Musk calls some Trump supporters ‘contemptible fools,’ escalating tension with MAGA hardliners
I’m sorry but that’s just nonsense. Congress has created a 36 trillion dollar debt that is now taking money away from those who need it. It’s a self destructive trend that needs to be addressed. There is no indication that Congress is capable or willing to do it from within.
Congress creates the budget and the President signs off on it. The final responsibility is the executive branch and Trump is directly addressing the issue. It’s absolutely the responsibility of the President to address overspending. And Trump has done just that before taking office.
It’s not burgeoning the way it was because it does not have the infrastructure to back it up. You have to be wealthy enough to support an EV with the ability to garage it and charge it. That market is getting saturated. What is needed is for Congress to work with the auto industry to encourage more hybrid electric vehicles to fill the infrastructure gap.
And again, Musk was entirely responsible for bringing electric vehicles to market. He has singularly done more than any other person on the planet to address CO2 emissions.
This is a risible statement even before considering the emissions (and other resource) impact of training AI models, his desire to launch multiple Super Heavy/Starship launch vehicles per day, and of course his personal emissions from almost constant private air travel to hobnob with SiVal billionaires, Saudi princes, and GOP leaders. Even if every internal combustion passenger vehicle in the United States were replaced with a Tesla Model 3 (and all of those cars were crushed and recycled instead of being sold on the secondary market or shipped to developing countries where the emissions controls are stripped off and they are run into the ground), the total impact upon annual climate emissions would be south of 2% even before consideration of the carbon budget of somehow building all of those vehicles in short order. This fanatical quasi-religious worship of Elon Musk, Billionaire Eco-Hero And All-Knowing Seer is just as much hype and nonsense as everything else about him, from his claims of having designed every system on Tesla vehicles or come up with ‘original’ plans for colonizing Mars that would be familiar to any Golden Age of Sci-Fi fan to his purported expertise in neuroscience and his pump & dump cryptocurrency schemes.
Stranger
Odd that the Elon fanboy worship died when he bought Twitter. This website was dripping with it until that happened.
Let me know when Trump, or any Republican, actually does something to reduce the deficit while they’re in office, rather than just talk about it.
Congress has shown the capability of addressing the federal deficit. It was during the '90s, under legislation passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote.
Hell, I liked him a lot when he was building cars and launching them into space. That was cool! But then he had to open has damn fool mouth.
Not really. He has become more and more MAGA. Why is it strange that this would turn a lot of people off?
To be honest, until a few years ago, while I knew who he was, I paid him no attention. Now he’s everywhere, and obnoxious. So while I was never a fanboi, I went from neutral to negative.
Also, if all of those Teslas were powered by electricity obtained from renewable sources.
Boy, when you decide to be wrong, you do it up right.
It’s not nonsense that the business of the Executive Branch is specifically NOT to tell the Legislative Branch how to conduct its business, it’s the law. If you believe in the rule of law, you can’t believe the President has such authority. Read the US Constitution.
Nowhere in the Constitution is the President given the responsibility to address overspending by Congress. That is not his job. His job is to insure the spending is performed in the manner authorized. It is not the job of the President to change the laws he does not like any more than it’s his job to change the way the Courts work. All of that is prescribed by the US Constitution. Perhaps you should read it.
If the people of the United States (that’s who are important) don’t like they way Congress is spending the federal revenue, the people have the power to change it by voting for representatives and Senators who will spend the money the way they want.
Having a single person make that decision is not democracy, it’s a dictatorship.
He is empowered though if he disagrees with what they came up with, to just veto the whole shebang, and ask them to come back with either an overriding majority or something he can sign. As to how they do it, that’s where the President can only propose, suggest, cajole, ask, but he can’t make them. Thus how when Trump, as not yet President but nominally undispputed political leader of the GOP, said “nix the spending compromise, and only pass a clean CR plus relieving me from dealing with the debt limit”, in the end what was passed was just the clean CR alone, leaving it to the next Congress to deal with the debt limit. Because that’s what they knew they could pass and make stick now.
Two advisors that handpicked themselves have no more authority to order Congress around what to do, than does any other stakeholder with a lot of money and influence.
Exactly!
That’s the rule of law. The only nitpick I would make is instead of “something he can sign,” I’d put it, “something he will sign.” Or, as you aptly put, override the veto with a 2/3 majority. You’ve obviously read the Constitution.
I was impressed by his cars even if they weren’t my cup of tea. Not a fan of TV screens in place of steam punk gauges and switches. His rockets are right out of science fiction movies. He does have a damn fool mouth.
Again, he is the one signing off on spending bills. The buck literally stops there. If it didn’t then there would be no reason for his signature. Your insistence that it’s specifically not the job of the President to weigh in on this has no basis in fact.
A timely point to make given the last election. What’s different this time is that an incoming President’s administration gives the budget a thumbs down even though it’s the current President who signs off on it.
And, of course, the executive branch submits a budget request to congress every year. The executor is in the best position to know what funding is needed. “You (congress) authorized a Department of Justice and a Department of Education. Ends up this year crime is down so we could use a little less money for the former and a little more to beef up some programs in the latter.” That sort of thing.
It was absolutely no one’s intention that the president would use their veto power on simple annual budgets to override vast swaths of legislation, approved by taxpayers’ elected representatives, by shutting down (or threatening to shut down) whole departments. Not only was this not the intent of the separation of powers, it’s stupid – shuttering departments and slashing budgets is highly disruptive and should be done with a plan, in coordination with congress. Trump and plans don’t go together, though. Defending his meddling with this budget as somehow being in accordance with constitutional ideals is… let’s just call it an odd take.
And lastly, we can see what Trump really cared about when push came to shove – increasing the debt ceiling. Something we can see for the political advantage it is but also pretty bad optics for a guy worried about the deficit.
And who addresses an ever growing deficit currently at 35 trillion dollars? The people doing it? Congress is nothing but a corrupt pork barrel conglomerate of stupid.
Wow, that’s a lot a monies! I wonder what the debt is!
The annual deficit is the difference between budget allocations (mandatory and discretionary) and revenue (mostly personal and corporate taxes). The debt is the cumulation of deficits plus the service paid on outstanding debt.
The last presidential administration to run a net surplus was under Clinton (from 1998 to 2001, although it consistently dropped from 1994 onward), and despite the rhetoric of fiscal conservatism of the GOP the US experienced multi-hundred-billion dollar deficits throughout the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and G.W. Bush administrations, peaking at over US$1.4T in 2009. Obama also ran large deficits from the mortgage and insurance industry bailouts (thank Clinton and the bipartisan Congressional movement in the ‘Nineties for deregulation and offshoring manufacturing jobs) as well as increases in Department of Defense spending demanded by Congress which were typically even above and beyond the DoD budget request.The deficit has been running about US$1.3T to US$1.4T under Biden, largely because of infrastructure outlays and stimulus packages. Contrast that with Trump who ran a US$3.1T deficit in 2020 and US$3.7T in 2021, in part because of pandemic response and employer loans (much of which went to major corporations and private equity controlled interests) but also because of his tax cuts which reduced revenues.
Overall, Trump has added more to the debt over his single term (~US$8.6T) than under any other president in peacetime, even adjusted for inflation. And his hand-picked efficiency expert and your personal hero, Elon Musk, has declared that he is going to cut US$2T out of the budget even though the discretionary part of the budget that Congress has the direct power to allocate is only about US$1.7T. So, I am not seeing any empirical evidence that either Trump has any real interest in reducing the debt or that his team of fiscal geniuses has any viable plan to produce a budget surplus. But please, enlighten us on the intricacies of federal budgets and debt reduction schemes from your vast knowledge of fiscal management.
Stranger
The deficit has come down since 2020; maybe we should keep those same people in charge for a while.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. The deficit was high in 2020 and 2021; due to COVID, I assume. It came down in 2022, as the economy recovered, and has crept up since. However, the deficit also went up during all four years of the first Trump administration. I don’t see any reason to think he’ll lower it this time. If history is anything to go by, Trump will promise to lower the deficit, then the deficit will go up, politicians and news outlets will ignore it, and during the next election cycle everyone will remember the promise and ignore the actual numbers.
A great political satire once said that in politics, the less you plan to do about something, the more you must talk about it. That’s the Republican approach to budget deficits in a nutshell.
My vision seems to be is that the GOP adds to the debt, then they make a big noise about it when the Dems are in power.