Jesus, I’d actually vote for Trump before I’d vote for Ramadingdong.
On day one, Trump wants to round up, incarcerate, and deport MILLIONS of undocumented aliens – devastating to the economy.
On day one, Ramaswamy wants to randomly cut half the federal workforce – devastating to the economy.
[Although I believe a case could be made that the two, disparate kinds of devastation might act like the collision of matter and anti-matter. Hm.]
Conservatives simply have to make it harder for these demagogues to keep lying to them. That’s the mandate. I have exactly no plan whatsoever for executing it. I keep coming back to education, but they’re on to us.
Well, I hate him and he didn’t say in the neighborhood of 50% and he also later said “half” so he can either be more precise or shut his stupid mouth.
So there! :raspberry:
Exceedingly well played.
This is much the same as ‘Mexico will pay for the wall’.
No thought other than the morons that approve of this proposal will vote for him. Because Government is evil. And he’s one of the morons, just like the many others we know.
It’s quite impossible for Trump to do that. There simply isn’t the infrastructure or personnel to do it.
Vivek could possibly do what he’s saying since the federal workforce is under the executive branch for the most part.
He’s a bit too smart to say the crazier parts out loud but Ramaswamy is full of Qanon dog whistles. The federal civil service being an unelected shadow government used to control the country is one of them. Putin fighting Nazis in Ukraine is another.
Fairly sure arbitrarily firing half the federal workforce would violate the Civil Service laws.
“I want to violate the laws in order to reduce the size of the federal government, and here is a particularly mindless way of doing that some very special people–my supporters–will find to be a brilliant rationalization for accomplishing that illegal goal.”
Y’see Trump’s advisors at least had the sense to counsel to first move civil service positions with policy or decision inflencing authority to Schedule F so it becomes a pleasure-of-the-President posting and then do a purge.
But that’s because they believe it likely he’ll be in a position to act so they make a plan that can work.
Vivek OTOH just throws out whatever random thing to rile up the audience.
One almost has to admire him for his audacity.
It’s not even especially audacious.
How many mediocre yet wealthy men have proposed, with little to no study or expertise, magical yet remarkably simple (read: asinine and likely to fail) solutions that only their own mediocre ‘genius’ could have thought up?
That describes so many would-be POTUS nominees, as well as several other high-profile politicians, just over the last decade that it should beggar belief but is instead so commonplace as to be tedious instead.
Instead of saying “I’ll fire every other federal employee” he devises a system for deciding which employees will go and which can stay, and to an imbecile, his system seems to be somehow fair.
Are you fairly sure? That’s good.
Obviously it’s a stupid idea. 100% of the people know government is inefficient. Those that work in government understand that even more. Some will listen to the idea even while knowing the plan won’t work. He is also pandering to the crazy crowd who believe in a deep state probably run by lizard people. He knows what buttons to push.
He’s also vowed to not cut the DoD, VA or DHS. That’s 60% of the federal workforce. I’m no math whiz but I don’t think you can randomly fire 50% of federal workers while not touching 60%. He obviously can’t do what he says.
But what can he do? A lot. Trump was able to do a lot with limiting CS power through executive order. He was challenged and won in court. He’s right about layoffs. CS rules have a lot of criteria about firing for cause which do not apply to random layoffs. Layoffs can occur. I can’t see a law stating that they can’t be above a certain percent. Courts have often ruled in favor of the executive being able to control his branch. Vivek is also vowing to immediately close several departments like the Department of Education and the FBI. Can the president do it? I’m not confident he can’t. Congress can budget money for the departments. Can Congress force the president to spend money on departments within the executive branch? Vivek will never get a chance to try thankfully.
Not sure it’s worth the tangent to quote much here, but for those interested in the legality of Ramaswamy’s mass layoff proposal …
It’s a single-digit-minute read:
In my country, the equivalent of a Social Security number is our ID number.
The last number on the ID is a check number (following the Luhn algorithm) which means there is not an even distribution of last numbers.
Does US social security numbers contain a similar internal validation? All I could find was regex to show that the format was correct but nothing about the actual numbers used.
Thank you. End of hijack.
Your cite is linking to a video showing a number of human- and dog-powered Rube Goldberg machines.
I mean, if that is how IDs are assigned to people, that’s pretty cool, but I suspect it isn’t.
I assume your point is that there is an algorithm that doesn’t conform to true randomness or a sequential system, thus a tactic like what Ramaswamy proposes wouldn’t likely result in a true 50% reduction of the workforce.
Oops. The Luhn Algorithm is what is used to validate credit card numbers etc
(Correct link this time)
And yes, it will not be truely random. My children, myself and ex-wife all have the number 4 as our last digit so we’d be safe from Mr. Ramaswarmy’s purge, if we all worked in US government.
ETA: missed a joke about the “Loon Algorithm” - I must try harder.
No, and as I understand it, that last part of an SSN is simply a count. So if you were to add or subtract from your social security number, those are valid SSNs too. If you mistype, that’s probably a valid SSN number.
You can also know where someone is from based on the first digits.
It’s become a de facto ID number, but no one would design an ID number system like this.