All good, happy to have a debate on ideas and actions that avoids name calling etc.
I do think it’s a simplistic injustice to brand the “MAGA” base as you have, which I know is how it is portrayed on CNN and the like. We are talking about a majority of the US population after all, not some fringe group of wackos. It is this type of condescension from the other side which actually drives people the other way. I have also made the point elsewhere that being “well educated” these days may not be as reflective of intelligence as it once was, given it seems to produce indoctrinated group think rather than critical thinking skills.
On immigrants, it is more accurate to talk of “illegal immigrants” which is the focus on ICE activities. Trump is simply doing what all Presidents have done up until Biden (including Obama) which is enforce border laws. If you disagree with strong borders, that is another debate.
On tariffs, not sure what free money generation refers to, but my understanding is that Trump is attempting to correct decade long trade imbalances which have effectively destroyed much of the American manufacturing sector. That seems like a reasonable objective for an American President. On a related note, I see that US blue collar wages have recently increased by their largest amount in over 60 years.
On DOGE and cost cutting, again Trump is trying to address a long term problem which threatens to bring the whole system down - out of control debt. Total US debt is now $36 trillion, up 30% since 2019, and reflects the interest bill on decades long budget deficits driven by over spending. With credit ratings looking to downgrade credit ratings, the situation will only get worse and there will have to be a reckoning at some point. However, the political situation in the US is such that there is unlikely to be bipartisan support for the meaningful cuts in expenditure that are required. The opposition to the relatively minor DOGE cuts is a case in point.
On Seibold, that sounds like something we can and do agree on 😀
I look forward to chatting more if you are so inclined. This type of debate tends to get a bit heated on here (somewhat understandably) so it’s refreshing to just toss ideas back and forth without rancour.
Cheers
Nice, glad we agree on Manly
🙂
I think I’ve seen too many hateful comment sections that I jumped into this head first. It is refreshing to just chat about different perspectives
Well typically I am not a very political person; Australia is at a stage where both parties are fairly stable and stick pretty close to centre. My belief is that this is largely due to our system of mandatory voting; whereby popular parties try appeal to the popular ideas (i.e. average person's).
In America, however, the political parties are tasked with captivating a subset of the population. Hence the people with more passionate views (left or right) are more inclined to vote than those sitting in the middle. For example, Trump won the popular vote with 49.8% (Kamala 48.3%), yet only 65.3% of the eligible voting population actually voted. Multiply those together and Trump becomes president with the support of 32.5% of the eligible voting population.
I've always been interested by history, hence why this has peaked my interest so much despite generally not having strong political views. I think this whole anti-intellectual movement is the main red flag. It is the turning point that paved the way for so many dictatorships (Nazi book burning, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge shutting down schools, universities and moving urban communities to farmland). The idea is that these groups only succeeded once they were able to discredit people who studied years to understand their fields.
I come at this from the perspective of having studied mechanical engineering, whereas most of my friends are tradies. I can engineer stuff safer and more complex than they could, sure. But on the same note I would look like a sore thumb if all of a sudden I had to do their trade without spending the years going to TAFE and learning it as they did. For the online MAGA community and US government press conferences I get the sense they feel experts (eg. economists, engineers, doctors) are 'waste', but without being experts themselves how could they have the insight to determine that?
Why is someone an expert while others aren’t? To me an ‘expert’ is just someone that has been wrong many times along the way while learning about a specific field. Typically by that point they become well aware that they are never always right. Yet when they are wrong, it is at least based on prior knowledge and understanding. I do think Politicians fall in a grey area, where their competence/conscience cannot always be trusted.
It can be simultaneously true that a) im
not better than my tradie friends, yet b) cars/planes/control systems should
not be designed by them. So when it comes to things such as DOGE; saving is a totally fine (and expected) premise, but efficiency implies a robust, well-conceived method. Governments do spend a lot, yet there are also studies suggesting this is important for strong economies / cash flow. US accrues debt like money grows on trees, absolutely. Yet, despite DOGE initially claiming they were going to cut $2 trillion, as of early march it was determined to be closer to $8billion. But summarising it in a single metric is not really feasible because it’s a time-dependant thing. For example, with cutting library funding they alleviate some short term cost, but if I’m not mistaken that industry generates $7 for every $1 they spend (in the US) so what’s the effect in six months time? Governments traditionally need to invest to stimulate their economy
That’s not to mention the instances where they were caught out recording things multiple times, or claiming to have cut contracts that were already set to expire.
W.R.T to the government systems, any senior data engineer would tell us that these would take a long, long time to fully understand. They are designed as they are to safeguard corruption and replacing extensive data systems is no job for AI.
In the end, US does have serious problems (wealthy vs poor, health system, debt, gun violence). For being the richest country in the world, they should not be so disjointed. I think median income is $200k compared to $500k mean (high due to the wealthier people driving it up). I understand people looking toward more authoritarian style leaders with big promises.
