Showing posts with label Vivek Ramaswamy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vivek Ramaswamy. Show all posts

Thursday, December 19, 2024

A 2T Cut



Reducing the U.S. federal budget by $2 trillion is a significant task that would require carefully considered policy decisions and trade-offs. Here’s an outline of possible strategies across various sectors:

1. Discretionary Spending Cuts

  • Defense Spending: The U.S. defense budget is substantial, making it a prime area for targeted reductions. Potential savings could come from:
    • Reducing overseas military operations.
    • Closing underutilized military bases.
    • Cutting investments in redundant or outdated weapon systems.
    • Streamlining procurement processes.
  • Other Discretionary Programs: Identify and trim underperforming or duplicative federal programs in areas such as education, housing, and public works.

2. Mandatory Spending Adjustments

  • Healthcare Programs:
    • Reform Medicare and Medicaid to reduce costs, such as negotiating drug prices or promoting value-based care models.
    • Introduce means-testing for higher-income recipients of Medicare benefits.
  • Social Security:
    • Adjust the formula for benefits to account for longer life expectancy (e.g., gradually raising the retirement age).
    • Implement progressive benefit reductions for higher-income retirees.

3. Reforming Tax Expenditures

  • Tax expenditures are effectively government spending through the tax code (e.g., deductions, credits, and exemptions). Reforms could include:
    • Capping the mortgage interest deduction.
    • Limiting or phasing out tax breaks for specific industries (e.g., oil and gas subsidies).
    • Scaling back retirement savings incentives for high-income individuals.

4. Revenue Increases

  • Corporate Tax Reforms: Close loopholes and enforce a minimum effective tax rate for corporations.
  • Individual Tax Adjustments:
    • Raise income taxes on the wealthiest earners.
    • Implement a financial transaction tax on trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives.
  • Carbon Tax or Pollution Taxes: Generate revenue while promoting environmental goals.

5. Improving Efficiency and Reducing Waste

  • Increase investment in anti-fraud initiatives for government programs.
  • Improve oversight and reduce improper payments in Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.
  • Optimize government operations by leveraging technology to reduce overhead costs.

6. Growth-Oriented Policies

  • Encourage economic growth through infrastructure investments and education reform to increase productivity and tax revenues over time.
  • Pair budget cuts with initiatives to improve workforce participation and reduce dependency on government programs.

Considerations and Risks:

  • Economic Impact: Sudden, deep cuts could harm economic growth, especially in sectors reliant on federal spending.
  • Public Resistance: Many cuts may face opposition from voters and interest groups.
  • Fairness: Ensuring the burden of cuts and reforms is distributed equitably across income levels and regions is crucial.



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Saturday, November 30, 2024

30: DOGE



How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy. ......... Twelfth-century Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi River, had a central city about the size of London at the time. ....... The American Colonists and founders thought Native American societies were simple and primitive – but they were not. ........ Native American communities were elaborate consensus democracies, many of which had survived for generations because of careful attention to checking and balancing power. .......... As they formed these new and more dispersed societies, the people who had overthrown or fled the great cities and their too powerful leaders sought to avoid mesmerizing leaders who made tempting promises in difficult times. So they designed complex political structures to discourage centralization, hierarchy and inequality and encourage shared decision-making........... the oral history of the Osage Nation records that it once had one great chief who was a military leader, but its council of elder spiritual leaders, known as the “Little Old Men,” decided to balance that chief’s authority with that of another hereditary chief, who would be responsible for keeping peace. .......... Another way some societies balanced power was through family-based clans. Clans communicated and cooperated across multiple towns. They could work together to balance the power of town-based chiefs and councils. ........... Many of these societies required convening all of the people – men, women and children – for major political, military, diplomatic and land-use decisions. Hundreds or even thousands might show up, depending on how momentous the decision was. .......... In some societies, it was customary for the losing side to quietly leave the meeting if they couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the others. ........... Leaders generally governed by facilitating decision-making in council meetings and public gatherings. They gave gifts to encourage cooperation. They heard disputes between neighbors over land and resources and helped to resolve them. Power and prestige came to lie not in amassing wealth but in assuring that the wealth was shared wisely. Leaders earned support in part by being good providers. .......... The Native American democracy that the U.S. founders were most likely to know about was the Iroquois Confederacy. They call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the “people of the longhouse,” because the nations of the confederacy have to get along like multiple families in a longhouse. ........... In their carefully balanced system, women ran the clans, which were responsible for local decisions about land use and town planning. Men were the representatives of their clans and nations in the Haudenosaunee council, which made decisions for the confederacy as a whole. Each council member, called a royaner, was chosen by a clan mother. .............. The Haudenosaunee Great Law holds a royaner to a high standard: “The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans – which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will.” In council, “all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.” ............. The law said the ideal royaner should always “look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.” ............. Of course, people do not always live up to their values, but the laws and traditions of Native nations encouraged peaceful discussion and broad-mindedness. Many Europeans were struck by the difference. The French explorer La Salle in 1678 noted with admiration of the Haudenosaunee that “in important meetings, they discuss without raising their voices and without getting angry.” ......... Leaders looked ahead and sought to protect the well-being of every person, even those not yet born. The people, in exchange, had a responsibility to not enmesh their royaners in less serious matters, which the Haudenosaunee Great Law called “trivial affairs.”

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Sunday, November 24, 2024

24: DOGE

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Thursday, November 21, 2024

21: DOGE



Musk, Ramaswamy lay out plans for ‘mass’ federal layoffs, rule rollbacks under Trump Tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy said Wednesday that their brand-new government efficiency panel will identify “thousands” of regulations for President-elect Trump to eliminate, which they argue will justify “mass head-count reductions” across government. ...... “The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” they wrote. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” .......... Slashing regulations should allow for “at least” proportional cuts to the government workforce .......... “A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy” .......... “Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited” ............ Musk and Ramaswamy pointed to several recent Supreme Court decisions that have taken aim at the power of the administrative state, arguing that a “plethora of current federal regulations” exceed agency authority and could be on the chopping block. ............

“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy”

........... “Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited” ........... Musk and Ramaswamy preemptively addressed arguments about civil service protections that could potentially block Trump from firing federal workers. ......... “The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation,” they wrote. “But the statute allows for ‘reductions in force’ that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to ‘prescribe rules governing the competitive service.’ That power is broad.” ........ “With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” ........... Government workers are already mobilizing in the face of potential mass cuts, reportedly hiring lawyers and preparing public campaigns while also hoping Congress will step in ........... Musk has spent much of his time at the Palm Beach, Fla., resort over the past two weeks, reportedly weighing in on Trump’s Cabinet picks and attending meetings, including those with world leaders. ........ He also hosted Trump in Texas to observe the launch of a SpaceX rocket Tuesday afternoon.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decadeslong executive power grab. ....... Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections. ........... On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it. .......... The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic .......... We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs. .......... We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

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Friday, November 15, 2024

15: Vivek Ramaswamy

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Wednesday, November 13, 2024

‘$2 trillion’ Worth Of Waste

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Sunday, November 10, 2024

The Structure Of Trump's Victory

He won all so-called swing states. He has the Senate. He might as well get the House. And if he does not, I got to know Hakeem Jeffries before he ever ran for public office. :)

In a democracy, you try to read the political mandate. Trump has won a mandate. What does it mean? Different people will interpret it differently, of course.

(1) America In Decline

The slogan Make America Great Again can be seen as wanting to face the fact that America is in decline, but it does not have to be.

(2) Defunding NATO

This is not about not being serious about defense. This is about asking allies to foot the bill.

(3) The Border Blame

America has not just been a country of immigrants. It has been a country of illegal immigrants. When there were no airplanes, Europeans came to the American shore on boats, and they did not exactly have papers, and they were not exactly royalty. They tended to be the misfits. Illegal immigration rejuvenates America. It is not like they are increasing the quota for the legal ones, either. Crime is a separate topic. The crisis is the economy.

(4) The Bloated State

How do you downsize the permanent state? It's like, how do you build a wall? How do you deport 25 million people and still harvest food in Central Valley, California? How do you get rid of overregulation?

(5) Ukraine

North Korea, South Korea. Frozen conflict?

(6) Political Realignment

The composition has changed. More Hispanics coming in does not mean a bigger Democratic Party. It is not automatic. 2024 is proof.

(7) The Tariff War

Used to be the US government was funded not by taxes but by tariffs. That is ancient.

And, of course, there is a distinct possibility Trump is a bullshitter. "We will buid a wall and Mexico will pay for it." That was the promise in 2016. Was never going to happen.

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Wednesday, September 25, 2024

25: Vivek Ramaswamy

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Sunday, October 01, 2023

1: Vivek Ramaswamy

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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

12: Vivek Ramaswamy



Vivek Ramaswamy Leans Into His Hindu Faith to Court Christian Voters The Republican candidate for president makes a pitch that the faiths have much in common, but for many religious conservatives, the difference is a hurdle. ........ “I looked up his religion and saw he’s Hindu,” he recalled. “I was going to vote for him until that came up.” What the country needs is to be “put back under God,” as Mr. Smith sees it, and he doesn’t want to take a chance on someone who is not a Christian. ......... At that point, he said, “I got back on President Trump’s train.” ........ He mentioned Mr. Ramaswamy’s list of 10 core “truths,” the first of which is: “God is real.” (The second: “There are two genders.”) ......... “He welcomes the deeper questions.” Mr. Ramaswamy is polling under 5 percent in most recent national polls. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach has been to confront the issue directly and argue that he has more in common with observant Christians than they might think. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy said his faith taught him that Jesus was “a son of God, absolutely.” (That “a” is a sharp distinction from the central Christian belief that Jesus is the son of God. Hinduism is a fluid and expansive tradition, and many believers embrace scores of deities, with some seeing Jesus as one teacher or god.) ............... He frequently mentions his experience attending a “Christian school” in Cincinnati (St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school). And he contrasts “religions like ours,” which have stood the test of time, with the competing worldviews of “wokeism, climatism, transgenderism, gender ideology, Covidism,” as he put it to an audience in New Hampshire. ............. Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign has disseminated clips of an Iowa pastor comparing him to the biblical figure of King David ............. The biggest objective now, Mr. Brody said, is combating “cultural Marxism” and correcting the course of “a country gone haywire.” ............ “The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all,” Mr. Brody said. ........... About half of American Protestants now say they prefer to attend a church with people who share their political views .......... Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, took pains to depict his faith as monotheistic, in contrast to the stereotypes of its followers as “heathen” polytheists. Although the faith has many deities, they are generally subordinate to one ultimate “reality.” Many Hindus and scholars say its theology is too complex to be described as either wholly monotheistic or wholly polytheistic. .............. He sees Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch against “wokeism” as a way to counter stereotypes associating Hinduism with hippies, yoga and vegetarianism. ............. Many evangelical voters embraced the crude, thrice-married casino magnate not because he was one of them but because they believed he would fight in the public square on their behalf. ............. Most Indian Americans, including Hindus, are Democrats. But some conservatives see an opening with a population that prioritizes family life, marriage and education. ........ there were more similarities among committed believers across traditions than between serious and nominal adherents within the same faith. .



At a Fourth of July event in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli Army had attacked “the most legitimate target on the planet — people who would annihilate our country.” He was referring to months of armed resistance against Israeli settlers by young men in the Jenin refugee camp. ......... More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance. .......... a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.......... With the absence of any hope for statehood, and with no viable political leadership to lead the struggle, some take matters into their own hands through armed and unarmed forms of resistance, others are apathetic or preoccupied with the crippling effort to support their families, and many live in fear. ........ In 2002, though round after round of American-mediated negotiations had faltered, there was still the hope — and the expectation — that a peace process would resume. The two-state solution was touted as the only option for peace. The framework of territorial partition — that Israel would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors — was the dominant policymaking approach. ........... With Hamas’s rise to power in 2006, Israel, in coordination with Egypt, tightened a hermetic blockade on the strip, effectively severing it from the rest of Palestine, and experimented with military techniques to force the population into submission. .......... Alongside food restriction policies and an economic chokehold, this took the form of devastating military assaults. The military referred to this doctrine as “mowing the lawn,” the approach of using disproportionate military force to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance and manage a restive population chafing against Israeli control. ............ Last week, Israel turned this military approach, perfected in the Gaza Strip, onto the West Bank, as it cordoned off the refugee camp in Jenin, pummeled it from the air and ground and destroyed crucial infrastructure for water and electricity as a form of collective punishment. ........... In the time between the two invasions of Jenin, Palestinians throughout the West Bank have been systematically funneled — through land expropriation, home demolitions and expansion of settlements — into isolated urban centers surrounded by land occupied by Israel. Just like Gaza, most urban centers in the West Bank can now be, overnight, entirely severed from the ecosystem around them, as was witnessed in Jenin. ........... The transformation of Israeli political culture that accelerated after the violence of the second intifada and the impunity Israel enjoys internationally have culminated in the most right-wing government in Israeli history. .......... what Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has called “a regime of Jewish supremacy” in all the areas under their control. .............. a singular constant: Israel’s ability to sustain its settlement of Palestinian territory without accountability, while equating Palestinian resistance to terrorism ........ That this framing has long been accepted among the major Western powers is particularly galling for Palestinians in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where resistance to illegal occupation is hailed as heroic and supported by Western weapons and military training. .

The Next Battle Over Colorblindness Has Begun . Race gaps characterize nearly every dimension of U.S. life: life expectancy, maternal mortality, employment rates, income, wealth, environmental exposures, criminal justice involvement and many others. Policymakers routinely seek to close these gaps, even when debating policies that aren’t directly about race, such as environmental regulations, health policy and criminal justice reform. ......... a healthy democracy requires open debate. In a country shaped throughout its history by racial discrimination and disparity, excluding race from policy debate would impoverish our discourse and threaten to delegitimize the political process. .

The reason is that not all bomblets explode as they’re meant to, and thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie around for years, even decades, before somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off. The weapons used today by Russia and Ukraine are said to leave as many as 40 percent duds lying around, and they will remain a threat to the people of Ukraine, no matter the outcome of this conflict. ........ As of today, 123 nations — including many of America’s allies — have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions. ......... But not Russia or Ukraine or the United States, which used cluster munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the United States actively opposed the treaty. ....... Together, these three nations have more than a billion cluster munitions stockpiled, far more than the number of weapons expected to be destroyed.” .......... But as the fighting dragged on and Ukraine proved increasingly capable of standing up to Russia, line after line has been crossed, with Washington and its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons like the Patriot air-defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and soon the F-16 jet fighter. ......... There is a legitimate debate about whether this amounts to the sort of mission creep that marked conflicts in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Sending cluster munitions to Ukraine amounts to a clear escalation of a conflict that has already become far too brutal and destructive. But the greater issue here is sharing a weapon that has been condemned by a majority of the world’s nations, including most of America’s close allies, as morally repugnant for the indiscriminate carnage it can cause long after the combatants have gone.

The John Roberts Two-Step Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions. ....... while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. .......... I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race). .......... “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” ..........

the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race.

......... To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize. ......... When read in its entirety, the dissent gives a picture of Harlan not as a defender of equality, but as someone who thinks the Constitution can secure hierarchy and inequality without the assistance of state law. It’s not that segregation was wrong but that, in Harlan’s view, it was unnecessary.

DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool........ once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive. ....... Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. ........ I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian......... Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.

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