Tag: national debt

Munda’s Theme Music

Hot, I say, hot. Munda, June 9, 2025, will be anywhere from 99 to 103 F in Ashlandia. Where would we be as a civilized society without electricity and A/C?

It’s already a helluva week and it’s just Munda. Wildfires still burn in Canada. We have protestors in Los Angeles facing off against National Guard. Gov. Newsom of California is asking the guard to be removed. Trump, of course, will thumb his nose at that. There’s a more general feeling that Trump is eager for this situation and unmindful of law or violence. There’s also a question of legality. From what we’ve seen of TACO, doing illegal acts bothers him less than lying. So the whole question is probably destined for the Roberts Court. I won’t guess about how they’ll respond. Besides that, there have been several fatal aircraft accidents, part of a disturbing trend for 2025. On the weather side, Hurricane Barbara has emerged. Fortunately for the U.S., it’s not expected to nail our nation, but unfortunately for Mexico, the same can’t be said.

Still disturbing the political horizon is the ridiculously named “One Big Beautiful Bill”. The longer it storms, the worse the bill seems to be. Many are angry about its impact on Medicaid. Others, like former First Bro. Elon Reeve Musk, complains that it will add to the deficit and is loaded with pork. The Congressional Budget Office say it will add trillions to the national debt. More people are angry that there’s a stipulation in the bill that will keep Trump administration officials from being declared in contempt of court. Others, like Marjorie Taylor-Green, voted for the bill but is now upset that it strips states from the ability to regulate Artificial Intelligence. Bitcoin marketeers are excited about the bill because many of them believe it’ll led to hyperinflation and the potential to rebase the US economy from the dollar to crypto.

As they say, time will tell.

Moreover, against these events, June 14 is Saturday, a perfect storm of TACO celebrating himself with a military parade for his birthday. It’s all about his ego. TACO has never served in the military but he feels that he should be honored with a military parade. This, from a man who frequently insults military veterans. He’s planning this parade while complaining about fraud, waste, and abuse, using that as a reason to chop up government agencies, don’t you know. That parade is expected to cost anywhere from 25 million to over 100 million dollars. Depends on what’s included, and who’s doing the addition. Either way, a penny over a dollar is too much and runs wholly and rudely counter to Republican squeaking about ‘the deficit’. That’s the way they always are.

Countering the TACO parade, several organizations are coming together in mass protests against TACO and his positioning via strongarm tactics and lawlessness as either a king, dictator, or PINO for life. Besides that, it’s Father’s Day on Sunday.

Watching events in Los Angeles, I ended up with Led Zeppelin and “Immigrant Song” in the morning mental music stream. The song’s been used in several movies, like School of Rock, Thor: Ragnorak, and Shrek the Third, so people who wouldn’t regularly know it are familiar with its driving staccato beat and Robert Plant’s wailing. Immigration, of course, has always been about trying to find a better place, and so it is the case with this song. On the issue’s converse side, the inhabitants of existing places often had something to say about immigrants coming into ‘their’ land.

Coffee is at hand again. I’m getting out of reality and slipping into story-telling and writing mood, somewhere were greed and evil is successfully countered, unlike the shitshow that we call reality. Y’all have a good one. Cheers

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Wenzda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Was anyone surprised that the United States Air Force accepted the gift aircraft from Qatar? The question answers itself.

What is interesting is what red news sites such as OANN and RedState said about it: nothing.

Yes, nothing. Surprised? No. They know accepting this gift will further enshittify the United States. They are aiding and abetting Trump’s support but saying nothing at all about it. We can deduce this because multiple celebrated MAGAts don’t like it.

In an interview with Fox News, Republican Sen. John Kennedy said, “I trust Qatar like I trust a rest stop bathroom. If they want to be friendly, I want to be friendly back. But with those guys, you know, trust in God, but tie up your camel.”

Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, criticized Trump’s $400-million gift on his podcast, saying, “Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, all the rest, that’s not America First.” He continued, “If you want President Trump to succeed, this kind of skeezy stuff needs to stop.”

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, an avid supporter of Trump, even expressed hesitancy about Trump’s $400 million gift. Graham said, “Air Force One is the symbol of America. When it lands or flies, it is America flying and landing. And I want to make sure that this whole thing is kosher. Time will tell.”

At this point, I’m actually for the Trump Regime accepting this aircraft. It’ll require years and chunks of money to refurbish it to use as Air Force One. As the economy crashes, inflation rises, the government misfires because of reduced personnel and mismanagement, unemployment rises, the wealthy enjoy more Republican tax breaks, the poor grow poorer, and the debt doesn’t doesn’t go down, this spending, along with spending on parades, golf, and poorly-thought out attacks on Trump critics, will help highlight how out of touch Trump and his GOTP are. How terrible they are at running the government. How misguided they are regarding freedom of the press, religion, and speech. The MAGA might wake up, although they’ll never sway their support until it’s all over but the crying. But independents and Democrats who thought they’d vote for Trump — i.e., the “Fuck Around and Find Out” horde — will awaken and may be pissed enough to actually act against Trump.

As Sen. Graham said, “Time will tell.”

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Tuesday’s Political Thoughts

TL/DR: The Trump/Vance mass deportation plan is morally abhorrent and fiscally disastrous, and Jamie Bouie has a column that effectively explains why.

Mr. Bouie’s column several days ago, Oct. 4, 2024, was The One Thing Not Named Trump That Trump Cares About. He captured what I’d been thinking about and addressing with friends and relatives. Jamie Bouie did it with a style and insightfulness which I lack.

The column begins, “The centerpiece of Donald Trump’s second-term domestic agenda is the mass deportation of what he and his campaign say are 20 million or even 25 million undocumented immigrants.”

JD Vance — and the GOP — are in lockstep with this policy. Mr. Bouie pulls together the disparate segments about the topic of mass deportation: what it would do to our economy in terms of labor and labor costs in different industries; and what it would mean to actually carry out such a project in concrete terms of those important elements of time, energy, and money. Citing information from a new American Immigration Council repot, Mr. Bouie brings the details:

“… a mass deportation plan designed to expel 13.3 million undocumented immigrants over about 10 years would crash the economy, immiserate millions of Americans and siphon nearly $1 trillion from the federal government.”

“To deport one million immigrants per year, the report says, “would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going toward building detention camps.” Even assuming some measure of “self-deportation,” the federal government would have to build “hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities to arrest, detain, process and remove” all targeted immigrants, at an estimated cost of $66 billion per year.

“On top of that, the government would need to spend $7 billion per year to conduct the arrests, $12.6 billion per year to carry out legal processing for arrestees and an average of $2.1 billion to remove these immigrants from the country. None of this includes the cost of personnel, which could raise the overall price tag quite a bit. “Even carrying out one million at-large arrests per year,” the report says, “would require ICE to hire over 30,000 new law enforcement agents and staff, instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government.” Assuming an average annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent, this deportation program would cost at least $967.9 billion over 10 years.“

I added the emphasis about the $1 trillion price tag. The GOP speaks with gusto about being financially responsible. Just recently, many Republicans in Congress voted against more funding for FEMA as hurricane season continues because of their concerns over the debt. Adding $1 trillion to our commitments must have them in a tizzy, right? They plan to lower taxes, so how are they planning to raise the cash to pay for their deportation wet dream while not incurring debt?

It’s critical to address this because this is typical of the lack of responsibility, increasing duplicity, and outright mendacity the GOP demonstrates under Trump. Lots of grand promises built on whipped cream pillars.

The American Immigration Council report notes:

  • “The construction and agriculture industries would lose at least one in eight workers, while in hospitality, about one in 14 workers would be deported due to their undocumented status.”
  • …”mass deportation would remove “more than 30 percent of the workers in major construction trades,” nearly “28 percent of graders and sorters of agriculture products” and “a fourth of all housekeeping cleaners.” 
  • “The federal government would lose tens of billions of dollars in federal taxes, including contributions to Social Security and Medicare. States and localities would lose more than $29 billion in tax revenue.”
  • “Overall, the American Immigration Council concludes, “mass deportation would lead to a loss of 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent of annual U.S. G.D.P., or $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars.” For comparison’s sake, the country’s G.D.P. shrank by 4.3 percent during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009.”

Beyond the economic and business impact, Jaimie Bouie brings up a more critical aspect about the morality of such a move like mass deportation.

“I’ve been discussing mass deportation as if it’s actual policy — as if it’s just one option among many for tackling the nation’s many challenges. But that’s absurd. Whether or not it works to fix the problems at hand, and it doesn’t, the mass deportation of 20 million to 25 million people — which is to say the forced detention and relocation of about 6 percent to 8 percent of the current U.S. population — is a human rights abuse. It would make the United States a pariah state. And it would violate the fundamental principles of the American creed, the core belief that “all men are created equal,” that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Bingo. This is exactly why Trump is such a threat to U.S. democracy and freedom. To achieve his political ambitions, he’s willing to promote abdicating multiple basic tenets of our nation’s foundations.

And it’s so grindingly typical of the modern GOP. They’re employing doublespeak. Those of us fervently following the election campaigns and Project 2025 read of their intentions and see that they’re suggesting that to go forward, we must go backwards; to be free, we must imprison others; to follow the path set out by our nation’s founders, we must turn our backs on them.

Voting for Trump and this platform makes no sense unless you are backward, narrow-minded, bigoted, racist, and sexist, and lack critical thinking skills. Or you’re a one-issue voter, supporting, for example, ‘lower taxes’. So, tell me, or great thinker, how will the GOP accomplish their goals of mass deportation with lower taxes while reducing the debt?

Well, we know what will happen. The GOP will lower taxes for the wealthy and corporations, cause they’re the ‘wealth creators’ (a wholly disproven and laughable position). And they’ll raise taxes on the poor and middle class through service fees and local taxes. See Ohio as an example of how this works out.

The third and fourth reasons you might still vote for Trump is that ‘you like him’ (which, to me, goes back to being narrow-minded, bigoted, racist, and sexist), or as we’ve witnessing with too many voters these days, you’re not paying attention.

Read all of Jamie Bouie’s column please. And vote blue in this election cycle.

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