Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Trump's legacy: Sabotaged federal functions & starving the beast



WHY ARE YOU FUNDING THE ENEMY? -- “Woke” companies across our country have been using the profits from our purchases to fund their own agendas — many of which destroy American freedoms, opportunities, and rights. This MUST change. -- STB (Starve the Beast) (Clearly, these fine folks want you to buy from un-woke companies)


One of the ex-president's major legacies is a more effectively sabotaged federal government. Of course, he alone does not get all the credit for damaging the federal government. The Republican Party has been actively attacking and sabotaging the federal government since before Reagan said in the 1980s that government is the problem, not a solution.

But the ex-president brought the toxic power of that government-hating dogma to new and more lethal levels. The rot that T****, his rotten administration and the Republican Party left behind and still defends to this day does not just include the sabotaged withdrawal from Afghanistan and the human lives it cost. It is spread all over the federal government. The neo-fascist Republican deep state is alive and thriving in the big crevices that Democratic Party incompetence leaves in its wake.

This one is about the Secret Service, which has had occasional problems for years. The Washington Post writes:
Secret Service leaders are downplaying any risk to national security after four of its employees — including an agent assigned to protect first lady Jill Biden — were allegedly hoodwinked by two men impersonating federal agents and plying them with gifts, telling congressional committees and allies that the severity of the breach has been overblown by prosecutors and the media, according to people familiar with the conversations.

But several former Secret Service officials warn that the alleged infiltration of the elite protection agency reveals a major vulnerability extending well beyond this particular case. They said the revelations suggest that agents who had regular access to the White House and the Biden family — and who are supposed to be trained to spot scammers or spies seeking to ingratiate themselves — were either too greedy or gullible to question a dubious cover story.

“If you can compromise Secret Service personnel by cozying up to their agents and their uniformed officers, unwelcome sources can get to the president and the first family,” said Jim Helminski, a retired agency executive and former leader of Joe Biden’s vice-presidential detail.
The Republican Party (RP) wants government to fail so it can be eliminated as much as possible. That has been an explicit RP goal since before Reagan. The RP sabotages and installs incompetence wherever it can, whenever it can. None of this is new or secret. The RP "Starve the Beast" strategy has been in place for decades. Wikipedia writes on Starve the Beast:
"Starving the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term "the beast", in this context, refers to the United States Federal Government and the programs it funds, using mainly American taxpayer dollars, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  
On July 14, 1978, economist and future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee: "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."
The tax gap is a stupendous example of RP sabotage of hated government. There is a logical connection between refusing to provide a budget for the IRS to collect taxes and the net tax gap, now estimated to be up to about $1.4 trillion/year (much less by corporate anti-tax sources like Deloitte). If the US government cannot collect the money it needs to be competent, then it will be incompetent. Incompetent government is what the RP has wanted for years. That gives the RP a great excuse excuse to get rid of the broken government that it worked hard to break.



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