Sometimes the order of stuff in my twitter feed is just perfect.
I guess so. He wants to know how much aid they have been getting, so he can halt it all and tell the American public that Mexico will pay for the wall out of aid money they don’t deserve over an x year period. If Mexico want the aid restored, they can pony up directly sooner.
Ah the old, we will pay for it by slashing foreign aid, ruse
The humorous thing is if we slashed all foreign aid to Mexico tomorrow (150 million in 2016) with wall costing between $15-25 billion so say $20 billion we have to borrow money at 2.5% so we have to pay $500 million interest. Which means that we’d never got our money back.
I am sure the Mexican government can do math also and since they borrow money at 7.5% and $20 billion dollar is real money to the Mexican government it would criminally stupid for them to pay for our fucking wall.
From what I can tell, foreign aid to Mexico varies wildly from year to year, and it’s been going down lately. It was supposed to be $134 million this year. Let’s say that stayed constant. Then it 8 years, that’s only 1.072 billion. Certainly not enough to pay for the wall.
Menzo
4570
Pst: nobody really cares who’s going to pay for the wall. Trump voters can go to bed knowing he delivered on his promise and Republican lawmakers will pass a budget measure with no offsets. Democrats screaming “we told you so!” won’t matter one bit.
Personally, I think we should just let this gigantic public works project slide.
I swear watching his speech at DHS, there must be an aid holding up an ‘applaud’ sign. Who is he pointing off to at the side when they clap? The entourage he brought with him to cheer? He just makes shit up - unprecedented illegal immigration, media never talks about victims of illegal immigrant crime, blah, blah, blah. These speeches are also written by Bannon, right?
No. He should constantly be dogged by what a waste of money this is, and how much of a failure it is constantly going to be. They need to have their noses rubbed in this.
There is a reason he is seen as a failure in business by people who know. It’s because of shit like this. Until they get their noses rubbed in it, they will not learn.
-xtien
[quote=“ChristienMurawski, post:4572, topic:78530, full:true”] Until they get their noses rubbed in it, they will not learn.
[/quote]
That’s fine as a metaphor and a general concept, but from everything we’ve been seeing during the last decade, it seems the only people who will be seeing this criticism will be people who didn’t support him in the first place. Until we start seeing this criticism on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Rielly, etc., they’re going to get their noses rubbed in it.
KevinC
4574
Fuck that. If we have $50-$150 billion dollars to spend on infrastructure, lets spend it on replacing our aging bridges, sewer systems, etc. Hell, can we take a slice of that and get the people of Flint some non-toxic drinking water? Or, as internet nerds, how about using that money to roll out fiber across the country?
This country is in serious need of infrastructure improvements. To have that money and effort directed towards a pointless wall? Fuck. That.
It’s not a “gigantic public works project.”
It’s a gigantic corrupt boondoggle designed to channel Federal funds into the pockets of Trump and his construction cronies first and foremost.
After that. it a gigantic symbol of racism designed to appeal the worst side of Trump’s supporters. It’s intended to be a national monument to insularity, just like China’s Great Wall.
It’s also a monument to Trump’s ego. Would you support building a giant statue of Trump? Because in his mind, that’s what this is.
The GOP doesn’t give a damn about the public works project side of it in the slightest. And as KevinC says, it’s useless and sucks funds away from public works we desperately need.
I’m all for public works. That is, projects that build up the economy with employment, manufacturing, and construction and provide a useful service or product at the end. Trump’s wall is not that.
KevinC
4577
Exactly. And what pisses me off in particular is that the Great Recession was the perfect time for such projects. Put people back to work, spur the economy, all while adding real benefit to the country. These are projects that really do need to be done.
But did it happen? Oh hell no. Too expensive! But hey, if it’s a giant racist wall? Yeah, put it on the credit card, lets get this done!
Republicans are like the worst investor in the universe. Oh, the stock market is down, better sell sell sell! Oh, everything is mostly better, buy buy buy!
I guess in reality they aren’t tying these decisions to the market at all, but it sure feels that way. In reality, they just spend on anything they want but use that as an excuse to oppose anything they dislike.
CraigM
4579
Exactly my thoughts. Infrastructure can be a big benefit to society, this is a poor use of those funds.
Djscman
4580
I know where you’re coming from, but I think that putting more emphasis on the popular vote isn’t helpful. It’s like tracking hits in a baseball game instead of runs scored. To me, Hillary ran a great and very close campaign, and lost by (by my idiosyncratic tally) 550,482 votes. That’s the sum of the difference of the votes of the three states in which Jill Stein called for a recount, plus an extra vote per state to tie and one more vote per state to won. In Ohio, the margin was 454,983; in Pennsylvania, 68,236; in Wisconsin, 27,257. There were other close states that went for Hillary by a narrow margin, too, of course.
It was a close race, and I wouldn’t call her a bad candidate, even though there were many voters that would never, ever vote for her.
Trump’s war of words with Mexico has led to Pena Nieto to cancel his trip to DC next week - which is probably what Trump wanted all along.
We have now seen our first major international incident that happened via Twitter. Expect more.
Enidigm
4582
Twitter has to be thinking “holy shit, what do we do here?”. I’m guessing they’re just going to hunker down and become like the post office, stop enforcing rules and let Twitter become a free for all conversation medium and not make any political statements or alignments whatsoever.
LockerK
4583
There’s no sum of money Twitter could pay to get the kind of user engagement our Tirefire-in-Chief is providing. They won’t do a thing.
Enidigm
4584
It would be great, in other words, if Silicon Valley stood up to Trump and these movements. But I think you’ll see them just go along with things. They’ve all been happy to go along with whatever the Chinese government demands, I doubt they’ll be any better here.
TBH, at this stage it might be better to witness what happens publicly on Twitter rather than trust in leaked info from The White House after the fact, or god forbid, an official press briefing from Spice for Brains.
