If I call the interest on my debt “squander” and “waste,” can I also write an agenda piece for a conservative propaganda outlet and call it “news?”
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Absolutely.
Now I just have to put in something about how it’s all because of the transgender pedophile agenda and it’ll surely get published!
You'll have your own Fox News show before the end of the day!
Yes, just start a YouTube channel and Twitter account. You'll almost certainly see some level of success.
Gotta be easier than getting a Twitch or OF rolling. You don't even need to say anything original. Just copy shit from other right-wing grifters, make it your own, and you're set.
Twitch or OF are more fun, but conservative grift is a lot easier.
I'm fairly irritated at myself to report that I just wasted half an hour of my life looking through Rand Paul's report in detail, because I was curious how he managed to arrive at $900 billion dollars. I spent some time with Google Sheets and trying to de-obfuscate his numbers. I'll cut to the punch line. It's:
- $659 billion in interest on the national debt
- $236 billion in "improper federal payments" -- basically, money that the federal government erroneously paid out to people it realized it shouldn't have ever given it to in the first place. This number is, apparently, actually real, and I sort of agree with Paul that it sounds big enough to be a problem. I will note that the number went monotonically up all through the Trump years, up to a peak of over $300 billion, and monotonically down through all through the Biden years.
- $851 million on all the rest of this culture-war bullshit aside from those two single line items
Or, to put it in visual form:
Everything in any news story, about Egypt or lobster tanks or transgender monkeys or whatever, is part of the orange slice of the chart.
Good post. Thanks for doing that.
Transgender monkey research sounds pretty interesting actually, ngl.
A couple things are worth critiquing, like hundreds of millions of military equipment lost to the elements. No idea how preventable that was. The COVID relief fraud stuff isn’t really new though.
If you want to bring down the debt though, here’s an idea: tax the wealthy.
Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills; photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds; the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear; $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development; and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to "struggling" music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.
Oh, so it's culture-war bullshit. Neat.
"Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,"
Oooooh... okay, I get it now. It's a desperate attempt to find a catchy and memorable thing to blame that isn't "we give money to rich people by the trillions and tax them less than we do the electricians." $6 million is like a week's worth of lost tax revenue from any one of 500 different companies. But sure, tourism in Egypt is the problem. Everyone please remember that.
$200 million to “struggling” music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne.
Ok, Rand. Now tell us how many of them are not Post Malone, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne, but artists who are, in fact, struggling.
Yeah. The US government is one of the biggest and most byzantine entities on the planet. You're going to be able to find some bullshit in there if you look. But that doesn't all of a sudden mean this culture-war pettiness is the whole problem, and the tax breaks and giveaways for the rich and the Death Star defense budget all of a sudden aren't relevant to the discussion.
Honestly, if there's a government program that can help a dude that busks in the subway buy a new saxophone or whatever, good. There should be. Art is important and so are artists.