Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, April 4, 2025 14:07
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VIEWED: 13350
PAGE 27 of 27

Thursday, April 3, 2025 12:50 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Speaking of evil people...

Quote:
Far-Left Maryland Lawmakers Pass Reparations Bill While Financial Crisis Looms

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Thursday, April 3, 2025 1:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?

Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.

By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some [?????] negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world.

When we were the only remaining industrial economy after WWII ... and for the longest time the largest ... international trade was beneficial. But international trade was also killing the goose that laid golden eggs. The creation of the "Rust Belt" began in the 70s and was a harbinger of things to come.

Quote:
Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America ...

Period.

Foreign governments SHOULDN'T make policies that help America (to their detriment) if their leaders are minding their own national interests. The only way we have gotten nations to sacrifice is by regime change, threats, and bribery.

Quote:
tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.

I was wondering how they came up with those numbers.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Thursday, April 3, 2025 1:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're going to find out, so I'll take what ends up happening as the truth over the people you quote that denied we were in a recession for the better part of Joe Biden*'s administration, and it cost about $9 Trillion to keep up the illusion that we weren't in that amount of time.

You are a simple minded fool.

If Trump and his team are as simple minded as you, then we're in a world of hurt and Democrats will rise from the grave.

If not, you're going to look really stupid again. Just like you always do.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?

Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.

By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

National Debt in 1934: $27 Billion

National Debt in 2024: $35,464 Billion

Shut the fuck up, Paul.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, April 3, 2025 7:17 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love how riled up Trump has gotten our idiots.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trump is imposing tariffs because American democracy is no longer strong enough to stop him.

By Zack Beauchamp | Apr 3, 2025, 3:15 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/407053/trump-tariff-expensive-democracy-a
uthoritarianism-breakdown

One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.

Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.

Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.

For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.

Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.

Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe.

And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 6:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 6:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How a Con Man President Is Destroying Confidence

By Paul Krugman / Apr 4, 2025 at 5:32 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-a-con-man-president-is-destroyi
ng

Normally, I don’t believe in confidence.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, “confidence” was the first refuge of scoundrels. That is, the supposed need to retain or restore confidence was constantly invoked as a reason to pursue destructive policies. If you argued for adequate stimulus to fight the Great Recession, you were told that this would undermine confidence. If you argued against austerity that would block economic recovery, you were told that slashing spending would actually boost the economy, because it would inspire confidence — a claim I mocked as belief in the “confidence fairy.”

The truth is that most of the time you should evaluate economic policies based on what they actually do, not with speculation about how you imagine they will affect confidence.

But this isn’t most of the time. This is the third year of the second Trump presidency — OK, it’s actually only part way through the third month, but it feels like years. And Trump is in the process of showing that a sufficiently chaotic and incompetent government can, in fact, do enough damage to confidence to inflict serious economic harm.

The most telling indicator here isn’t the plunging stock market — Paul Samuelson’s old jibe about the market having predicted nine of the last five recessions still applies. It is, instead, the plunging value of the dollar:

Source: xe.com

Standard economic analysis says that tariffs strengthen a nation’s currency. If the United States puts taxes on imports, this discourages businesses and consumers from buying foreign goods, which reduces the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market and should drive the value of the dollar up.

In fact, the normal effect of tariffs on the exchange rate was one of the reasons to doubt that the Trump tariffs would help U.S. manufacturing: A stronger dollar would make U.S. producers less competitive, offsetting the protective effects of the tariffs. And as you can see in the chart above, investors drove the dollar up after Trump’s election win, partly because they believed that tariffs would have their usual effect.

But the dollar fell once investors began to see Trump policy in action. Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.

Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment? Everyone is going to sit on their hands, waiting for clarity that may never come.

Wait, it gets worse. You might have expected a lot of careful thought to go into the biggest change in U.S. trade policy since the republic was founded:

But since Trump delivered his Rose Garden remarks, we’ve had a series of revelations about how slapdash and amateurish an operation this was. Trump declared that he was imposing tariffs on nations “that treat us badly”:

[W]e will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers, and other forms of cheating.

But we soon learned that no such calculation had taken place. Trump’s tariffs were, instead, determined by a crude, and, well, stupid formula that made no economic sense. It’s still an open question whether that formula was determined by some junior staffer or derived from ChatGPT and Grok.

Maybe the next movie in the Terminator franchise will be “Terminator: Trade War,” in which Skynet realizes that it doesn’t have to destroy humanity with nuclear bombs, it can accomplish its goals simply by giving bad economic advice.

An aside: Did anyone think about how to enforce wildly different tariffs on different countries, when it would be easy to transship goods? The Republic of Ireland, which is part of the European Union, is supposed to face a 20 percent tariff, while Northern Ireland, part of Britain, faces only a 10 percent rate. So can Irish exporters cut their tariffs in half by shipping goods out of Belfast? Will there be elaborate rules of origin to prevent this? And who will devise and enforce these rules?

Actually, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to my question: No, nobody thought about that, because there wasn’t time. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House didn’t even settle on the idea of country-specific tariffs until the day before the big announcement.

Again, the biggest trade policy change in history, hastily and sloppily thrown together at the last minute.

It’s no wonder, then, that confidence has taken a big hit. If you ask me, however, I’d say that confidence is still too high: business still hasn’t grasped how bad things are. For while tariffs are dominating the news right now, they’re part of a broader pattern of malignant stupidity. It may take a while before we see the effects of DOGE’s destruction of the government’s administrative capacity, or RFK Jr.’s destruction of health policy, but we will see those effects eventually.

And Republicans have just confirmed Dr. Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid. What could go wrong?

Personally, I’m feeling very confident. That is, I have high confidence in predicting that we’re heading for multiple policy trade wrecks, inflicting damage like you’ve never seen before.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 7:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

More fearmongering from the Dead Clinton/Obama party.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 4, 2025 7:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.

1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.

We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 4, 2025 10:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.

1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.

We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.

Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts

By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 10:14 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.

1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.

We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.

Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts

By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nah.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, April 4, 2025 10:26 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
More fearmongering from the Dead Clinton/Obama party.

Nobody cares.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

The Democrats should stop with mongering and go with pure fear: make Trumptards poorer to stampede the herd of retards. The kind of people who are lazy and dumb enough to vote for Trump are the kind who lack resiliency when faced with adversity. They want Trump to save them from financial and personal problems because they lack the energy to save themselves. 6ix is an example -- withdrawing from life. Living a minimalist existence. But other Trumptards withdraw by divorcing their wives, seeking sex from strangers, and taking up drug habits and alcoholism.

What Happened to Trump’s Meme Coin After He Announced His Tariffs?

By Noor Al-Sibai | Apr 3, 3:52 PM EDT

https://futurism.com/trump-meme-coin-tariffs

Donald Trump's eponymous meme coin is worth less than ever in the wake of his tariffs finally being launched.

Less than 24 hours after the president announced the long-anticipated reciprocal trade tariffs on domestic imports, his $TRUMP cryptocurrency's value dropped to a meager $9 per token.

That's a new all-time low — and remember, it was only launched about 10 weeks ago ahead of the real estate scion being sworn in for a second time.

Obviously, there are far bigger concerns afoot than the president's shitcoin tanking — but you have to admit that it's pretty hilarious that it's happening this way.

Still, the debacle illustrates that Trump's nonsensical trade war isn't just hurting the entire global economy, which has essentially been lit on fire by the tariffs, but even his own business interests.

Ironically, the tariff announcement came just after news broke that the Trump coin would be "unlocking" 40 million tokens, or 20 percent of its locked-down supply, later in April. It's the first time the memecoin has held such an event since its launch in January and could, theoretically, have generated the kind of buzz that would drive its value up.

Instead, it made nary a blip — and after the tariff-induced price slump, it's hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to buy $TRUMP anytime soon.

Per a very unofficial poll on the crypto ticker site CoinGecko, meanwhile, a whopping 77 percent of people who took a confidence survey about the official Trump coin said they felt negatively about it.

From overtaking the $SHIB and $PEPE memecoins — yes, we're rolling our eyes too — when its value surpassed $60 per token and rising to an all-time high of nearly $75, the Trump coin has been remarkably volatile even for its market.

Even on unelected co-president Elon Musk's X social network, news of this latest Trump slump resulted in japes and jibes.

"Donald Trump just destroyed the entire financial markets, stocks, crypto and even his shitcoin," one user jeered. "Everyone fucking hates him now. What a fraud."

In another post, a satirist jokingly begged the president to mention his memecoin at all.

"Pls just talk about $Trump coin," the user wrote. "Need money back Sir."

Those who willingly bought the president's memecoin are, clearly, in the "find out" portion of the "eff around and find out" adage amid the tariff turmoil — and unfortunately, the rest of the world is right there with them.

More on the tariffs: Trump Tariffs Show Signs of Being Written by AI

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 10:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.

1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.

We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.

Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts

By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nah.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

If the IRS would start a bounty program for capturing tax cheaters, and allow torturing tax cheaters until they pay, America would be made great again. The National Debt would vanish in a few years.

Trump has not paid his taxes, by the way. Neither has Musk. I would approve of bounty hunters torturing those two until they paid as an example for what will happen to other billionaires who don't pay. The others would voluntarily stop cheating on taxes. MAGA!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 1:18 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Republicans Are Trying to Pull a Fast One to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts

They’re using an accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless, when, in fact, it will add about $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Words fail me. Well, not really. Here’s how their latest effort to pull the wool over the public’s eyes works:

Details at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-cuts-curre
nt-policy-baseline-deficit-budget-economy.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 4, 2025 1:35 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A catastrophe is unfolding at the top US health agency — and it will put American lives at risk

US health care is never going to be the same.

By Dylan Scott

https://www.vox.com/health/406967/rfk-jr-hhs-cuts-vaccine-measles-outb
reak

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he had to overcome a long record of fringe anti-science beliefs. He had indulged in conspiracies about chem trails, questioned whether HIV was the actual cause of AIDS, and, most notably, spread the repeatedly debunked theory that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism.

In private meetings with senators and public confirmation hearings, he downplayed that record and claimed he wasn’t anti-vaccine: “I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement at one hearing. “I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.” He gave assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, an MD and one of the last Republican holdouts on his nomination, that he would not change federal vaccine guidance

But less than two months into his term, Kennedy is blocking the release of pro-vaccine data amid a widening measles outbreak even as he puts into motion long-term projects that seem set to further erode Americans’ wobbly trust in childhood vaccination. Coupled with the massive staff cuts at HHS, a weakened federal health department is being remade in Kennedy’s anti-vax, anti-science image — an overhaul that could have dangerous consequences for Americans’ health for years to come.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration began to lay off 10,000 workers across HHS, which includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Combined with workers who had already departed or were laid off earlier, the department’s overall headcount is expected to shrink from 82,000 to 62,000 people.

Many rank-and-file staff were simply let go; some senior leaders were offered reassignment in different roles, sometimes in a different part of the country, according to the New York Times. Subagencies focused on substance abuse and environmental health that were previously allowed some independence are being brought under HHS’s direct supervision. Top deputies who might have clashed with Kennedy — such as the FDA’s senior vaccine official, Peter Marks, one of the architects of the highly successful Operation Warp Speed in Trump’s first term — are being forced out.

HHS touches the lives of Americans from birth to death: It oversees Medicaid and Medicare, which cover one in three Americans, it sets the standards for medical care across the health system, including vaccine schedules; and it is the biggest funder of the kind of vital medical research in the country that leads to new medical treatments.

Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to let Kennedy “go wild”; now he and his subordinates have the means to execute his vision.

Some of the effects are being seen immediately as a massive measles outbreak spreads. Other reverberations in public health and medical research may not be fully felt for years. Former federal officials say the overhaul represents a fundamental reimagining of what HHS should be, a withdrawal from an active government role in the safeguarding of America’s health. We could be living with the consequences of these changes for a long time.

“This is not a so-called restructuring. These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe,” Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director, said in a statement. “They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health.”

More than an abdication, Kennedy’s new regime is steering the department in a radically new direction — one that seems poised to send American health backward.

The immediate dangers of RFK Jr.’s health care overhaul

Kennedy’s leadership is already making the biggest US measles outbreak since 2019 worse. The number of cases across five states is nearing 500, twice as many as the United States saw in all of 2024, and two people, including an unvaccinated child, have died.

Some experts believe it may take up to a year for the disease’s spread to be brought under control. Epidemiologist Michael Mina wrote this week in the New York Times that the US could see tens of thousands of cases. More people would die, and many of the ones who survived could be more vulnerable to other viruses in the future after the measles virus wipes out many of their preexisting antibodies.

The response to the current measles outbreak is a good measurement of just how much Kennedy has changed things. During Trump’s first term, the president himself urged people to get vaccinated to stop a measles outbreak. Now, Kennedy, as the nation’s top health official, is instead using his enormous platform to undermine the importance of the measles vaccine while the virus rapidly spreads. (Measles vaccination is the best way to protect yourself against the virus, and health officials even encourage unvaccinated people who have already been exposed to get a shot because it could reduce their symptoms.)

Kennedy has extolled vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatment options, but doctors caution that, while vitamin A could benefit someone who is vitamin-deficient when they contract the measles, almost no one in the US has a vitamin A deficiency. A Texas doctor hawking those remedies to patients skeptical of vaccines said he has been in direct contact with the HHS secretary during the outbreak.

Kennedy isn’t just using the bully pulpit to pitch pseudoscience. His department is now actively suppressing information about the value of the measles vaccine during the outbreak, according to ProPublica. A CDC forecast that would have shown the risk of catching measles is higher in less vaccinated areas was shelved, after the agency originally planned to release it as encouragement for people to get the measles shot. The CDC justified its scrapping of the report by claiming the data “does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.”

Even as the emergency grows more serious, Kennedy is reducing his own infectious disease staff: One workgroup focused on vaccinating underserved communities was eliminated as part of the layoffs. HHS has also pulled back grants that support the state and local health workers who are frontline responders. According to Reuters, health officials in Lubbock County, Texas, near the epicenter of the crisis, had their funding halted for several grants that were being used to support work on the outbreak.

At the same time, Kennedy is launching a systemic analysis of any supposed links between childhood vaccines and autism — a link that has already been refuted by previous scientific analyses. He has placed a long-discredited anti-vaccine researcher in charge of it.

Americans’ trust in vaccines had been slipping before the pandemic, and then widespread conspiracies about the Covid shots helped make those views even more mainstream. A federal probe that seems designed to sow distrust could drive vaccination rates lower.

The national measles vaccination rate has already slipped just below the 95 percent target that experts say is necessary to maintain population-level immunity. The speed of that decline has been alarming: In the 2019–2020 school year, 20 states were above the 95 percent vaccination rate threshold, and just three had dropped below 90 percent. But by the 2023–2024 school year, only 11 states had more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated against the disease, and 14 states had fallen under 90 percent.

In individual communities, rates have slipped even lower, which creates the right conditions for an outbreak to explode; measles, after all, is one of the most contagious diseases known to humanity. In the Texas school district most affected by the current measles outbreak, the vaccination rate is under 50 percent.

What this means is that measles outbreaks could again become a recurring public health nuisance, 25 years after the US declared the virus was no longer spreading within the country.

At the same time measles is spreading, a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic is brewing: The virus has been found in nearly 170 million birds and 1,000 livestock herds; 70 humans have been infected. On that disease, too, Kennedy is signaling a more hands-off approach: He has suggested allowing the virus to spread unchecked through factory farms, and the department is threatening to end a recent contract to develop a universal pandemic flu vaccine. One of the groups laid off this week were scientists testing pet foods for any trace of the virus.

The long-term implications of RFK’s MAHA agenda

Other long-running health campaigns will be jeopardized by the combination of HHS cuts and Kennedy’s fringe beliefs. In a 2021 book, Kennedy favorably presented the discredited theory that drug use, not HIV, was responsible for the development of AIDS. Now, despite Trump’s previous pledge to eradicate HIV completely, Kennedy’s department is pulling back on one of the defining health crises of the modern era.

Staff at the CDC Division of HIV Prevention office was cut in half as part of the mass layoffs. They had made great strides thanks to a muscular government approach: New HIV infections declined by 12 percent since 2010, aided by public health campaigns and direct subsidization of HIV treatment. Deaths have steadily fallen as better disease management allowed doctors to turn HIV into a chronic condition patients could live with, rather than a death sentence.

Now the programs and medical research grants on the HIV crisis that made that progress possible are being cut. One analysis projected there would be 143,000 more HIV cases and 14,000 more deaths in the US by 2030 as a result, according to Anna Person, an HIV physician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“Many people who have been living with HIV for decades are afraid we are returning to the 1980s era of HIV, when many buried countless friends and loved ones,” Person said in a media briefing this week. “They ask how it makes sense to cut prevention funds or endanger access to HIV medications? My answer: It doesn’t. These actions are inefficient and will lead to increases in health care costs.”

The prospects for future drug development could also grow dimmer given the massive funding cuts at NIH. The federal government does not manufacture drugs itself, but the basic research supported by NIH is critical for identifying possible targets for pharmaceutical interventions that private companies then work to develop. The vast majority of prescription drugs approved in the US benefited from the kind of federal medical research funding that will be reduced by billions of dollars in the second Trump term. Other changes could further slow down drug approvals: Some of the FDA staff who were laid off had been dedicated to approving new medications.

He could even reorient substance abuse treatment, just as the US is finally making progress in reducing the long-running scourge of fentanyl deaths. Kennedy, who is in recovery himself, has endorsed some unusual ideas for addiction care, such as sending people to so-called wellness farms where they would attempt to break their habit while participating in. It’s a concept that has failed in the past, and experts remain skeptical of its value today versus other more mainstream harm reduction strategies.

Public health is often slow and steady work, except when there is an emergency. We saw the consequences of an ill-equipped federal government during Covid, and the measles outbreak will test what happens when federal authorities are disinterested in an ongoing public health threat.

But it is in these longer-term trends, a lack of new scientific advances or the warping of public attitudes toward vaccines, where the department’s death by a thousand cuts may be felt most.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

When Dems do this, it makes me glad Trump is in power:

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"It's Un-American" - 19 Democratic State AGs Sue To Stop Trump Blocking Non-Citizen Voting

SERIOUSLY????

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