Right, I keep forgetting he claimed it was a personal transaction. Thanks.
But her emails.
Let’s not forget in all of this that Ben Carson spent $31k of your tax dollars on a dining set.
I think these people are just willing to take their chances, assured in the notion that they can likely fare better when things head South than Liberals, their mortal adversaries. That’s how much they hate Liberals.
The current Republican regime is the culmination of a decades long effort that started after the New Deal to return America to the gilded age (hence the defenestration of Unions and the fight to destroy higher education, both institutions that strip power from the oligarchs. ) It really picked up steam with the Powell memo ("corporations are people’), gained maximal traction with Reagan, and jumped the political fence with neoliberalism (Bill Clinton, “The era of big government is over”). Mix in white nationalism and resentment and well, here we are.
Stolen from a reddit post, but these quotes neatly summarize the “conservative” economic viewpoint:
Summary
From the excellent book American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (2016):
The mixed economy was at the heart of this success—in the United States no less than in other Western nations. Capitalism played an essential role. But capitalism was not the new entrant on the economic stage. Effective governance was. Public health measures made cities engines of innovation rather than incubators of illness. The meteoric expansion of public education increased not only individual opportunity but also the economic potential of entire societies. Investments in science, higher education, and defense spearheaded breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, infrastructure, and technology. Overarching rules and institutions tamed and transformed unstable financial markets into more manageable ups and downs. Protections against excessive insecurity and abject destitution encouraged the forward-looking investments and social integration that sustained growth required. At every level of society, the gains in health, education, income, and capacity were breathtaking. The mixed economy was a spectacular positive-sum bargain: It redistributed power and resources, but as its impacts broadened and diffused, virtually everyone was made massively better off.
It’s an impressive record. […] There’s just one problem: We’re trashing the mixed economy.
With increasing vigor and volume, some of the most powerful actors in American politics are sabotaging government’s essential role in the economy."
More specifically:
Because of its powers of coercion and coordination, government can produce public goods and encourage the production of goods with positive externalities. Government can also restrict activities that produce negative externalities. Dumping carbon in the atmosphere has been costless to private actors; put a price on it (with a tax or government action), and we will all pay more attention to the true costs of our choices. Government can provide nudges of varying strength that combat the dangers associated with our own myopia, and it can work to prevent the predictable efforts of companies to exploit our own shortcomings for private profit.
Government does not always work well—indeed, we wrote this book because it is working less and less well. And when well regulated, markets often work very well indeed. But there is no recipe for prosperity that does not involve extensive reliance on effective political authority. The conservative vision of shrinking government to a size that will make it “safe” from cronyism is the economic equivalent of bloodletting. The cure is far worse than the disease. Prosperous societies need […] not less government (or necessarily more government) but effective government.
Also:
[T]he GOP has abandoned not just its prior moderate commitments but also its willingness to work constructively with other political actors to update and strengthen the mixed economy. Indeed, the GOP has learned how to win politically by fostering dysfunction, to achieve its policy goals not by brokering agreement but by breaking government. With positive conceptions of government’s essential role marginalized and demonized in political discourse—denounced by Republicans and defended feebly by Democrats—Republicans discovered the benefits of the self-fulfilling prophecy: They could simultaneously cater to narrow corporate interests and denounce “crony capitalism,” feed political dysfunction and win by railing against it, undermine the capacity of government to perform its vital functions and decry a bungling and corrupt public sector.
TL, DR:
- Reduce/Dismantle Regulation
- Use deregulation to boost corruption
- Blame corruption on ineffectiveness of regulation
- Convince people they want to vote against regulation
The new right wing talking point is that Google must be broken up, because… Reasons?
I mean, their existence is clearly beneficial to consumers, and there’s really nothing that prevents anyone from completing with them, since there’s no inherenet limitations to playing in the search market.
But the fringe right thinks that Google manually manipulates search results to make the right winer’s look like imbeciles.
Because they have no idea how search works.
Because they are imbeciles.
Some are. But many of them are in the “Keep Your Dirty Government Hands Off My Medicare” camp, too.
I can’t remember who here said it, but I think it’s 100% true: lots of these folks feel like literally anything is worth it if they can get one or two more Supreme Court appointments. That includes losing all elections for the next 20 years.
This is why they’re willing to overlook any and all of Trump’s transgressions. They don’t care.
The only thing that would move the needle is if Trump suggested his next Supreme Court nomination would be focused on balancing the court. Then they’d start impeachment proceedings.
There is one small upside to Trump Unchained that we’ve gotten in the last few weeks.
With fewer people restraining him, he’s more prone to say what he actually thinks and/or what he thinks will make him popular with Important People - namely, the kind of rich people he grew up with. Everything in Donnie’s life, from his belief that coal and steel are still king to his outfits to his serving iceberg lettuce at Mar-a-Lago, stems from his belief that the natural state of the world is a Republican country club circa 1969.
But of course most Trump voters aren’t country club people at all. Uncensored Trump is likely to reveal that deep down he doesn’t really know or care about big chunks of his base - see his gun comments from last month.
So buck up. There’s some chance that Trump’s next unhinged rant will be him reminiscing about the times he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion.
This kind of thing I really don’t even care about. The article says the purchase was cancelled and yes, it now looks like his wife picked it out and he ok’d it but…so what? I wish this was the worst of the Trump administration.
It’s just emblematic. It’s something so simple and blatant that it serves as a symbol of the far greater and deeper corruption and ineptitude.
Exactly. It isn’t that they canceled it after they got called out on it by others. It’s that they thought they could.
Well there’s the matter of a member of the Cabinet blatantly lying about it. I realize that it pales in comparison to the daily lies that we’re fed from every member of this administration but it’s still important. Everyone believes they can just lie indiscriminately with no repercussions and it’s becoming a bit ridiculous.
There’s a small chance Unrestrained Trump may just end up making himself look like a bigger dumbass than he already has, end of story. But really I think he’s more dangerous now than before. No one in his administration is going to even pretend to try to stand in his way from now on.
Further, Trump is in perfect tune with his base. His base are dumbasses and deep down don’t know or care much about each other in many instances, either. He’s just like them. Trump and his base both get all their news form the same TV station. Trump would need to sell out a huge number of them in a short period of time to really make a dent in their support for him. (Briefly supporting limited gun control against the wishes of the NRA almost was a small taste of this, but alas.)
Also, the idea that Republicans will “[lose] all elections for the next 20 years” is ridiculous. People thought similar things after Bush/Cheney, but it only took 8 years for Reps to elect an by an order of magnitude worse candidate. The GOP (including or not including all of Trump’s base) may not back Trump again, but they’re not going to vote Democrat for the next 20 years.
I think it’s possible that Carson may not have really known about it in the sense that someone may have handed a paper to sign and told him it was for the dining set his wife had approved. He may not have thought twice about it or even looked at the price.
But yes, lying about it is dumb. This is the guy who thinks the pyramids were grain silos, though. He may be the dumbest brain surgeon on the planet.
So…you’re cool with cabinet secretaries just signing any ol’ shit someone puts in front of them?
Oh c’mon. I’m talking about a specific instance. Try to be reasonable once in awhile.
I am being reasonable. The White House Cabinet is the big leagues. You don’t get to be Henry Blake and call yourself fit for that position. Your job makes and affects policy.
I’m not really sure what Carson actually IS doing that he’d be too busy to know about $31k of furniture being ordered. The whole thing just reeks of bullshit. He should be fired immediately for lying about this; it’s insane. He just didn’t think anyone would care because of all the other crap going on. What’s another wasted $31k? Lie, lie, lie.