Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread

[CRHeel94]

Last night we had a family discussion about illegal immigration. It was an interesting conversation that covered several topics and led me to what I believe are some fundamental truths about the situation.

-Every country has the right (actually, the responsibility) to control its borders. Illegal immigration is problem just on this concern. Its paramount to be able to monitor who's coming in.

-The Republicans have been using illegal immigration as a convenient campaign issue for nearly 20 years. They have little incentive to actually solve it. This election was the clearest example...it was the main issue for Trump, it was the constant drumbeat that has marked his campaign.

-The dirty little secret is that America depends on the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide in certain key industries (agriculture, construction, child care, meatpacking, etc). I love how the immigrants are the ones that get hunted down and pay the price. Start locking up the business owners who hire them and we'd see a compromise mighty quick.The US is currently at full employment; where the heck are they going to get the millions of laborers they will need? If Trump accomplished his campaign promise of sending back every illegal immigrant, the negative impact on the US economy would be severe.

-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.

-We have a tense situation around the world between the developed and underdeveloped world regarding immigration. More people wanting to hop on the boat than is possible. Long term, the solution is the economic development of the third world (economically, politically, socially). Thats quite a daunting global challenge, but I'd like to believe that it can be achieved. Costa Rica (as well as other countries) does not have an emigration problem for the most part (we have more immigrants than emigrants). Why? Because in broad strokes people like to live here. My concern is that objective takes concerted leadership from the developed world...hard to achieve when someone wants the lion's share of the kill.

 

[CRHeel94]

There is definitely a ton of nonsensical spending in the federal budget. I'm sure there's opportunity to save billions.

I have very little faith that Muskrek will be able to go about it in a objective way...there will be a political bias to the machete they wield.

 

[dukeman92]

-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.

There was legislation to fix some of this in the border bill Trump got squashed.

 

[BlooVooDoo]

There is definitely a ton of nonsensical spending in the federal budget. I'm sure there's opportunity to save billions.

I have very little faith that Muskrek will be able to go about it in an objective way...there will be a political bias to the machete they wield.

Congress can cut waste anytime it wants and the GOP has both chambers. I don’t see anything substantive to come from DOGE without running afoul of SCOTUS decisions regarding the line item veto and that was even done with the blessing of congress.

 

[hedge]

Cheese carve-out for school meals threatens student health

As USDA attempts to reduce salt in school meals, lobbying from Big Dairy could reverse progress—at the expense of children's health.

www.cspinet.org

I really wish they had written "lobbying from Big Cheese could reverse progress"...

 

[lawtig02]

Whole lot of rumors out there about Kash Patel for FBI director. Whoo boy.

 

[HeelYeah2012]

That’s what freedom’s all about. You’re free to eat healthy or not—there are plenty of options, particularly for those with the money to pay for organic foods. And you’re free to exercise as much or as little as you’d like.

If you’re suggesting we need governmental intervention to promote healthy eating options and exercise, or that we need to somehow limit people’s freedom of choice—well, that seems a bit hypocritical coming from someone on the right, doesn’t it?

No, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to think that it’s a worthy goal of government help keep harmful ingredients out of our food.

 

[superrific]

Last night we had a family discussion about illegal immigration. It was an interesting conversation that covered several topics and led me to what I believe are some fundamental truths about the situation.

-Every country has the right (actually, the responsibility) to control its borders. Illegal immigration is problem just on this concern. Its paramount to be able to monitor who's coming in.


-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally".

1. I think your first point there deserves its own thread and discussion. I have some questions.
2. They don't want them to come legally. That's just an excuse.

I've had the following conversation so many times:

Me: What is it that you don't like about people coming to this country to work hard, contribute, and do jobs that Americans don't want to do.
Them: I like immigrants. I just don't like them being illegal. They should follow the rules.
Me: So your only objection is that it's "illegal"?
Them: Yes. I love legal immigrants.
Me: So why not just make their immigration legal?
Them: ????
Me: If the problem is purely a function of legality, it's easy to solve. Make it legal.
Them: Why not solve murder by making murder legal?
Me: Because murder is bad. We want laws against things that are bad. But you just told me there's nothing bad about illegal immigration.
Them: But, but
Me: Give me a reason why the immigration you just described as "good, but" should be illegal. People will come as long as there are jobs, and they won't come if there aren't. While they are here, they don't have to hide or work in the shadows or be exploited or be scared to report crimes. Win-win.
Them: [Lies forthcoming]

I've yet to meet a person who decries "the border" who actually wants legal immigration. It only takes a few questions (and not even along the lines of that discussion) to poke the facade.

 

[HeelYeah2012]

First of all, the middle sentence there is obviously laughable hyperbole. There is no metric by which one could claim that we are less healthy now than we've ever been. US life expectancy now is at least a decade longer than it was after WW2, and more than three decades longer than it was in the Reconstruction era. We may have a bigger obesity problem than we used to, but overall health is far superior than it used to be, in basically every way you want to measure it.

Second of all, it is absolutely right that poor diet and poor exercise are the main culprits in our unhealthiness, but those things are very difficult to fix because they are subject to personal choice. The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive).Rest assured RFK's desire to remove niche food additives will do absolutely nothing to make us healthier on the whole; contrary to what many gullible people believe, there is not some "poison" being added to our food to make us unhealthy (unless you want to count sugar and sodium, both of which are harmful in the amounts in which we consume them, which is not what RFK has been talking about).

As for exercise, you do what you can to promote healthy choices - make cities more walkable, tax gasoline and disincentivize automobile use, build parks and greenways and trails and lots of free, easily accessible spaces. But you can't force people to use those things. And, of course, that all costs tax money.

I was careful with my wording there and said that by “many” measures (not all), Americans are less healthy now than ever. Life expectancy is of course longer, no argument there. But obesity is up, anxiety and depression are up, and clearly there are direct linkages between these things and diet/exercise.

I agree with this sentence you typed: “The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive).” I would argue that I’m simply in favor of doing what you said is already happening in a lot of areas - the government doing its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food. No more and no less. That doesn’t mean the onus still won’t be on individuals to make healthy choices, but the particularly bad stuff should be taken out of the ingredients altogether.

 

[Zoo_View]

Regardless of what’s in Coke or a Big Mac or Doritos or Cheez Its or Pop Tarts or Frosted Flakes, none of those products are healthy foods…..they could be made fresh daily from locally sourced organic farms and they’d still be crap foods.

 

[finesse]

I was careful with my wording there and said that by “many” measures (not all), Americans are less healthy now than ever. Life expectancy is of course longer, no argument there. But obesity is up, anxiety and depression are up, and clearly there are direct linkages between these things and diet/exercise.

I agree with this sentence you typed: “The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive).” I would argue that I’m simply in favor of doing what you said is already happening in a lot of areas - the government doing its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food. No more and no less. That doesn’t mean the onus still won’t be on individuals to make healthy choices, but the particularly bad stuff should be taken out of the ingredients altogether.

I still want to know who defines and how that definition of particularly unhealthy is reached. I also want some context of the cost and justification of each specific change and the priorities of them in the general overall scheme of health and government.

 

[mpaer]

Regardless of what’s in Coke or a Big Mac or Doritos or Cheez Its or Pop Tarts or Frosted Flakes, none of those products are healthy foods…..they could be made fresh daily from locally sourced organic farms and they’d still be crap foods.

I have a feeling the can of beer I have most evenings is healthier than any of these

 

[sringwal]

I was careful with my wording there and said that by “many” measures (not all), Americans are less healthy now than ever. Life expectancy is of course longer, no argument there. But obesity is up, anxiety and depression are up, and clearly there are direct linkages between these things and diet/exercise.

I agree with this sentence you typed: “The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive).” I would argue that I’m simply in favor of doing what you said is already happening in a lot of areas - the government doing its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food. No more and no less. That doesn’t mean the onus still won’t be on individuals to make healthy choices, but the particularly bad stuff should be taken out of the ingredients altogether.

Anxiety is being diagnosed more accurately, and more commonly, but I don't know how much it is "up" vs. say, the 1930s and 40s and how much it is that the stigma has gone away. I'd also encourage you to look into how anxiety disrupts the digestive system, which in turn impacts our cognitive abilities.

 

[CFordUNC]

Whole lot of rumors out there about Kash Patel for FBI director. Whoo boy.

Hey, would you look at that! So Republicans don’t *actually* hate DEI hiring practices, huh? Kash Patel has exactly zero managerial experience and zero law enforcement experience, so naturally he should be put in charge of leading the largest domestic law enforcement agency in the country!

 

[EyeballKid]

No, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to think that it’s a worthy goal of government help keep harmful ingredients out of our food.

We already do that.

 

[WaynetheDrain]

Former two-time Trump voter from Mobile, AL.

They don’t care. Their only goal is to own the libs.

 

[superrific]

There is some kind of fallacy inherent in the arguments that immigrants are committing crimes but I don’t know if it is a recognized one or has a name.

It is a valid argument to say that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the population at large. The response is always that so and so would be alive today if we didn’t have immigrants and while true that seems fallacious considering the crime rate disparity. (I am not using Laken Riley as an example as her perpetrator had previous legal problems which makes that story a bit different.)

IMO that argument boils down to an argument that if we have more people we will have more crime - not necessarily at a higher rate but more in absolute numbers. And of course that is true.

Their argument makes no more sense than saying that we should get rid of people from Burlington because someone in Burlington went to Chapel Hill and committed a crime, a crime that would not have happened had we removed all the people from Burlington 100 miles a way.

Someone needs to develop that thought, maybe wrap it in a mathematical framework, and give it a name.

What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic? I've done the arithmetic many times on the board. Suppose you live in an rea with a 5% homicide rate. That means every resident has a 5% chance of being murdered in a given year. Now suppose the population doubles, with the new entrants having a 1% homicide rate. Now the area has a 3% murder rate. Every resident has a 3% of being murdered. Literally everyone in town is safer, even though some of the new entrants have committed murders. The general formula is extremely simple. I'm not going to try to write it because formatting is a pain but it's Algebra I level if that.

I don't know if the fallacy has a name. I suspect it does. I don't always learn the names of fallacies as I think it's just easier to point out illogic. But I can think of two ways of characterizing it:

1. "But for" fallacy. When a migrant kills an American, the migration is a "but for" cause -- i.e. if the migrant wasn't here, he couldn't have committed the crime. But so many other things have the same causal status. If the victim had been at home instead of out partying (or vice versa, depending on where the killing occurs), s/he would be alive. If the perp wasn't able to buy a cheap used car, s/he wouldn't have wheels and it's hard to be a killer riding the bus. Maybe the perp was angry at being dumped by a former romantic interest. Maybe the perp had been playing football and suffers from CTE, etc.

If any of those factors in the causal chain had been different, the victim would still be alive. But nobody calls for surcharges on used cars, or preventing people from dumping their partners, or banning football, right? It's illegal immigration that caused it, even though the immigration is very far back in the causal chain. Lots of things had to happen between then and now for the killing to happen.

Maybe we can call this the "fallacy of excess causation." Any analysis that relies on "but for" causation will quickly find that everything is a cause of social ills. Thus does everything become a cause and the whole concept of cause loses meaning. The law mostly uses a concept of "proximate causation" which is sort of a cop-out but at least tries to find a way to distinguish who should be held responsible for an action from those who don't deserve it. And one principle is "intervening criminal act," which is to say that we hold the criminal responsible, and anyone who helps the criminal after the fact, but we don't go after the people who acted (even wrongly) prior to the criminal act -- unless the action was specifically designed to aid the crime (i.e. obtaining an illegal gun) or was an obvious result of the action (here, think of the movie Seven and the way John Doe carried out his crime of lust).

2. Another way to think of it is a fallacy of visibility, if that's a thing. Go back to the arithmetic above. Everyone is safer in the town because of the new entrants -- but nobody sees it because you can't see a thing that doesn't happen. Some % of the crimes that would have been committed against an old resident are now being directed at the new entrants, meaning that the original residents should be thankful that someone else was the target of the killer . . . but of course they can't see that. They don't know that they would have been targeted if the new entrant wasn't here. It's arithmetically required, but we don't know who was "saved" by not being targeted.

It's the way people don't see harm prevented, because you have to look closely to see it. This is what RBG famously described, in her Shelby County dissent, as "throwing away the umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet."

Maybe we should coin a phrase and call it the umbrella fallacy. It's a bad idea to close your umbrella in a rainstorm even if you're not getting wet.

 

[sringwal]

Hey, would you look at that! So Republicans don’t *actually* hate DEI hiring practices, huh? Kash Patel has exactly zero managerial experience and zero law enforcement experience, so naturally he should be put in charge of leading the largest domestic law enforcement agency in the country!

 

[CFordUNC]

They don’t care. Their only goal is to own the libs.

Oh, I know it. No doubt about it. I’m just enjoying pointing out the stupidity and hypocrisy in claiming to be a conservative and voting for a party and a presidential candidate that is anything but. It just sucks that Donald Trump was the person for whom we abandoned our principles of small government, free markets, defend individual liberties and personal freedoms, respect for rule of law, and pro-America patriotism.

 

[superrific]

They also hate weaponization of government so much that they are appointing a guy to head the FBI who has previously invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.

Also, the guy's 2020 portrait is Manson-esque. I don't know enough about human physiology to assess it. Are there people whose eyes naturally look sociopathic? I don't want to slam on the guy if this is just how he looks, but to me it looks like he's a crazy man.

Kash Patel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org