.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/20 ... ons-budget

Turns out, maybe they have so much CONFIDENCE in the military that they think they can keep doing their job with merely as much money as the next 7 countries combined instead of 15.

[deaddmwalking]

I just keep coming back to the supposition that you must be insane.

Biden has proposed a $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan. It includes $400 billion to expand access to caregiving and to improve pay and benefits of caregivers (ie, broadening the definition of infrastructure to include some types of essential workers).

Biden's Expanded Child Tax Credit that was included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.
According to the Center for American Progress:
An Expanded Child Tax Credit Would Lift Millions of Children Out of Poverty.

We don't have an authoritarian government. Politics is about 'the art of the possible'. Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, and we haven't figured out how to solve that issue right now. Even if most people agree that military spending is too high (and I think they do), you can't find a single program that people actually want to cut.

USNI News reported this month that Pentagon leaders are again considering a reduced carrier force structure as part of its upcoming 2022 budget submission to Congress.

Resistance from lawmakers is likely. Wicker released a statement Monday calling for a bigger Navy in response to growing presence at sea from Russia and China. He urged the Biden administration to embrace a military plan released under President Donald Trump to increase the fleet to 405 manned Navy ships by 2051.

It's critical to pick your battles. If spending an extra $11 Billion on the military lets you spend $2 Trillion on social programs, maybe that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

[Kaelik]

"You have to do whatever the majority of people want" suddenly becomes "you have to do unpopular bad things that people don't want" really fucking fast for you as soon as it turns out people want good things.

Nothing about an infrastructure plan that hasn't passed or a stimulus bill of approximate total value as the one's Trump signed requires you to increase military spending. You can just do whatever spending you want and CUT military spending. You can do this both in the sense that increasing military spending doesn't interact with other bills being passed, and also because it doesn't help you win any future elections. It's just a separate bad decision Biden made. No one was going to go into revolt if Biden had requested 6.5 trillion in military spending over the next 10 years instead of 7-9 trillion as it perpetually increases.

That's the point here. Spending more money to do evil bad things abroad is not actually a requirement. No one is forcing Biden to do it, no politicians and no voters are going to punish him for it. He would be rewarded for not doing it. He's doing it because he wants to.

Your absolutely absurd "they want it to decrease but they don't want to decrease any programs" is both wrong and you lying. It's wrong because of course, voters would support reducing spending on basically all military programs. It's lying because voters don't see or care about funding for programs, since they see either literally nothing or the single yearly bill with a giant lump sum that no one in the entire fucking world even knows for sure what it goes for because the Pentagon has never in it's entire history had an audit and it had accounting irregularities in the trillions that it just doesn't bother to even fix because no one does any oversight.

The actual bill almost certainly reduces funding for some programs, and no doubt increases funding for many programs people would be perfectly happy to decrease, but no voter actually cares about that info on a program by program level because literally no aspect of our society ever conveys it to them.

[deaddmwalking]

You are the definition of cynicism masquerading as wisdom. People literally went into revolt because they didn't think Biden was lawfully elected and you don't think that they would cause problems if they thought he was actively dismantling American sovereignty?

I'm not saying that he shouldn't do exactly that, by the way, but headlines absolutely matter. JFK got elected with the promise that he would 'close the missile gap' which didn't exist. Reagan got elected in part because of a promise to restore military might after the defeat in Vietnam and the perceived impotence of the US in dealing with Iran. A headline like 'Biden slashes military budget' or 'US Military Readiness at lowest level since 1976' do have an effect on low-information voters.

Biden learned that optics matter with Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act is actually popular, now that people know what it does. But for most of the first decade it was all about 'death panels' and 'taxing you for choosing not to buy insurance'.

The fact is, raising the budget less than inflation is cutting the budget.

And the Wall Street Journal (of course) points that out. But clearly, saying 'Biden raises the defense budget, but not enough to account for inflation' is the type of nuanced article that the vast majority of the public won't seize on as evidence that Biden is selling us out to our enemies.

I'll also point out that it appears disingenuous to claim that the proposed budget (which hasn't been passed) should be treated as a done deal, but other proposals (like the child credit that IS happening in July) apparently don't count even though they were signed into law because...???

Biden wants his infrastructure plan. If the headlines said 'Biden guts military to fund Amtrak', Joe Manchin wouldn't give his vote. Controlling the narrative fucking matters.

I literally believe that you're just upset that Biden hasn't been worse than Trump. I've enjoyed almost 100 days of not hate-reading the news and alternating between contemplating suicide and wondering if relocating to another country was actually an option. Turns out, Frank was right - a 'replacement level Democrat' is actually better than the Republicans. We've made more progress toward a more inclusive, more fair, and more socially protected economy in the last three months than in the last 30 years. Maybe that's not good enough, and maybe there's a lot of things that could go wrong, but I think supporting the policies and working to increase the governing majorities would go a long way.

Didn't you just a few posts up posit that we were going to a full Republican government with no chance left to stop it? Maybe saving the vitriol for the policies that REALLY deserve it would be a good first step.

[Kaelik]

You are the definition of cynicism masquerading as wisdom. People literally went into revolt because they didn't think Biden was lawfully elected and you don't think that they would cause problems if they thought he was actively dismantling American sovereignty?

What an incredibly stupid thing to say. Yes, the people who think Joe Biden is pedophile King doing socialism are not going to go into revolt against Joe Biden because the military budget is cut. My family members who are getting their passports to flee the United States in case they are wrong, but are still pretty sure that any day now the PLAN will be activate and Trump will be reinstalled are not going to revolt because the military budget is cut. But if they did, they could be handled.

There is nothing to be gained about trying to win votes of the Q anon January 6th people and no possibly Biden policy could effect whether they revolt because they do not engage on policy. Cutting military spending is a thing that would make most people more likely to vote for Joe Biden, and is the right thing to do. There is no political or moral reason not to do it. You are making up increasingly unhinged reasons why democrats have to do bad things they don't want to do, but those democrats keep telling you they want to do those bad things! Joe Biden wants to give the military more money because he likes giving money to the military, not because he is worried that cutting the military will cause people who already did a dumb revolt to vote against him and/or do a second one.

I'm not saying that he shouldn't do exactly that, by the way, but headlines absolutely matter. JFK got elected with the promise that he would 'close the missile gap' which didn't exist. Reagan got elected in part because of a promise to restore military might after the defeat in Vietnam and the perceived impotence of the US in dealing with Iran. A headline like 'Biden slashes military budget' or 'US Military Readiness at lowest level since 1976' do have an effect on low-information voters.

Well as long as JFK got elected on promises to do a bad thing in the 60s I think we can all agree that absolutely NOTHING has changed since then and we definitely aren't in a different world where public opinion has changed, aside from all the changes to public opinion.

Again. Ideally, a president should be willing to do things because they are the right thing to do, and should reduce the evil being done in the world by the US for that reason, and hope that the good things they do make up for those things when they are unpopular. But also, that's not this, because cutting the military would be very popular and if Biden did it and they wrote articles saying "whaaaaaaaaa biden military budget go DOWN" then it would make him more popular.

I'll also point out that it appears disingenuous to claim that the proposed budget (which hasn't been passed) should be treated as a done deal, but other proposals (like the child credit that IS happening in July) apparently don't count even though they were signed into law because...???

No one claimed his Covid Relief Bill comparable to Trump's "doesn't count" and maybe the fact that you have to lie about things like this gives away the fact that you have no serious arguments. His covid relief bill "counts" for what it is worth (not much, literally the bare minimum, the same amount Donald Trump signed into law, but some of the money that went to airlines or banks or furloughs now goes to police budgets and a tax credit instead) but it doesn't in fact have anything to do with the military budget. He doesn't "get credit" for an infrastructure bill that hasn't passed and does get blamed for a military budget that hasn't passed because one of those is definitely going to pass with 98 votes and one of those we don't know if they will pass it at all.

I've enjoyed almost 100 days of not hate-reading the news and alternating between contemplating suicide and wondering if relocating to another country was actually an option.

Absolutely no one is surprised that you have not given a single shit about all the horrible things that have continued to happen or that Biden has accelerated because a democrat is president now so it's good when we bomb people and do coups and support the largest ongoing human rights crisis in the world.

We've made more progress toward a more inclusive, more fair, and more socially protected economy in the last three months than in the last 30 years.

The last 30 years included 16 years of Democratic Presidencies where things got worse. The fact that passing a child tax credit and doing nothing else is better than the aggregate of the last 30 years isn't a selling point for anything, not even a child tax credit. The ACA was also an individual improvement that if taken alone was better than anything else that happened in the last 30 years, but it turned out to do almost nothing to help most people just like a slight increase in the child tax credit will compared to repeated recessions and tax cuts for the rich. Maybe Biden might pass an entire second bill that will be good, and improve things. It's very possible. It definitely won't be "enough" since we are all still going to die from climate change and income inequality is the worst it's ever been and US empire will continue to be the largest source of evil in the world. But generally, I would wait until Biden does literally anything good besides pass a covid relief bill that is about the size of the one passed a year ago. with a slightly better distribution before going too hard on pretending things are just so good that you can't imagine how anyone would complain.

but I think supporting the policies and working to increase the governing majorities would go a long way.

No, you obviously don't! You have a preexisting idea of what is good for whatever very stupid reasons you have and then you post hoc invent the fake excuse that it's to "increase the governing majorities" whenever you can't argue the merits of a thing you already decided to support.

You make this fake post hoc argument even though cutting the military would "increase the governing majorities" and increasing the military budget doesn't do that. You position that increasing the military budget existed before you had any information about what voters want, and then faced the information that voters want the budget cut, you decided that actually, fuck that, JFK, so therefore voters really want the thing you had decided was good before you heard about voter opinions.

Didn't you just a few posts up posit that we were going to a full Republican government with no chance left to stop it?

Probably, because the thing about elections is that we have fake ones, and the republicans are writing the rules, and the democrats believe that a editing mistake weaponized to defend segregation is more important than trying to even slightly counter this. Your theory that you can fake elections rigged against you by just doing the unpopular thing of funneling more money into the military is a very stupid version of politics.

Maybe saving the vitriol for the policies that REALLY deserve it would be a good first step.

Hey dumb shit, increasing the military budget is one of the worst policies! Every dollar spent on the military goes directly into the giant fuck off pile of evil that is US empire, which is in fact very bad everywhere, no matter how much you personally love it because you don't see anyone outside the US as a person. You can read entire very large sections of my posts about all the bad things we do with all that fucking money, including the dictators we support, the coups we arrange and support, and the people we murder.

[deaddmwalking]

Oh, I see how you missed the boat. You think that one survey question that was asked in a way that leads to a specific response (redirecting military spending toward domestic programs like the Center for Disease Control) yielded a response that indicated people generally agreed with that statement.

It's actually not that clear cut. My source shows 52% of Democrats want to keep Defense spending where it is or increase it.

Having a budget doesn't mean that you'll do evil things with it (even though it keeps happening). Spending money on military aircraft is less effective than pumping that money into infrastructure - but there are benefits to paying people for doing NOTHING, so getting an airplane or an aircraft carrier could be seen as objectively more valuable than just a universal income in some manner.

Defense spending is complicated, and simple reductionism is misleading. While the US spends more than any other country, the US is also a very rich country and a relatively populous country. Our defense spending of approximately 3.4% of GDP is less than Russia or Saudi Arabia - basically double that of the UK.

Defense Spending compared to other countries

While I think that a lot of people will agree that defense spending is out of hand, a massive reduction in spending immediately has other huge problems that you're conveniently ignoring. Most of the defense spending is long-term - it goes to salary dollars and facilities maintenance. Closing a base is actually really costly, even though you may realize long-term savings. Ultimately, the United States is committed to being able to fight a two-front war (like World War II) and our defense spending reflects that. Military power and American commitments to allies through bi-lateral and multi-lateral defense agreements (like with Taiwan, Japan, and NATO) are an important part of global leadership. It's childish to cry about the top-line number without making a proposal that you think actually makes sense.

So let's say the budget was cut in half this year... What does that look like? Is any part of that good? What do you start cutting from the budget? I promise you, the defense budget is the gnome problem writ large. You think you can cut it, but there's some group that is a die-hard supporter of every aspect. Even if you decide to stop building ballistic missile submarines (the Columbia is approved), where are your savings? If you lay-off all the workers that were going to build it, does that really help anyone? If you think of military hardware spending as mostly a jobs program (and I do) it's not really as clear what cuts make sense.

I assure you that cutting the OPERATIONAL BUDGET for overseas troops that is used to support their current operations is NOT supported by the general public. Even people who want our soldiers to leave Afghanistan don't want to see them abandoned there.

[Kaelik]

It's actually not that clear cut. My source shows 52% of Democrats want to keep Defense spending where it is or increase it.

What an incredible deceptive way to say that 23% of people want an increase.

Having a budget doesn't mean that you'll do evil things with it (even though it keeps happening). Spending money on military aircraft is less effective than pumping that money into infrastructure - but there are benefits to paying people for doing NOTHING, so getting an airplane or an aircraft carrier could be seen as objectively more valuable than just a universal income in some manner.

Absolutely not! Resources not spent on building a new aircraft carrier aren't going to lie fallow, they will be used for something else. And yes, if you are the United States Military having a budget means using it to do evil.

Defense spending is complicated, and simple reductionism is misleading. While the US spends more than any other country, the US is also a very rich country and a relatively populous country. Our defense spending of approximately 3.4% of GDP is less than Russia or Saudi Arabia - basically double that of the UK.

And here we get to the crux of it. You don't actually think increased defense spending is a bad thing Biden did for politics, you never did, it's just a thing you support.

Being a "relatively rich country" (GDP is a fake measure and this tells us nothing) spending 3.4% of your GDP on the military is bad! The US had more military presence than any other 10 countries combined. The reason we do that is not because there's a "normal" amount of spending for the military as a percentage of GDP, it's because we are an empire that deliberately incites conflicts all around the globe and then uses those conflicts and our participation in them to justify having a military that is simultaneously capable of winning a land war in Europe, a sea war with China, blockading any country we are mad at in South America and militarily conquering middle eastern countries while regularly doing special ops and bombing campaigns everywhere previously listed and Africa.

Being able to simultaneously engage in war everywhere on the planet and "win" all of them simultaneously is the motive for our spending and is conduct we engage in because of that spending.

If you want to admit that the point of the military is to engage in constant conflicts all over the world simultaneously then fine, do that, but saying "we only have a percentage of GDP" is so much bullshit, we have enough military to win all the conflicts we want to threaten with at the same time and the conflicts we want to threaten amount to WWIII where it is almost the entire world against us and our few local regional allies.

Military power and American commitments to allies through bi-lateral and multi-lateral defense agreements (like with Taiwan, Japan, and NATO) are an important part of global leadership.

US "global leadership" is farce and a force for evil. We leverage our military power to create the governments that advance our interests and then we use that as an excuse to do the things we wanted to do anyway. The US created the government of Japan, the country of Taiwan, and 22 of the 30 members of NATO.

It's childish to cry about the top-line number without making a proposal that you think actually makes sense.

This is absolutely fucking stupid. It is not incumbent on every citizen with a political opinion to employ an entire staffing team to review every single DOD department and come up with a complete military budget. That's why in our system Joe Biden didn't personally come up with a proposal he thinks makes sense. He hired staff to do that for him.

Bernie Sanders proposed an alternative military budget back when we had a Fascist Dictator in charge, but the democrats in congress decided that we needed to give the fascist dictator more money than he asked for to fund the military answerable to him.

I can say that Joe Biden should have (hired staff who or given guidance to his staff to) come up with a budget that drastically cut the military budget without writing my own military budget.

So let's say the budget was cut in half this year... What does that look like? Is any part of that good? What do you start cutting from the budget?

There was literally a proposal to cut the budget 10% proposed and voted down by democrats last year.

You think you can cut it, but there's some group that is a die-hard supporter of every aspect.

So fucking what! Raytheon is bad! Northrup Gruman is bad! Most of the members of our National Security Council are bad! Police also suck! This is literally the point of defund movements. These things are bad institutions that exist to do evil and reducing their funding causes less harm by reducing their power. Giving in and doing bad things that bad institutions want because otherwise the bad institutions will oppose you is how you become the worst source of evil in the world, rolling around doing constant evil and then having to justify doing more evil this year than last year!

If you lay-off all the workers that were going to build it, does that really help anyone?

Yes, obviously if we stopped paying Northrup Gruman and Lockeed Martin and Raytheon to build missiles or trillion dollar fighters that don't work or another aircraft carrier that would obviously be an improvement! It would mean less money and power to Raytheon, less incentive to engage in bombing campaigns, and diverting resources in our economy to literally anything that isn't violent imperial control over the world.

I assure you that cutting the OPERATIONAL BUDGET for overseas troops that is used to support their current operations is NOT supported by the general public. Even people who want our soldiers to leave Afghanistan don't want to see them abandoned there.

You can't assure me of jack shit when it comes to what "the general public" supports because you have no idea and don't care. You just insert your personal dumbass opinions in as the general public.

People don't actually care if we have 5000 survey and bombing flights in Afghanistan or not. "Supporting" the troops is not a thing that even always looks good on paper, and there are a fuck ton of ways that the public would never know or care about cuts while leaving operations the same, but yes, in fact, significant cuts would in fact force us to actually use the military less. That's the FUCKING POINT of cutting! People aren't advocating for lower military spending because they love our imperialism and just think we can do it more efficiently!

[Thaluikhain]

Spending money on military aircraft is less effective than pumping that money into infrastructure - but there are benefits to paying people for doing NOTHING, so getting an airplane or an aircraft carrier could be seen as objectively more valuable than just a universal income in some manner.

Wait, what? Or is that with an emphasis on "could"?

[deaddmwalking]

Giving people money is inarguably valuable. Having people produce goods and services to make available to other people is inarguably valuable. When you have more people then you have goods/services that you need to produce, murdering them all or letting them starve to death would be monstrous. Paying them to sit around and do nothing is a better option.

A lot of jobs plans assign some sort of moral weight to work. In that case, paying people to sit around and do something (even something useless) is seen as more acceptable. Building a giant sand castle and then knocking it down over and over again isn't appreciably different than sitting around doing nothing - at the end of the day people are engaged in labor and you have nothing to show for it. If those same people were paid to build an aircraft carrier that sat around for 30 years and then got dismantled the net result would effectively be the same (though having an Aircraft Carrier does offer some potential benefits in excess of a sand castle).

I would argue that most people feel more fulfilled if they think their occupation makes a difference to the world at large. I've known more than a handful of people who felt that their jobs were meaningless and they wanted to do something 'worthwhile'. While not everyone will agree that building aircraft carriers is 'meaningful, worthwhile work', there are a significant number of people who feel that it is. Paying those people to do something so they're not starving to death or feeling that they're a drain on society makes sense almost no matter how you do it.

Since we're talking about people and emotions and psychology, nothing is as simple as it ought to be.

More Americans oppose a universal basic income than support it. But many of those same people have no problem with hiring people to engage in non-productive work of building tanks that nobody actually needs.

While spending a dollar on building a bridge or a rail will probably help generate more revenue as people use that infrastructure to more efficiently distribute goods/services, spending a dollar on 'nothing' also stimulates people to engage in commerce, launch new businesses, etc.

Military spending is a form of stimulus money - clearly it is 'targeted', but so were direct payments to Americans. If you cut government spending by $800 billion/year, that would have a clear and obvious impact on employment and livelihoods for a lot of people. Cutting that budget to $0 and then spending that money in another category would also be disruptive, even if ultimately it would be worthwhile.

It's not that cutting the defense budget by 5% or 10% or 50% is bad, but that a mile-high view of defense spending as a number misses a lot of things that do have value. In 2010, the US Military was involved in providing disaster relief for Haiti. Would that have been possible without a military? WIth a smaller military? With a military with approximately half the existing personnel, hardware, etc?

Some people are trying to make the case that the Biden administration is betraying America/the American people by not taking a wildly unpopular action that will be reversed by the next administration and instead trying to make changes through the legislative process (which is harder, but also harder to change). From my perspective, the defense budget wasn't a huge miss. It's nominally larger than the last budget in terms of dollars, but when considered against inflation it is effectively 'the same'. Since major changes to the budget require major changes to strategies, major changes should follow AFTER.

It turns out that the Republican promise to destroy government by eliminating funding doesn't work. Defunding the military is a slogan, not a strategy. Reducing the 'mission' of the military would allow you to reduce the budget of the military. Asking anyone to do more with less year after year after year has consequences (ask anyone who has ever worked for a company).

[Kaelik]

Building a giant sand castle and then knocking it down over and over again isn't appreciably different than sitting around doing nothing - at the end of the day people are engaged in labor and you have nothing to show for it. If those same people were paid to build an aircraft carrier that sat around for 30 years and then got dismantled the net result would effectively be the same (though having an Aircraft Carrier does offer some potential benefits in excess of a sand castle).

This is absolutely backwards. Building an aircraft carrier uses up resources that could have been used to do literally anything else which would have been productive. Buying a bunch of physical resources, using a bunch of capital, and then driving an aircraft carrier around using energy for 30 years all detract from the amount of wages you could pay at the same salary with the same amount of money. It uses up resources that could have been elsewhere. Then, once you have an aircraft carrier, it will be used exclusively to do evil things, because it's a force projection of american imperialism.

DeadDm can't see that because he loves his imperialism so much he thinks an aircraft carrier menacing china is a positive good that is worth the use of limited resources and worth paying people less money in your "jobs program."

Paying those people to do something so they're not starving to death or feeling that they're a drain on society makes sense almost no matter how you do it.

The US is in desperate need of trillions of things that aren't aircraft carriers. A reduction in military spending isn't going to result in people just sitting around all day with high unemployment, but even if it did, better that more people are paid more money on unemployment then we spend the same amount of money to give fewer people jobs and then they make murder weapons.

This is a version of the weird neoliberalism thing where you imagine the theoretical harm done to some person if we change the status quo, and even though that harm is extremely minor if real at all, and applies to very few people who now "feel bad" because they are paid to sit around instead of building murder weapons, you ignore all the harm done by the status quo. You ignore the millions who will suffer because of continued US imperialism and the thousands of people we could pay to "sit around doing nothing" (or refit homes for modern energy efficiency) in addition to paying all the laid off aircraft carrier builders the same money.

Although in this case, you aren't even arguing for the status quo! You are arguing for spending more money on the military to ramp up production and build more stuff when that money could just as easily be used to increase production of good things or even just paid to people and the hypothetical future aircraft carrier builder will just have to make do.

In 2010, the US Military was involved in providing disaster relief for Haiti. Would that have been possible without a military? WIth a smaller military? With a military with approximately half the existing personnel, hardware, etc?

The military is not more competent at doing disaster relief than anyone else. People are still suffering from the after effects of the Earthquake to this day because the military wasn't there to actually help, and the total number of actual soldiers (16,000) who participated in relief efforts is a tiny fraction of the 200k we keep constantly deployed overseas where they exist purely to project our power. The point of sending a bunch of Marines to Haiti instead of actual relief workers was to continue our ongoing imperialist project.

2010 was an election year in Haiti and the US wanted to install their chosen piece of shit. Clinton as Secretary of State flew down to Haiti and threatened the then President of Haiti directly with "a withdrawal of foreign aid" unless he declared the US's chosen candidate to advance. (The last Haitian President was kidnapped by US armed forces and flown to the US where he was coerced to resign paving the way for Preval to become president.)

But sure, just say we need to spend trillions on the military so that we can have a rapid response team of thugs who aren't even well trained for aid work show up to pressure people into cheating our candidates into "winning" their "elections." What a great example of the "benefits" of US military spending.

Some people are trying to make the case that the Biden administration is betraying America/the American people by not taking a wildly unpopular action that will be reversed by the next administration and instead trying to make changes through the legislative process (which is harder, but also harder to change). From my perspective, the defense budget wasn't a huge miss.

What an incredibly bullshit thing to say. Presidents request military budgets. Biden requested a military budget. People saying he should have requested a smaller military budget are not calling for him to do something outside the legislative process you absolute dumb fuck liar.

This "wildly unpopular" action is popular. Even when you went fishing, you still cited a poll saying more people support lowering the budget than increasing it! The fact that you have to keep fucking lying about the unpopularity of cutting the budget shows that cutting the budget is good and you have fuck all nothing as an argument.

And "the next administration" can't possibly reverse the 2022 military budget you lying sack of shit.

It turns out that the Republican promise to destroy government by eliminating funding doesn't work.

The republican strategy of aggressively defunding the government has provided them huge fucking benefits in that people expect the government to suck at everything (because it does, because it doesn't have the funding) and their most primary target, the IRS, has been the most successful, where the IRS is so incapable of auditing rich people it just gave up and doesn't do it any more. You live so deep in your moment to moment post hoc rationalizations for whatever dumb thing a democrat did today that you don't even remember any event in the last 30 years that was all just republicans successfully making every part of the government worse for decades.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how- ... was-gutted

Asking anyone to do more with less year after year after year has consequences (ask anyone who has ever worked for a company).

As we can see here, two seconds later, when you admit that defunding does in fact work.

"The Mission" is never going to be reduced if you keep shoveling more money because all the people responsible for deciding what "the Mission" is want it to be always more and more and will use 100% of the resources they are provided to do it.

[Kaelik]

Merrick Garland believes that the police can break into your home and search even if they have no warrant and steal anything you own, even if they have no reason to believe any crime occurred or will occur, as long as they say the magic words that they did it because they were concerned about safety.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The safety of police is what's really important here, not the safety of average, non-militarized citizens.

[Kaelik]

The safety of police is what's really important here, not the safety of average, non-militarized citizens.

In this case the specific thing they are doing is saying "we think you are a threat to.... yourself? the community? who cares." and then using that as justification not to search a house because you might be a threat to the cops if they don't search, but instead, with absolutely no reason for cops to be there are at all, they can go to your house search it, and steal whatever they want, so long as they said "community safety" first.

Because apparently the fourth amendment stops functioning if the cops say it does.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That's because cops are better and more important than you. I've been joking about the police and the military being their own class of citizen for years, and every year it becomes less and less of a joke.