https://directfile.irs.gov/

During the WW2 german occupation of France, there were some french people who opted to enthusiastically work to support the german side, and they certainly benefitted short term from the goodwill earned

At the end of the occupation, a lot of them were shot or hanged by the resistance

Email me.

When the shit inevitably hits the fan from the massive amount of orgs they are dismantling, Musk and the DOGE will be used as a political scapegoat by Trump, that's how politics work.

And then from that, taking responsibility has never been Musk strongest point either, he'll push back the blame further to DOGE workers.

His management style is best described as humiliation and abuse.

Or to put it another way, you can build a lot of pyramids when you use disposable slaves.

Congress as the Legislative Branch has no authority to Execute.

Or, instead, we could stop tinkering around the edges as a nation and think about the structural reasons why current spending on pensions and the healthcare safety net in the US isn’t sustainable, despite providing less to citizens than other comparable countries.

- the Social Security Administration, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $395 billion of spending. - the Department of Defense, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $250 billion of spending. - USAID's annual budget is $38 billion annually, so we could realistically estimate that, if they've outlaid $3 billion this year thus far, they've spent 0.4% of what those other two departments have.

Let's call this like it is: USAID is a bogeyman to Trump and Musk and is a threat to the administration's efforts toward becoming a "hard power" country. If they really cared about spending, they would have gone elsewhere first.

Source: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Oh definitely. They often don't have the experience to question what they're told or see the holes and deceptions in it. For instance: they'd be more easily fooled by a fake deadline. Or in this case, they may trust and follow their leader like a little zealot, even when he's wrong and doing bad things.

If you're the king of a nation, anyone trying to convince your knights to overthrow you is a corrupting force. But at the same time you could be a brutal ruler corrupted by power, and it is the knights that are trying to upturn the corrupt system.

You seem to have entirely missed the point of the comment you’re replying to. The consumption rate of residential toilet paper increased. Have you seen actual commercial toilet paper and considered its texture and, more critically, the size and shape of the rolls? While it’s possible for someone to awkwardly wipe using a monster roll of commercial paper at home, the commercial roll is not really a desirable substitute for residential TP.

What do you think happens if the debt goes up? Do you think the government is gonna go bankrupt? That’s literally not how it works.

Do you think inflation is gonna happen? Again, literally not how it works. In fact, too low public spending means you get deflation which is even worse than inflation.

I know you're making a good faith argument, but you're twisting the definition of regressive. For example, if a country has one citizen with an income of 1 trillion, and one hundred thousand citizens with an income of $10,000 each, the trillionaire would still pay over 99% of taxes even if taxes were proportional.

The point is that with severe income inequality, it is fair that the super rich pay a very, very high proportion of taxes. The 40.4% seems high for the "top 1%" of the population, but if you replace "top 1%" with their actual average income, the comparison is less misleading.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2021/06/08/richest-...

the 25 richest Americans (by Forbes’ tally) paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% on wealth growth of $401 billion between 2014 and 2018.

It is not a legit source for progressive tax policy.

The Congressional Budget Office has been the most reputable source for tax policy data. The current director was appointed by Trump 2019 and was retained through Biden's presidency.

The CBO is very wonky and so far as withstood partisan meddling by presidents.

Now let's see control of assets.

The national debt increased because we increased the amount of the federal government does, it the income tax.

In 1960 the top tax rate was 91%. In 1980 it was 70%. Reagan dropped it to 35% and it's stayed below 40% since. Then add in that corporations and the wealthy have moved away from having normal income that isn't taxed (loans backed by assets) and you've lost half the tax revenue that paid for cheap housing, nearly free healthcare and public college and you have a healthy society and middle class.

But then to screw the pooch even more, Bush printed 5 trillion for his wars and two tax cuts. Trump printed money for his tax cuts too. (these expenses were never in the annual budget - they just printed the money)

Tesla, one of the richest corporations in our country just reported 0% tax in three years.

Our national debt has nothing to do with the annual budget and expenses, including USAID and helping Ukraine.

It is 100% because of tax policy.

The opposite of that play is:

Voted-in Conservatives: we are the party of fiscal responsibility. We shall reduce govt spending by running services into the ground.

Voted-in Libs: We were voted in to undo all this f*kery... gotta spend those $$$

Conservatives: Didn't we say you can't trust those libs with the $$$?

For the record - I think society needs both parties alternating in power to function properly. Either one in power forever is a mistake

https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-federal-go...

You would have to cut entitlements if you're relying on cuts alone, and those require Congressional action to change. It's absolutely wild people actually believed Musk without spending a few minutes understanding the issue.

He now has significant influence over all of those things. Official government communications are only being released on X, incentivizing people to use it. The next NASA contract is going to be awarded by people who know their boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss owes his political career to the owner of one of the bidders. Last quarter, a quarter of Tesla’s net income was unrealized Bitcoin profits – and he’s pushing the government to subsidize Bitcoin so it can get the kind of adoption it hasn’t been able to achieve on merit!

This is why government ethics rules exist, and why high-level officials have public confirmation hearings. Even if he was incredibly scrupulous about not making decisions based on his own interests, it reeks of corruption and provides many avenues for potential abuse (e.g. what if China threatened to seize his factories unless he helped them get a better deal?). The federal employees he’s attacked have annual training reminding them that they can’t accept gifts over $20/year – and really shouldn’t even then – with consequences up to going to jail for a long time.

When Elon runs his companies, he is beholden to shareholders to use the company's resources effectively to generate and maintain value.

Who is Elon beholden to when managing public funding and programs as an unelected non-official? Who will vote him out when he wasn't voted in? Who will revoke his confirmation when he was never confirmed?

- Safety checks are dismantled

- Decisions are made at the whim of an executive

- Executives surround themselves with sycophants

TSLA doubled in value in the month after the election, despite the financials of the company going down. The only reason for the increase in share price is because the market expects Musk to benefit from Trump's corruption, in the form of less oversight and more government subsidies.

One thing that seems worth think through more is whether the stated outcomes of those agencies is what's actually be optimized for, or whether those are suborned for personal gain by a few parties.

And his buddy the president is happily sending the currency and stock markets up and down with his every idiotic tariff announcement. I wonder if the top man at DOGE is on the list of people who Trump tips off?

Musk, Trump and half this administration are off-the-charts corrupt.

If treasury money is diverted to his private interests, that is waste and perhaps fraud. But to him it achieves the same end (personal profit) as capital efficiency of orgs under his own ownership, not just his control

Which Congress authorized and funded.

Congress, historically, has made formal declarations of war only at the request of the President. No President has asked for one in decades nor are they required to make war.

So good luck relying on rule of law.

We desperately need term limits. Age limits might make sense too but term limits would mostly take care of that.

... right up until they pretend they're not and never were when the political winds shift again. Though, maybe the winds no longer shift in these parts ...

That was true in 1961, but not in the 63 years since then. The Foreign Assistance Act has been amended many times with specific requirements since written for the by then already existing United States Agency for International Development[1]

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1071/pdf/COMPS-107...

Regardless, the agency is a party to contracts which it is currently breaking. The actions of DOGE are causing the US to break contracts, which is illegal.

I’m suspicious, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised we’ve hit the “one simple trick” era of governing.

Hell, the guy is able to re-run and win the elected office again after being impeached a few times during his previous administration. Congress needs to affirm his impeachment to force him out of office and that requires a supermajority, which will never happen. Trump could kill someone on national TV and he would maybe get impeached, but he'd have enough friends in congress defending his actions that he would still be president. I mean he's already a convicted criminal.

That's why he just doesn't care anymore and is going crazy as if no laws exist. Laws mean nothing to him. At worst they are an annoyance or noise to him, but he already proved that nothing can stop him.

Impeachment and removing him from office means the dems will need to control congress. Which can’t happen until 2027. Then, those dems will need convince at least a double digit count of GOP senators to vote to remove him and not care about facing the wrath of the MAGA base…just to get him out a couple of years before term limits do?

Think something should be illegal? It's probably in there somewhere. Want to do it anyway? It's probably allowed somewhere else. Want to know if you can or can't do something? Well, good luck figuring that out. With enough time spent in lines talking to civil service workers you can get an answer that may be correct. Or maybe not. Probably best to hire a lawyer at hundreds of dollars an hour to tell you whether you can or not. (The lawyer will say "no", because if he says "yes" and is wrong, now he's in trouble, and nobody wants that.)

The system has grown and changed and mutated, and now it's a behemoth that nobody really understands. It's such a mess that people are genuinely hopeful that an AI will ride in and help us all untangle all that we humans did.

And the people that we've put in charge of doing all of this are collectively the most unaccountable folks ever. They routinely skirt, side-step, or ignore the rule of law as they see fit, and they still enjoy a 90%+ re-election rate and an incredibly high barrier to entry for reformers.

And of course, the executive branch has everyone from the FBI on down, you're not going to win a shooting (or shoving) war with them.

So in other words "no options" because we will never have a unified front in the legislative branch.

Which requires Republicans to honor their oath to uphold the Constitution. So it's a non-starter.

Knowing people in democratic politics, this isn’t true. The root of the problem is that they don’t understand or prioritize power.

They have overwhelming support for every major issue: abortion, gun control, corporate taxes, HNI taxes, healthcare, social security, climate, gay rights. All of them. And yet they lose. Minority on the Supreme Court, house, senate, presidency.

Think about Obama’s first presidency. Sixty senators. What happens if they:

1. Make DC a state. That’s two senators. I don’t think they could get Puerto Rico.

2. Make Election Day a federal holiday. That spikes turnout, which benefits democrats (see: advantage in every major issue.)

That’s the type of thinking that gives and maintains power. But they don’t think that way until it’s panic time and already over.

No electoral mandate (and the argument for a clear mandate for all of this is thin or nonexistent) makes unconstitutional/illegal action suddenly legal or constitutional.

Whether anyone with the relevant power chooses to punish these violations, is a different matter. The choice since January 2020 has been to repeatedly do nothing in the face of illegal action, but winning elections doesn't make criminal action magically non-criminal.

I think that’s extremely debatable. Last I checked “unauthorized access to confidential taxpayer information” was not an election topic.

This is true on all sides of course, folks who voted for Obama didn’t vote for drone strikes against US citizens either. Winning a presidential election does not mean four years of dictatorship and silencing of criticism.

Did people vote for this? I thought people were voting on the price of eggs. Trump dishonestly disavowed the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 ghostbuster containment system of horrible policies when people started becoming aware of the horrors that were in there. Sure, Trump is releasing those demons on us now, but a lot of voters claimed to believe Trump's dishonest disavowals.

Trump wouldn't have won if he had been honest about what he would do. Voters didn't choose *this*.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1071/uslm/COMPS-10...

That means that the President can’t wipe it out as an independent agency unilaterally. He could go to the members of his party in the legislature and ask them to create a bill rechartering the agency but then it would get public debate and they’d have to own what they’re doing, so he took the path of daring anyone to enforce the law. It’s like hot-wiring your buddy’s car because you don’t want to ask if you can borrow it, except that it’s disrupting millions of lives.

> It'd be interesting to find out why people think moving the USAID organization under the Secretary of State is unconstitutional.

If there are no existing laws to prevent this, then it probably is legal. Given the voluminous laws in existence, I would not be surprised if there was one out there which is relevant.

> If they do not disperse the money as directed by Congress to specific causes by the end of the fiscal year then there is a problem, but not until September 30th

While this might be a "strict letter of the law" kind of thing (again IANAL), violating the spirit of a law is still illegal. Disbursement schedules are a real thing, with real-world impact when they are not adhered to, and can cause very real problems.

Some more recent constitutions have established a separate court that only rules on constitutional issues, but the US doesn't have that.

Marco Rubio (head of the state department) stated that they refused to audited. So did other congressmen. https://x.com/cspan/status/1886473339201360210

Do you disagree with what he says in the above video? They denied to be audited. The US in USAID stands for United States. Can we not ask what they spend the money on?

USAID was not created by congress. It was created by executive order 10973 by JFK. It can be undone by executive order. It's function can be rolled into the state department.

No one is stopping the people at the top of the US Government from doing what they want. In fact, there is a whole apparatus in place, at this point, to protect their ability to continue to operate unchecked.

This source apparently talks about it, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14359253/joni-ernst...

But, the demographic crisis means that moving forward our growth in entitlement spending for the growing population of seniors is far outpacing our growth in GDP from our slowing population of workers.

We can't tax or cut out way out of this. Elon's cuts are going to be performative at best. Real cuts would put tens of millions of seniors, vets and disabled people into destitution. Taxing the billionaires more would be nice. But, taxing them to zero would only paper over a few years of the problem.

The only way out I see is through massive investment to increase per-capita GDP long term. As a super duper liberal, I'm gung ho on "Bring manufacturing back!" in the form of

1. Re-prioritize trade schools and trade skills so we can actually perform high-skill work in factories if/when we build them. 2. Do everything we can to catch up with China making locally-built green energy tech dirt-cheap and highly effective. 3. Figure out how to incentivize the market to local build the interconnected web of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to produce high tech goods fast and cheap.

I see the work of https://www.hadrian.co/ as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm starting to see some senators act like they need to stop talking about it and actually do something about it. But, the "best" I've heard from Trump is "Drill, baby. Drill!" and "Tariffs are magic."

If Trump laid out a plan for how to target tariffs surgically and use those proceeds to build up manufacturing, I'd be on board. But, he hasn't. Instead, he has made it clear his only plan is to create chaos, achieve performative concessions, and declare personal triumph while netting great harm for everyone in the end.

My point is that a lot of people seem to be in an "ends justify the means" mindset here where it's OK to rubber-stamp over laws, security, any sort of requirements for competence, or even basic understanding of what's being destroyed because in the end, this is chaos is going to have such a tremendous impact.

But, it's not. It mathematically can't. Even if it all turns out amazing it will be a small dent in the problem it's claiming to solve.

So, in the end, all of this is actually just chaos for sake of chaos. In the process, a whole lot of real people will be hurt in real ways. It's not bad at the same scale that "Turn off Medicare until we understand how it works" would be. But, it's nonsensically destructive in exactly the same way.

Turning off the entire flow of money is unnecessary, even counter-productive, to understanding how the money is flowing. Even if half of the money is waste, turning off the other half is causing tremendous real harm for no reason.

It is completely unnecessary and horrific to rubber stamp around national security protocol for something as incomprehensibly impactful as the federal payments system.

And, in the end, what are we going to get out of all of it? What I'm seeing out of Elon is propaganda about programs like "studying shrimp on treadmills" which was an microscopic piece of a very sensible study on marine safety and security. That's exactly the kind of work the government is supposed to be doing. But, if you frame it badly enough, you can destroy it for everyone and claim it as a victory.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+tax+cuts+defecit

Turns out that having a 100% guaranteed return is attractive to a lot of large-scale investors, even if the yields don't make the money machine go brrr.

This is one thing that worries me about the current administration. A lot of trust is built on the fact that the US gov't has never defaulted on a debt in its history. I feel like some people don't place enough weight into what that really means for both ourselves and the world.

People like to bring up places like Argentina and Venezuela, but their debts weren't denominated in their own currencies, so they had to collect dollars in order to repay debts in dollars. As a currency issuer, since we create dollars, we can never run out of them. Nor do we have to round up dollars and take them back from currency holders before we can repay a debt. Doing so just takes those dollars away from the non-government so that the issuer can zero out a ledger somewhere. The interest is interest we choose to pay, for some reason. The only way we could default on our debt is if we decide to. The only way to "pay off" the "debt" is to take all the dollars away from the non-government, which is _us_.

Also, China did try it only a few decades ago. Murder, starvation, horrific torture, reeducation camps, brainwashed children denouncing their parents... impressively evil. Not that Tiananmen Square or Uyghur ethnic cleansing or kidnappings of expat dissidents are so much better.

And there's nothing the US can do. Cutting government spending and starting trade wars with neighbours is not going to stop it. Building up a totalitarian state with deep government influence into businesses is not going to work and will be actively resisted, since Big Government is so against the principles of the current regime's voters - and China has been working on this for decades now. Free market won't work either, as it's already very free in the US itself - but the aggression of US companies in their sales practices, tax dodging, and privacy violations have caused their foreign customers like Europe to raise the defenses.

TL;DR, while I can see how totalitarianism can in theory create a strong economy, it isn't going to fly / work in the US.

Instead, The biggest oil pipeline in the US was shutdown on day one and increased regulations led to our current situation with inflation.

The democrats are also war mongers and want to have perpetual wars to line their pockets.

It's telling when there isn't one negative story about Biden/the democrats (especially when we found out they were colluding with big tech to suppress the speech of average citizens) in 4 years, and we immedialy get slop hit piece articles about Trump and Musk.

It's been less clear to me whether federal agencies are obligated to spend money that congress has authorized.

I asked ChatGPT and it said many other agencies were established by EOs (e.g. FEMA, NSA, NASA, EPA). Quote from ChatGPT: "Many agencies later received congressional authorization, but their initial formation or restructuring was often directed by executive orders." So it seems like the last paragraph is incorrect.

But this is standard practice, no? The US system is rather unusual compared to Parliamentary systems in that Congress delegates precisely this power to the executive all the time.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

It's only matter of time until one of these clowns starts "accidentally" touching data like the 2020 census individual response data.

To me, that's the red line: If they can touch that and suffer no consequence, then there is no law or process can exist to ensure accountability of the government.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

Also, you consider Aaron Burr one of America's greatest leaders? He literally committed treason.

- https://freebeacon.com/national-security/panama-wont-renew-b...

- https://ground.news/article/panama-pledges-to-exit-chinas-be...

These politicians who do not provide results and are just confidently talking nonsense still get voted. By the people.

People are indeed just tribal unga bunga monkes which learned to walk, talk and do stupid shit. Some more than others.

I can’t even begin to tell you how far the US is from hyperinflation or any major debt issues - the only real risk the US faces is internal stupidity (I don’t only mean the current situation, idiocies like the ongoing debt ceiling nonsense apply too).

Look, prudence is not a bad thing, and it’s worthwhile to have sensible management. But talk of hyperinflation is either severe mis-calibration of risks, deep misunderstanding of how economies work, or intentional propaganda.

If the US has a problem, it'll look like some fairly substantial hit (eg, external forces closing their current account deficit) and a longish period of being economically weakened due to a lack of investment in productive capital. Maybe some riots since the pain will probably not be spread evenly.

It is a catastrophe, but mainly a catastrophe of opportunity costs. We've had a counterfactual running in China over the last 20 years of what could have been happening in the US economy if they hadn't mucked up their overall strategy (particularly energy policy and banking regulation) so badly. Plus there is an impression forming that they are actually a lot weaker militarily than had been assumed to date, I wouldn't put money on Taiwan's long term independence right now. The US doesn't have the funds to handle all the military problems if overseas nations stop picking up the tab.

What do you think is more likely, that you’re an economic genius and you can see an impending crisis that 50 years worth of economists couldn’t, and that somehow that crisis is going to happen in the next few years? Or maybe you don’t actually understand how macro economics works and have been manipulated into thinking this way by your inherent dislike of government spending?

Is that why you made that statement in the context of everything that was built on that hard power being demolished?

there where two major wars during that time which mattered for the formation of germany, (the franco prussian war and the austro-prussian war, which was an extent of the politicals about who should form the german state).

In general, it's also better to have friends in the world rather than going around being loud-mouthed jerks that no one likes.

It's also a tiny amount of the budget.

Because they help starving children?

> First, these are symbolic

Are we talking about how USAID worked against apartheid in South Africa now?

But in case anyone thinks this is a dunk on the EU: this is still not as invasive as the US law enforcement's powers of warrantless surveillance which have repeatedly blown up the EU-US frameworks for data sharing (Privacy Shield and its other iterations, which Mr Schrems seems to have personally made a sport of shooting down faster than they get implemented). It's also not entirely contradictory as the focus here is on protecting the rights of people against corporations while still providing means for the state to violate those rights when necessary (similarly to how the state can violate your right to free movement through incarceration or your right to bodily autonomy by shooting you, neither of which seem to upset the people who'd think this one is a gotcha).

Considering the EU's main function is being a transnational economic region (if you ignore all the fluff about shared values and history and instead follow the definition of "a system's function is what it does"), it's absolutely true that the EU is remarkably restrictive on what corporations can do compared to the US - even before Trump.

EDIT: The two sibling comments prove my point: while EU member states have been pushing for legislation like providing backdoors to encrypted communication, this is neither unique to the EU nor a contradiction and the US already has far wider reaching measures in place.

Consider for example the Switzerland-based CIA and BND (Germany) shell company that distributed backdoored encryption to hostile nations which Germany backed out of when the CIA defended distributing the same technology to friendlies without informing them or their intelligence agencies. Or literally any of the Snowden leaks, which described not only mass surveillance of US citizens but also espionage against US allies (infamously including wiretapping then-chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone) to a degree none of the EU member states have ever done anything comparable to - and which those mostly didn't act on because of the importance of maintaining good terms with the US. Or the post-9/11 legislation which not only allowed warrantless surveillance with gag orders (which is why "canaries" became popular in cryptography communities) but even literally killing or abducting and indefinitely incarcerating US citizens without a trial - not to mention torture.

You can criticize the EU for state overreach. You can't do so by using the US for grounds of moral superiority - not even moral equivalence. You can argue about different attitudes to free speech, gun ownership or the right to self-defense (e.g. castle doctrine), sure. All of these are valid grounds for debate. But the US government can (according to its own jurisdiction) legally do so many more things to both its own citizens and non-citizens both within and outside its borders that trying to use it for a libertarian "win" against the EU seems farcical at best.

I mean that feels right. But, they have more money than they can spend. They can make their lives better by stopping being so greedy... it's not about better.

It's greed. It's the number on their total net worth, or some other bullshit number.

It's exactly like Musk paying others to play games to get him the best apparent player character. He pays others to earn money to make him look, to himself, like the best fascist-capitalist oligarch, or whatever he's going for.

In reality, their lust for boosting some vanity metric is most closely aligned with "make life worse for the poor". Because whilst they do pay some top employees well, the whole pyramid sits on the exploitation of many millions more poor people who, through their greed, the capitalists push down further into the bloody, stinking, fetid soup below.

Oh, and the capitalists rape the planet too... just to make sure no lining thing escapes the accretion zone of their self-destructive insecurity.

Oh, ok.

People with that kind of wealth have transcended humanity. Not towards greatness but towards total indifference.

The same would apply to the right too, except that the right tends to shut down agencies, not create them.

No, but paying an exorbitant amount, but seeing few things being improved around you, but endless wars funded and cronies getting richer, and useless bureucracy enlarged and making your life or business more difficult, is.

Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.

The Democratic Party is the conservative one.

It still might happen that there won't be any further elections in which anyone but trumpists can actually win.

Assuming you meant X.com (formerly known as Twitter) - in no universe is there a Twitter cofounded by Musk.

Of course, right now it seems even the existing amendments are not safe. Our government is a non-functioning, dishonest imperial oligarchy, and we just keep paying our tithing out of fear, telling ourselves it's all going to schools and highways.

In the US, when we elected mediocre actor Ronald Reagan, I think. His trickle-down economics nonsense turned out to be a just and early example of catering to the rich in broad daylight instead of behind closed doors. And the people, for the most part, bought it, so now we have legal scams like 401ks that the average citizen thinks are there to help them.

The point has always been to seize control of the money while removing all accountability and they are finally succeeding because liberals handed them the election over Gaza, which is no longer in even in our news cycle.

It all makes my stomach turn, to be honest.

If you are politically motivated to minimize the tax burden, it makes sense to be skeptical of direct filing (even if you are not bribed by Intuit).

I don’t know if there is any quid pro quo but that’s why we have ethics laws because otherwise you have to constantly ask whether something is good for the country or just the guy making the decision.

So even taken charitably I think they are wrong. But I do believe it is simply just corrupt and malicious.

I also didn't make any claims which groups should exist, solely based on the name of the group.

You're the one who made an argument along those lines. Not me. As if, a group named for efficiency couldn't possibly be inefficient. Or, that 2 groups working for efficiency would somehow be automatically better than 1 group.

History sure does have an uncanny way of rhyming if not actually repeating.

Something that greatly galls me is that the livelihood of tens of millions of families depend on the whims of people who think only in terms of profit. Government is not supposed to make a damned profit! The government's primary role should be to care for everyone, from entrepreneurs to people with disabilities. I'm not saying "handouts for all", I'm saying that the government needs to provide stability, a level foundation for all to build upon.

It's like Venkman in Ghostbusters, in the ballroom: he yanks away the tablecloth sending everything flying except "the flowers are still standing!". The rich are the flowers, secure on their own foundation, calm with the knowledge that the guy pulling the tablecloth can't affect them. In other words, the new administration should be carefully enacting new policies not causing chaos by doing everything too quickly.