Forget it, Jake. It’s Trumptown.
This way, you can be cruel to twice as many people.
How is that supposed to work? Are they going to just let everyone out? I mean, even if you re-define “prison” to be a big hole in the ground you just toss people into and forget about them, you still need to pay to dig the hole, and pay the people who do the tossing-into.
Or are they completely misunderstanding the concept of “for profit prisons”?
The whole thing (the claimed aims of the trump administration and toadies) is simply random spoutings that don’t make individual sense and sure as hell don’t add up to a collectively coherent philosophy.
To the degree there are any underlying themes, one of the biggies is that there’s waaaay too many government employees. Eliminating the work many of them do, and outsourcing substantially all the rest to controllable private companies seems to be a goal.
But not the various forms of police. Just everything else. Although I would not put private for-profit police forces beyond them. But they’d probably have to grow into that idea over more than 4 years.
I suspect the idea is to replace federal funding by making them profitable using slave labor; or to just kill people out of hand and not bother with prisons.
Would ‘for profit prison’ fall under the heading of ‘private prison’ instead of ‘federal prison’? Like a ‘charter prison’.
Yeah it’s the old “a federal government small enough to drown in the bathtub” canard. It really means one small enough so that it can be run directly by the party Boss, for private benefit, that provides so few benefits the people have to depend on the patronage of those private beneficiaries to meet their needs; BUT that still is able to apply maximum brute force to enforce the Boss’ will.
I was thinking that, but here’s the thing: We already know that minimum wage isn’t enough to live on, pretty much anywhere in the US (and Canada, btw). And a prison building is likely more expensive to run than a cheap apartment building, if for no other reason you need to pay for guards.
So who is going to pay above minimum wage for prison labor? Why not just hire non-prisoners for minimum wage?
Using prisoners as cheap labor makes sense today, since their basic incarceration costs are paid for by the contract with the government to run the prison. The money brought in by the labor contract is almost pure profit, so it doesn’t matter if they have to undercut minimum wage to attract customers. But drop the massive up-front subsidy of the prison, and it just doesn’t add up.
This assumes a level of competence and foresight that has never been evidenced by the people involved.
They come up with the brilliant ideas. If they don’t work out, it’s the fault of the peons for failing to implement the vision.
Oh, I never expected them to have actually done the math on this. I’m just queueing up for my Surprised Pikachu Face when the obvious math that they completely missed bites them in the ass.
But it won’t bite them in the ass. Just everyone else.
Private prisons make money now. For tbe prison owners. That’s the only measure of merit the Fascists and tosdies are looking at.
And end the VA health system? I’ll bet that many veterans are among the MAGA faithful. If they’re actually willing to act against the interests of their supporters, I’ll be surprised but a little impressed.
Backstabbing your supporters once their usefulness is ended has a long tradition among fascists.
Yes, but what is the source of that money? As I said, it’s the contracts they have with the government to hold the prisoners.
If DOGE cuts the prison budget, that money disappears.
First they ship them off to blue areas then the want them removed. Make up your minds people.
Well, they’re ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’.
And when I hear Trump call them this sort of thing, I wonder why they ever supported him.
With the exception of his comment about John McCain (“I like people who weren’t captured”), I think that most of the negative comments which Trump is said to have made about soldiers and veterans have been things that have been reported by others, and aren’t things that Trump said during public speeches or statements.
I suspect that, like a lot of things about Trump, his supporters choose to disbelieve that he might have actually said those things, and rationalize that the second-hand quotes are lies.
I tried to find a few examples of him actually speaking instead of being reported on:
