Probably because it’s punishable by death?
Nah, they’re just better Americans than Americans are.
Don’t give them ideas…
That’s because Baker was a professional. None of these people currently running our executive branch seem to have a professional bone in their bodies…
Oh please let this be true[quote]President Donald Trump personally reached out to two of his former campaign aides – his first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his deputy campaign manager, David Bossie – to sound them out about working with the administration as crisis managers, according to two people familiar with the situation[/quote]
Because?
I would argue that everyone in Trump’s administration is a crisis manager.
Because if he’s bringing in Lewandowski to manage the crisis, it’s not going to be managed well. Immanentise the Eschaton and all that.
Ah, gotcha. It’s a sure bet that either a) no one competent will be brought in or b) they won’t be listened to if they are competent.
WaPo: Trump advisers call for privatizing some public assets to build new infrastructure
The Trump administration, determined to overhaul and modernize the nation’s infrastructure, is drafting plans to privatize some public assets such as airports, bridges, highway rest stops and other facilities, according to top officials and advisers.
In his proposed budget released Tuesday, President Trump called for spending $200 billion over 10 years to “incentivize” private, state and local spending on infrastructure.
Trump advisers said that to entice state and local governments to sell some of their assets, the administration is considering paying them a bonus. The proceeds of the sales would then go to other infrastructure projects. Australia has pursued a similar policy, which it calls “asset recycling,” prompting the 99-year lease of a state-owned electrical grid to pay for improvements to the Sydney Metro, among other projects.
What the ever-loving fuck.
“Let’s sell bridges and airports to pay for roads.”
How about we USE THE FUCKING TAXES INSTEAD.
Buying a bridge would be akin to buying a city in most cases. You could cut everyone off from their ability to go to work and then extort them. This pants on head eating feces levels of crazy.
If not for welfare and a social safety net, the world would be a utopian paradise of rich people. Damn, why didn’t we think of this earlier?
If this is his idea of paradise:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/У_здания_Харьковской_ЧК.jpg
Texas, where they hate beer apparently.
regarding poverty, wasn’t there some amendment to some welfare law that effectively broke up families by penalizing couples or something? I forget which law specifically did that.
Guess I have one more reason not to go to Texas.
This is what you get when you vote Republican, job killing regulations that favor certain corporate interests over the public good. (intentional framing for maximum irony)
[quote]Presidential budget proposals are not received as actual fiscal blueprints but as statements of priorities, and so we must conclude that President Trump’s top priority is refusing to deal with reality.
Here’s the situation: About 80 percent of federal spending is consumed by five things: 1. National defense; 2. Social Security; 3. Medicare; 4. Medicaid and other related health-care benefits; 5. Interest on the debt. President Trump wants to increase spending on defense by about 10 percent while shielding Social Security and Medicare from cuts. Short of a default, he doesn’t have any choice but to pay the interest on the debt. So that leaves things pretty tight.
On top of that, he wants to pass what he boasts is one of the largest tax cuts in history . . . and balance the budget.
[/quote]
That infrastructure idea is ridiculous. Let’s spend $20 billion a year for 10 years to help states sell their assets to private companies who will fuck up everything instead of spending $20 billion a year for 10 years to actually improve infrastructure. This idea of selling/leasing bridges, roads, rest stops, airports, etc. is obviously the brainchild of corporate interests looking to cash in on infrastructure.
What will happen is that a state will lease a bridge to a private company, but still be on the hook for part or all of the maintenance cost of said bridge, meanwhile the private company will slap a toll on the bridge, increasing it every time they have to pay their 20% of the maintenance costs. The end result will be the state sinking any revenue from the bridge back into maintaining the bridge, while the private company keeps most of it’s revenue, and prices on everything in the area increase because goods transportation costs now have to include the cost of the tolls. It’s a bad deal all around (except for the private company of course). This has already been proven time and time again with privatization. Like Trickle-Down Economics, it’s a Republican mantra that has been proven to be bullshit.
Any decent infrastructure plan needs to be along the lines of a new New Deal, where the federal government teams up with each state to determine what the needs of that individual state are, then provides seed funding for a few initial projects while also funding job training programs so that people in hard hit industries in that state can retrain to do infrastructure jobs at no cost to themselves. A couple of years of that and you’ll have a labor pool for infrastructure improvement, a bunch of projects to tackle and the tax revenue in-state (from all those previously un/under-employed people now working better paying jobs) to fund said projects. It’s not all construction jobs either, that’s a misnomer, infrastructure also includes electrical grid, phone and cable systems, highway and rail management and logistics, public transportation and urban planning in metropolitan areas, etc., so plenty of good paying skilled worker jobs once the ball gets rolling.
Not sure about laws, but iirc the algorithm expects every adult family member in the household to be a contributing member. If they don’t have a job, the per-person calculation only accommodates so much for it. Important note; this is second-hand info, so I may easily be wrong.
Hey, you read my mind.
Excellent. We are thinking shwarma for lunch, or maybe a nice curry.