Whoppertime

We could find out who is more serious about the debt by comparing the total debt in January 20th 2017 when Trump entered office and January 20th 2021 when he left office, with the size of the debt when Joe Biden entered office in January of 2021 and left office in January of 2025. If you do that you will see the former raised the debt from $19.95 trillion to $27.75 trillion or by 7.8 trillion. While Joe Biden started with 27.75 trillion and ended with 36.2 trillion or an increase of 8.4 trillion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/us/politics/us-biden-chin... "The tariff rate will go up to 100% on electric vehicles, to 50% on solar cells and to 25% on electrical vehicle batteries" How is this fundamentally different from the Tariffs the Biden Administration announced and enacted in 2024?

Well we know what happened with the nuclear ambitions of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Their regimes lied about their nuclear capabilities and our regimes also lied about their nuclear capabilities

The Middle East managed to fight the US government since 2003 without using Nukes. I guess nobody told them AK-47s and IEDs were ineffective

Yeah but can they be sued for rulings they made in their capacity as a judge? Could we throw in jail Supreme court justices for making the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision if they were still alive?

Wouldn't a general rent strike look like the Eviction Moratorium of 2021?

I am against rich people putting their kids in private school on credit then having that debt "forgiven" and paid for by people who sent their kids to public school. I am sure those kids are getting a benefit from private education. That doesn't mean I should bail them out and pay their bill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit... Sovereign Immunity is an idea that has a long precedence. The Supreme Court was arguing that bad behaviour by the President is resolved through impeachment, and once they are out of office they are subject to criminal charges.

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-k-12-productivity-chart It's hard to believe that education is getting less funding. There seems to be a perception that spending more money on education will result in smarter students or higher test scores but that doesn't seem to be the case. There is more money spent on educating children through K-12. Also Richard Nixon was president before Ronald Reagan so Nixon wouldn't be able to double down on his successors policies. Unless you mean Governor Ronald Reagan who started his leadership in 1967 with Nixon's presidency starting in 1969

If you look at the home ownership rates of that generation it would be a fair assumption

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/11/05/131105373/the-... I still remember an old Planet Money podcast they did covering a Rent or Buy calculator, It didn't allow for the possibility that the value of a house might fall over time. If you put a negative appreciation rate it would spit out an error. Which in the immediate aftermath of 2007 meant the tool was unable to capture reality.

Some people really just want a back yard with a white picket fence their kids can play in

Well if they're buying gasoline in California, or cigarettes in Australia taxes can be a huge part of the pricetag even if they're not thinking of it as taxes. You can see various taxes and fees if you look at the receipt of an airline ticket or a bill from a Telecoms company. I admit the fee they add to fund 911 calls isn't typically large but every little bit adds up

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-k-12-productivity-chart It's hard to believe that education is getting less funding. There seems to be a perception that spending more money on education will result in smarter students or higher test scores but that doesn't seem to be the case. Obviously if you spend $0 on education results will suffer, but there's a point of diminishing returns where $1 more in spending doesn't seem to have any impact on key metrics

I think contemporary events force people to be skeptical. For one generation it was the Vietnam War, the dissonance between what generals were saying and what was happening on the ground. Another generation had that happen with WMDs in Iraq. I think many in this generation had it happen with "2 weeks to flatten the curve" and the dissonance between promises made about COVID, the efficacy of lockdowns or the efficacy of vaccines.

"all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies" Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing. I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups supporting the Contras made the CIA offer a high ROI. Those black ops planes carrying cocaine into the United States had some valuable cargo. And yet, after all this came to light I would have had no problem with Bill Clinton reducing the size and scope of the CIA, even if it was offering a high ROI and "was useful"

That's the thing. COVID was a crisis an emergency, and that justified emergency powers. Donald Trump is declaring the current situation an emergency and is making use of emergency powers. You cannot assume "your side" is going to maintain political power forever, and build institutions with that in mind. Build a political system then hand it to your political opponents to run for 4 years. I think people who cheered on the use of emergency powers over the last 4 years are going to have it boomerang back on them, as I predict the next Democratic president will use the precedent set by Trump in a way that will boomerang back on Trump supporters who were cheering him on

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2025/05/22/japan/gre... Japan would be a classic example of a developed country hamstrung by unaffordable debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy While Chinese Debt Trap Diplomacy is a classic example of the trap poorer countries can fall into with unaffordable debt

How is a tax cut a handout to the wealthy? The wealthy still have to earn the money. If the Doctors top tax rate goes from 35% to 30%, and his combined State Local and fee burden goes from 50% to 45%, he still has to perform surgeries to get the money. It's not a handout. he's keeping more of what he earned.

Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is on this issue? Bet that the deficit will go up more over the next 4 years compared to the last 4 years? On January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, the U.S. national debt stood at approximately $27.8 trillion By January 20, 2025, as he exited office, the debt had risen to about $36.1–36.2 trillion. Are you willing to bet that Donald Trump will wrack up more than 8.3 trillion in debt?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_U... Defense spending is 12% of the budget. Even if we cut every dime from defense we would still have 88% of the problem and be no closer to a balanced budget

At least with tariffs you can understand there will be short term economic pain for presumed long term economic gain Polling of Biden voters seem to suggest they didn't expect the 20% inflation that happened between Biden entering office and Biden leaving office. They didn't think it would hurt Republicans more, they just had experts denying that anything was happening, like the head of the Fed saying inflation was transitory. That situation impedes on the function of democracy in a different way

Who would you say was a real journalist as opposed to a propagandist during the COVID 19 era? I am not asking this as a gimme but out of curiosity of who you thought was a true journalist during a time where many journalists were acting as mouth pieces for the powerful

The concept of "Diversity Equity and Inclusion" would be wonderful if it actually focused on ideological diversity and being welcoming to others rather than being a system designed to produce people with different skin tones and the same opinion, and acting as a racial spoil system

The constitution is not a suicide pact. If deporting millions of people without due process is authoritarianism, what is letting in millions of people without due process? Rules for thee but not for me?

It's hard to hear people complain about looting and authoritarianism after watching these same people calling BLM mostly peaceful protest, and had no problem with the authoritarian policies passed during the COVID lockdowns https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-se...

It's like California paying more for homelessness each year and getting more homelessness each year

https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-ro... Well, the average bank branch in an urban area required about 21 tellers. That was cut because of the ATM machine to about 13 tellers. But that meant it was cheaper to operate a branch. Well, banks wanted, in part because of deregulation but just for deregulation but just for basic marketing reasons, to increase the number of branch offices. And when it became cheaper to do so, demand for branch offices increased. And as a result, demand for bank tellers increased. We see a whole number of occupations where you might think that technology is going to destroy jobs because it’s taking over tasks; and the reverse happens.

I would have been more worried if I lived through 1939-1945, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kids going duck and cover under their desk. Nuclear exchange seemed inevitable. And yet the cold war never went hot. The experts of the 1960s didn't see the Soviet Unions collapse in the 1990s coming. We may find the inevitability of climate apocalypse as inevitable as nuclear apocalypse with the Soviet Union turned out to be