Trump's Appointments

[Loren Pechtel]

But the debt, which is clearly a burden on the average American, will start getting paid off. That’s the point, right?

Assuming you're serious.....

In 2024 the deficit was $1.83T. If you cut $2T (somehow) and tax receipts stay the same (somehow), you reduce the debt of not quite $36T by $170B, or a bit over 0.5%.

(The point is to eliminate the government and institute an oligopolic kakistocracy....)

I'd be happy if they would just quit digging the hole deeper.

But my step #1 would be to undo The Felon's tax changes.

 

[Tigers!]

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Even Australian cabinets are better than some of Trump's selections.

 

[Swammerdami]

But the debt, which is clearly a burden on the average American, will start getting paid off. That’s the point, right?

Firing Every.Single.Federal.Employee would have negligible effect on the deficit! Much of the spending takes the form of transfer payments: support for America's disabled soldiers; SocSec and Medicare for retirees; education and health-care for youngsters struggling to escape poverty; etc.

As these programs are gutted the savings will not be used to repay debt. Instead the need is to enrich the Greatest Americans with deregulations and further tax cuts. At present Elon Musk is worth only about $300,000,000,000. Can this wise genius take full advantage of his talents with only such a pittance?

Assuming you're serious.....

In 2024 the deficit was $1.83T. If you cut $2T (somehow) and tax receipts stay the same (somehow), you reduce the debt of not quite $36T by $170B, or a bit over 0.5%.

(The point is to eliminate the government and institute an oligopolic kakistocracy....)

I learned a new word! "kakistocracy" (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state) was used as early as 1644.

In his 1838 Memoir on Slavery (which he supported), U.S. Senator William Harper compared kakistocracy to anarchy, and said it had seldom occurred:

Anarchy is not so much the absence of government as the government of the worst—not aristocracy but kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained amongst men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most horrid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence.

American poet James Russell Lowell used the term in 1876, in a letter to Joel Benton, writing,

What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?