I'm not the first one to see parallels to the Cultural Revolution. Policies like purging the intelligentsia and sending educated urban people to go work in the fields weren't motivated by any thought out plan, but by an irrational sense of resentment against "elites" and a desire for "purity".
This probably won't end with millions of Americans starving to death, but I'm sure the administration is hard at work looking for ways to destroy our seed corn.
Arts/academia/sciences are being disciplined for thought crimes and will learn one way or another through this coercion to bend the knee, it explains the crackdown on student protests against Israeli genocide, science funding, the arts takeover, using all the federal levers of funding and immigration.
Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]
People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
Right now, if Trump has his way, people under $150k will pay no income tax, no tax on tips, increased tax on millionaire earners, and tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs.
Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers. He is clearly bent on the idea of abolishing democracy so he can be the king of America savior of the factory worker.
He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.
When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.
Trump says everything basically and then just repeats what his MAGA crowd cheers the loudest about. "Trump said..." isn't a meaningful indicator of his intent, his beliefs, or his "plan".
> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]
This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.
Not sure why you're downvoted. It's part of Trumps schtick. He says contradicting ideas, and since everyone knows he lies, people pick the idea they want to believe. Pretty wild actually.
Where's Trump's socialized medicine plan? That's by far the most populist desire of populist America. It's very easy to get caught up in the name of things and not look at it substantively, which is what you seem to be attacking the other poster for.
Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.
The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.
I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.
>People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.
I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base that obviously they are right, and obviously the other side is just evil).
I'm not sure how your post doesn't fall for exactly what you claim to be criticizing. You do not engage with the substance of anything I said and instead just name call.
I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.
The thing about populism is that it doesn't require any plans as such. You can just say things like, "we'll have the best healthcare system in the world, you've never seen healthcare as good as what I'm going to give you, I guarantee it!".
For as long as you have the cult of personality going, anyway. Which is plenty of time to put your men in key positions of power for when your charisma is no longer convincing enough.
It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism. To them it is an oxymoron.
Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.
Once again you are just talking about "left" and "right" not engaging with anything I discussed while accusing me of being in denial of "right wing populism" which is facially not the case.
I don't "not believe" in right wing populism, I disagree with your assertions of how it functions and what its goals are and how that relates to your notion that populists want the same thing regardless of whether they are "left" or "right" and that it's just "different paths."
>It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism.
This isn't even remotely true. What "left"ist stuff are you reading?
I don't particularly care about anything Trump says. He says a lot of things. A lot of what he says is just outright lies. A lot of what he says is just to make a particular audience happy at a particular point in time, and ends up having little relation to any actions he ends up taking. Even when it seems likely that something he says is something he actually wants to do, he'll walk it back in a heartbeat and pretend the opposite was his position all along, if he believes doing so will make him look better.
What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.
(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)
It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")
As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.
He is a billionaire himself, his admin has the most billionaires of any admin ever. He passed tariffs, which are a direct tax on the working class, he passed massuve tax cuts profiting mostly the wealthy, he cut every welfare programs which only benefit the poor.
> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]
He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1.
> He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.
Of course not. Why would anyone get the idea that Trump is working for billionaires? It's not as if he hawked cars on the White House lawn for the world's richest man.
According to the national debt clock, we're at around 36.8T in debt. I don't know if that's his motivation or not, but we're not starting all this from a balanced budget.
Trump cannot raise taxes, he only can impose tariffs under laws that Congress could rescind if they wished to, and only Congress can change tax laws. Trump also took both sides on issues while campaigning and low info voters ate it up and ignored the parts they did not like, it's the gish gallop, and Trump never stops campaigning with rallies even after winning office. Nothing that he says matters, it's what actions they have taken that matter. The bill in Congress now does not have anything like what he said yesterday about raising taxes on millionaires.
The thought leaders within the Trump administration simply hate academia. They've said it out loud over and over. Folks like Yarvin or Rufo would like the university system in the US to be reduced to smoldering ash and replaced with ideologically focused universities that exist to teach particular religious, social, and economic values.
The issue is not that they don't like the NSF in general or that science funding is breaking the bank. The issue is that people they hate rely on the NSF.
This is a pretty old belief system amongst conservatives. God and Man at Yale was published seventy years ago and argued that universities should actively teach that Christ is divine and that free market capitalism is the best thing ever at all times and in all venues.
There are very few places an administration can cut costs without touching entitlements. Until voters stop punishing politicians for raising the retirement age or trimming wasteful healthcare spending, they will cut the discretionary budget.
Social security is entirely self funded, has a large surplus in the form of the SS Trust Fund (that’s being spent down) and has contributed $0 to the deficit or debt. You should really learn the basic facts about something like that if you’re going to support cuts to the program.
The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter. It's gone and spent.
The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
> The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter.
"Numbers on a spreadsheet" is meaningless, you just described functionally all of accounting for the entire economy, and if that's a reason it "doesn't matter" then the debt also "doesn't matter" because it's also just numbers on a spreadsheet. What do you think nearly all money is?
> It's gone and spent.
Simply, factually wrong. If so, then so's your 401k. And all the money in your bank account.
> The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.
You're wrong about Social Security (and medicare, for that matter) contributing to the budget deficit, so you're trying to change the topic to "is social security's funding fair?"
The SS trust fund produced a surplus. Boomers then spent the entire surplus on their own deficit spending. There is no actual cash in a bank — it was put on a spreadsheet and then spent on other budget priorities — wars, military, medicaid, everything else.
The SS trust fund was one of the main reasons the US could spend profligately for the past couple decades!
The SS Trust Fund is NOT A BANK ACCOUNT. I cannot emphasize this enough. The money got spent.
Now, boomers are retiring and demanding that money — which they already spent — back again. That's absurd double spending which impacts young taxpayers as inflation or deficit spending.
You have fallen for propaganda aimed at getting people to not give a shit when republicans try to end Social Security.
The money didn't "get spent", it's invested. If that counts as "got spent" then your savings account also "got spent" (funding loans) and your retirement accounts also "got spent" (buying bonds, treasuries, securities) so you can go ahead and sign those over to me since they're empty anyway—right?
If the money had been spent then it would have reduced deficit spending by that much, but it didn't, because that spending was funded by debt (some of which the SS trust fund owns). If that isn't "real" then the entire debt isn't real so who cares if anything contributes to it?
The money is lent to the federal government via Treasuries. As the surplus is spent, it will directly decrease the funding for the government deficit, increasing the cost for the government to service its debt. The original poster is wrong since the surplus is real, but spending down this surplus will still cost the government a lot. And even if it didn't, Social Security will burn its entire reserve in 10 years and be forced to cut benefits by 20% in 10 years or be forced to spend trillions to maintain its current level deficit.
It's true to the same extent that redeeming any treasuries "contributes to the deficit". The only way that is meaningfully true in the context of "how do we reduce the deficit?" is if we're willing to not repay our debt and if that's the case, the entire issue is moot.
Framing it that was is just priming us for the government to actually empty the account by defaulting on that debt, i.e. rendering the assets owned by the fund worthless.
It's true in the same way that it's true to say that cars can fly, which is to say, that it's way more true to say that no, they cannot, even if yes, sure, the other thing is "true".
Maybe you should have organized your argument at the outset instead of leading with baity statements and then trying to leverage the attention for your 'real' argument. I am sick to death of this sort of manipulative discourse. It's bullshit and wastes everyone else's time.
Society isn't going back to old people eating dogfood, a child labor workforce, and people being denied basic healthcare. Adjust to reality and make it work, or the masses will make it work but it won't benefit anyone how we get there.
Argentina tried this. The rich people were just fine (they mostly left). The masses are the ones who ended up poor and fucked. Adjust to reality and fix the system, or you end up the same place.
Some of your comments in this subthread were arguably unfairly downvoted and flagged, as you were making valid points, but you fanned the flames with some activating language, most notably this:
> Lol what an internet tough guy.
Please take care to read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
defense is squarely not a government responsibility. not federal at least. state militias and small arms in the second amendment are respectively nainle for US defense
The amount they plan on raising defense spending by more than cancels all other things we plan to save, even before considering tax cuts. At the current rate, the national deficit (rate of growth of national debt) is expected to be about double what it was (on average, over four years) compared to the last presidency.
Not to mention that the Department of Defense has never passed a financial audit in the last seven years and money frequently disappears into contractors who are known to delay projects on purpose to make more money.
They're pushing a 55% budget cut. There is absolutely no universe in which you can justify that with rhetoric around "DEI" science. This is going to cut very, very deep into basic STEM / biomedical research.
They're cancelling mRNA research, they're flagging research that uses words like "trauma" or studies how medications impact men and women differently. There's no sensible agenda behind all of this, it's just backlash and destruction done haphazardly. This is no different from the Department of Defense deleting the Tuskegee Airmen from the website because "DEI", except far far more consequential.
I'd be interested in discovering what the breakdown is, DEI vs non-DEI, but I wouldn't be surprised if this move was to censor climate change research, since this administration doesn't consider climate change to be real.
Nonsense. NSF awards are all public. If you could actually give enough examples of these "extremely large" awards to constitute 55% of the NSF budget you would have.
So after the first simple question, we're already at less than half the original claimed figure of 55% (a bad sign for its credibility, if you're a Bayesian!).
But more importantly, I'm familiar with the linked document, and it's garbage. It was thrown together practically overnight to justify a political decision that had already been made, and in its incompetent haste, flagged proposals that had phrases like "diversity of sources" that had nothing to do with DEI and included them in the totals. Not a credible source.
I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.
Even the word "siphoned" is loaded with bias. Is research aimed at understanding why kids choose to participate in high-school science classes or not, and whether certain teaching approaches lead to better outcomes for boys vs girls, not legitimate NSF research? We can't make improvements to science education without that kind of data.
That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science.
Completely aside from the incompetent misidentification of which proposals have anything to do with race, gender, or sexuality (hint: it's a lot less than 25%), the staggeringly stupid premise that all of them are inherently politically-motivated is part of the problem here.
They literally categorized research as DEI ("Status") if it had the keywords "HISTORICALLY", "EXCLUSIVE", "INSTITUTIONAL", "STATUS", "BARRIER" and on and on...these are not serious people.
They're not spending 55% of their budget on unnecessary administration. Though ironically, having their ideological crusaders check every science paper that mentions the word "bias"[1] to check that it doesn't also mention minorities they wish to normalise bias against will probably increase the administrative overhead...
[1]I think it's probably fair to assume that whoever concluded the word "bias" indicated a likelihood the paper was "woke" struggled with high school statistics and has never read an academic paper of any sort...
The research that NSF funds is not in competition to private companies, it's mostly basic research. To the contrary, it's part of an important pipeline for training young scientists. And many of those later will work e.g. in pharma companies.
Big pharma has thrived by letting public sector R&D do basic discovery that's high risk, and then pick up the successful projects as part of public-private commercialization programs.
Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.