Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread

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gtyellowjacket said:
I'd be all for cutting corporate welfare but it's not going to get you anywhere near where you need. Corporate welfare is about $100 billion per year depending on how you define it. Tax breaks for oil companies are about $2 billion and farm subsidies are about $20 billion and there's some overlap with the corporate welfare number.

Defense spending is more than eight times that at $850b per year. Reduce that from the 3.5% of GDP that we currently spend to the around 2% that our better NATO allies in Europe spend and you're making real progress.

So if we're going to start making some hard decisions, we can't just say cut government waste or corporate welfare or NASA or whatever other peanuts approach people advocate and never get done. We have to cut defence, cut entitlements, raise taxes or keep running up the credit card. Now which one do you want to do?
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Other than you're equating NATO spending with their entire defense spending and that you're ignoring how much more of the world we're spending that money on than NATO is, and you're making real sense. I expect we're getting good value for that money when it comes to the Ukraine and NATO.

The problem is that it's the money to private contractors, sweetheart deals for constituents and things that most need to be cut that are the most likely to be hands off.
 
finesse said:
Other than you're equating NATO spending with their entire defense spending and that you're ignoring how much more of the world we're spending that money on than NATO is, and you're making real sense. I expect we're getting good value for that money when it comes to the Ukraine and NATO.

The problem is that it's the money to private contractors, sweetheart deals for constituents and things that most need to be cut that are the most likely to be hands off.
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I certainly mentioned that our defense spending includes non-nato commitments before in this thread so not sure how I'm ignoring it.

I'm sure there are plenty of sweetheart deals but if we're talking cutting hundreds of billions from the defense budget, it's going to be more than those little set-asides. We have to make the decision to roll back our defense commitments or we're going to keep spending at this level.

But no one, including you, wants to make those hard choices. It's all about cutting waste and there's just not enough of that.

So make a hard choice. Show some guts instead of the politician 's favorite strategy of claiming we're going to cut waste or administrative bloat when it won't make too much difference. If it's cuts for defense spending, cuts in entitlements, more taxes or more debt, which are you going to go with? And if it is defense spending, what commitments are you willing to lapse to allow us to reduce that spending?
 
I'd start with mothballing half the carrier groups, stopping any future contracts on more, put more focus on smaller craft and phasing out future development of manned combat aircraft. and get rid of the older ones as fast as is expedient.

I'd also cut aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia and a few other non NATO countries. I'm not sure why we are spending the money we are in Ethiopia. Then we can evaluate how top heavy we are with officers.
 
finesse said:
I'd start with mothballing half the carrier groups, stopping any future contracts on more, put more focus on smaller craft and phasing out future development of manned combat aircraft. and get rid of the older ones as fast as is expedient.

I'd also cut aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia and a few other non NATO countries. I'm not sure why we are spending the money we are in Ethiopia. Then we can evaluate how top heavy we are with officers.
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Okay. That takes some guts. Carriers have a maintenance cost of about 3 billion per year per carrier. Mothball half of them and you might get to $18 billion in cost savings.

Us foreign aid to Israel is a little less than 4 billion but us foreign aid to Saudi Arabia is nominal at about 3 million per year although that carrier near the Persian Gulf cost a few billion a year to operate. Not sure if that's included in your mothballed fleets.

The US has 1.3 million active duty soldiers and 18% of them are officers. Their average salary is $62,000 per year but call it $100,000 per year with benefits. That's 23.4 billion in personnel cost for officers. You didn't say how many you'd want to cut but say it's 25% and you just saved yourself about 8 billion.

So you've just cut about $30 billion per year. You've got a ways to go but you have to start somewhere. We're going to find out if we need those carriers and officers, but I think you've made a good start. What else are you going to do?
 
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Preferably leave it to someone who understands this. It's not something I've studied. I can see some obvious trends and understand a little about how much pork barrel spending there is but if you want more you need somebody who knows more.
 
It doesn't have to all come from spending cuts. We have to find a way to make Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to pay a LOT more taxes. Maybe special confiscatory rules for naturalized citizens and non-citizens to pay back this country for the wealth they were privileged to accumulate here.

If we can have special immigration rules for children of non-citizens why can't we have special tax rules for naturalized citizens?
 
Good to see Trump getting all of the grift and abuse of business connections to foreign governments to enrich himself out of the way before taking Office so he can be laser focused on day one with bringing down prices to make life more affordable for lower and middle class Americans.
 
CRHeel94 said:
I wonder if the Europeans will at some point call Trump's bluff..something along the lines of "You want to pull out of NATO? Go ahead. Europe will defend Europe.".
1. The Russian threat is not as scary as it was 3 years ago. The boogey man is not quite as scary.
2. The euros take it as an opportunity to funnel government spending into their regional defenses industry.
3. Germany shrugs off its post war aversion to rebuilding its armed forces.

That scenario, in the long run, makes the world a more dangerous place. Trump is a fool for not understanding the importance of NATO in global stability and American preponderance in the last 75 years.
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That’s not what will happen and you’re ignoring basically the entire history of the European continent which is that they never ever have had a united defense policy up until 1945 (or 1991 if you want to get more technical about it).

NATO or European defense minus America is non-existent, it returns to everyone being for themselves again, and honestly at this stage in time there’s a decent chance Europe without America would fragment and Balkanize. There are A LOT of active separatist movements all across Europe that would benefit from a crisis. Everyone misunderstands right wing populism at this moment in time in Europe, demagogues don’t have the youth population numbers to do damage, in many ways they’re perhaps the only thing that might save the nation state. The logical progression of Europe is watching Spain break up into 5-6 countries, Germany into 3, Italy into several, etc. Forcing the locals to increase their defense spending to be remotely on par with where they need to be means taking money from elsewhere, which has helped maintain a modest standards of living in Europe but push people to the brink they’ll reassert power locally, not nationally with demagogues.

Part of why the demagogues are so pro-Russian is because the Russians understand this dynamic and have already have worked to neutered the threat to them from the right.
 
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