The EPA now becomes a mandatory profit center and must provide $4m to the federal gov’t each year, but without fining any businesses or levying any taxes, but they can sell national parks to actual villains from the old Captain Planet cartoon.
Massive spending cuts to FDA and State… Massive increase for military. Throw away your toolbox and fill it up with hammers.
Well it’s not like Trump or his controller trust career civil servants. They need the military on their side in order to govern at all, but they don’t want big executive departments full of people who despise them.
There is probably not a single person in EPA who likes Trump, so obviously it’s got to go. Science is bad, m’kay? And scientists hate Trump, while the exploitative CEOs he likes hate the EPA. No brainer. Tillerson has no authority or responsibility, so there’s no real need for a state department, either. And again it’s full of snobbish intellectual types who can be counted on to despise Trump. It will be semi-private agents like Kushner doing the foreign negotiation, to the extent that Trump is willing to let anyone else do any of it.
After his awkward endorsement of pedophilia disqualified Milo Yiannopoulos to be the hard right’s token gay pal, CPAC needed a new speaker to fill his slot their conference, and the guy they chose was Jikido ‘Jay’ Aeba, a member of the notorious Japanese “Happy Science” cult, who helped the religion extrude a tendril into the political realm by founding the Happiness Realization Party.
This was a repeat visit for Aeba, who was also given a spot on the CPAC 2016 bill, where his connection to the Happy Science cult was sidelined – he was billed as the founder of the Japanese Conservative Union, which appears to be a one-man show run by Aeba who runs around energetically wearing a lot of hats and conspiculously not mentioning his solemn belief that an obscure religious leader is the living, embodied reincarnation of the creator of the universe, returned to us after stints in the lost kingdoms of Mu and Atlantis, to conduct and publish expensive volumes of posthumous interviews with MLK Jr, Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler.
Edit: Aeba at CPAC last year:
Wow - this blows my mind. I had no idea Milo had a connection with Koufuku no Kagaku.
I actually knew some members of the cult way back when I was a exchange student in Osaka in 2003. I even toured some of their temples and stuff around Lake Biwa. They were eccentric but harmless.
An offshoot of Buddhism that had a ceremonial prayer to Roman gods were pretty wild though.
That sounds awesome.
Trump proposes “historic” increases to military spending. This will be funded by taking the money from other federal agencies, specifically foreign aid… one of the smallest expenditures we have.
Kiss your environmental protections, food safety, healthcare, and other social programs goodbye, kids. We need more bombs.
Because that’s America’s problem. We just don’t spend enough on the military.
You know who else historically increased their military spending, ignored previously signed treaties, and picked out subgroups of his own populace to target for “increased scrutiny”?
hashtagdailygodwin
If spent well, the US could get a lot of value out of defense spending. the DoD does a lot of hard core research on technology that tends to find its way into the public sector before too long, and has historically fed into major technological shifts that stoked the economy.
But the flip side is that I don’t really have any faith that Trump’s team knows how to spend this money. Instead of funding stuff like the SBIR program, they’ll probably just funnel money to Trump’s lackeys.
Yeah, I was just saying this to my friend. The similarities are getting absurd at this point.
So, the EPA’s budget was what, $8 billion? If we eliminate that, it’ll leave us with $46 billion more to go. Let’s go down the list, who’s next?
(in response to @timex) The marginal value of the next defense dollar (to any metric you care to name aside from ‘making defense contractors richer’) is almost certainly significantly lower than the next dollar spent literally anywhere else in the federal budget.
Well there is the problem that a lot of that money would be better spent on social programs.
Because if you think we need to cut the school lunch program for poor kids to build more bombs, then go fuck yourself*. If you want to remove any environmental protections and cut funding for mitigation efforts to buy more stupid guns, go fuck yourself. And if you want to cut taxes on the wealthy, further enable Wall Street malfeasance, remove healthcare, allow predatory insurance practices, target trans kids for discrimination, gut labor protections, nakedly engage in state bribery for private profit using your hotels, use force to confiscate sovereign land to place an oil pipeline that risks the health and water supply of the persons who live on that land, all so you can build more ill conceived and massively foolish Doctor Strangelove Penis Enhancers please then do the world a favor and sign up for the Russian diplomat health treatment. Then go fuck yourself.
*none of this really directed at you @Timex, but to those who think cutting that program to spend more on military is a good thing. I know that these are not your positions.
Yeah. Spinoff research value is only worth mentioning in the context of a program that has innate value itself. If you don’t value space exploration at all, then NASA spinoff value is worthless, because a tiny fraction of the money could have been far more profitably spent directly on the applications you like, leaving the vast majority left over for other things. It’s always been an embarrassment that spinoff was used to justify NASA.
So if, let us say, research done for the V-22 Osprey program resulted in more stimulating condom designs or darker blacks for LCD screens or whatever, it’s not exactly a positive result because 99.99% of the money spent on the damn things had nothing to do with any of that, and moreover it was a terrible graft-ridden program to begin with that did more harm than good.
Yeah, that too. If we want to fund research, we should goddamn fund research. A dollar spent on grants for fuel cell research is better value than another hundred funneled into Lockheed or Honeywell or whomever.
Can you offer anything to back up this claim, in terms of concrete data or analysis?
Programs like the SBIR program specifically target small businesses. In many cases, they specifically target small businesses in disadvantaged groups (such as women or minority owned, HUD zones, etc.).
Aside from doing things like developing new technology, this also tends to bring good jobs and money into various disadvantaged areas. And often, it’s not really directly related to what is traditionally thought of as “defense” at all, in that they’re not really working on things like weapons systems.
Again, DoD spending through organizations like the Office of Naval Research, or DARPA, is doing exactly that.
Nope! I’ve read things in the past, but hell if I can remember specifics and I certainly didn’t save links or anything.
…wait, you’re actually going to argue that military spending is better than other types of spending for anything but having a bigger, shinier military and richer defense contractors? Ooooookay.
And we all know that this is not what Spray tan General Ripper has any interest in doing.
Some portion of that money is simply S&T research funding. It’s not all weapons system development. The fact that it’s under the DoD doesn’t really change anything.
You could move stuff like the battery research conducted by the DoD to the DoE, and it’s still gonna be the same research.
No, I don’t buy this at all. The demands of the military absolutely direct any R&D done under the DoD’s umbrella. It has to. There is no way you are going to convince me that the objectives of the military for a technology don’t affect the research. It’s an absurd assertion on its face.
But those “demands” are often not directed at weapons system design, or making bombs and shit. For instance, I’ve done work with natural language processing. While it certainly has applications in stuff the DoD is interested in, it’s way more applicable than just blowing up people.
In the case of things like batteries, the demands that the DoD has are the same as everyone else… to have lighter batteries that last longer.