Credit Where Credit is Due: a shout out thread for Things Trump Did Right

[Politesse]

Well, he fired Billy Long and banished him to Iceland today. Given that his only qualification for running the IRS was that he was rich and a friend of Trump's, and his conduct in that office has been a ludicrous joke, I'd say showing him the door is a prudent course of action.

Of course, he's to be replaced with some new, even more cringing croney.

 

[TV and credit cards]

He has slowed the passage of time.

 

[Politesse]

Compliment time: I do think that a sovereign wealth fund is a good idea, or at worst a neutral idea. I don't love how intertwined our economy already is with the stock market, but that jinn escaped the bottle seventy years ago. Diversifying our national revenue stream makes sense in an era where uncertainty clouds all questions of budgeting.

Of course, it will take a Democratic president to make the fund actually functional and scrape out the patina of corruption that attaches itself to every Trump order and appointee. Presumably he intends using it to fund money to himself and his pedophile friends.

 

[bilby]

I do think that a sovereign wealth fund is a good idea, or at worst a neutral idea.

Sure, but it's only a sane thing to have if you run a surplus, and have finished paying down your debts.

Countries with sovereign wealth funds are mostly net exporters, usually of energy and/or minerals.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Compliment time: I do think that a sovereign wealth fund is a good idea, or at worst a neutral idea. I don't love how intertwined our economy already is with the stock market, but that jinn escaped the bottle seventy years ago. Diversifying our national revenue stream makes sense in an era where uncertainty clouds all questions of budgeting.

If you have debt it's almost always better to "invest" in paying down that debt.

 

[Elixir]

If you have debt it's almost always better to "invest" in paying down that debt.

Depending on interest rates of course. Trump calls himself “king of debt” (and everything else) which is part and parcel of his insane determination to lower interest rates - even in the face of his inflationary tariffs and weakening jobs market.
Right now there is an artificial increase in consumer spending due to fears of impending price increases, but that won’t last long. The piper will come calling, even if Trump has every member of the Fed murdered and replaced with his toadies.

 

[Politesse]

The Department of War fiasco, and associated renamings of the Pentagon and Pete Hegseth.

HIs rationale for doing so is dumb, historically ignorant (the DoD was never called the Department of War before, that was the Army), and worrying. But I've always thought that calling our military oversight cabinet the "Department of Defense" was some politically correct bullshit. So the renaming itself is actually fine with me. I think in the long run it will put more distance between the public and the military, as there should be. The War Department makes war, not "defense". The police... police, they aren't "peace officers". Spies spy, they aren't "intelligent". ICE is a vigilante deportation squad, not a "customs enforcement" agency. Go ahead and clear out all the double speak, call everything exactly what it is, and see if the public is still as quick to sign trillions in blank checks each year for all these militaries, adjunct militaries, and paramiltaries. I think they actually won't be.

 

[ZiprHead]

White House to rebrand Pentagon the Department of War

It would likely cost billions of dollars to change the names of hundreds of Pentagon agencies, their stationary, emblems, plaques and other signage at the Defense Department, along with bases around the world. The expense could put a serious dent into the administration’s efforts to slash Pentagon spending and waste.

But Trump’s effort to rename the department fits in with the administration’s wider reshaping of the federal government, from firing tens of thousands of federal employees to deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles and Washington.