Is the guy that paid $44 billion for Twitter really the best candidate to solve wasteful spending?

@SumKindaMunster It's also well known that Twitter's value plummeted in the years since. It's lost revenue, users, and is mired in lawsuits due to Musk not paying rent or owed wages. But sure, let's let him mess up the US government the same way

At this point it's hard to tell how much graft or corruption is baked into the system because very little has been revealed and there's no oversight whatsoever.

@TinyViolins PUH-LENTY has been revealed, you just don't subscribe to news or social media that will tell you that. Yeah "oversight" would be great but instead of doing that, TPTB want to shut it all down and stop talking about it. I'm all for oversight but that's not what you are being told you want. You are being told to shut down the investigation and trust the bureaucrats who have been wasting this money for decades.

@SumKindaMunster Way to stuff a bunch of words in my mouth. At some point you gotta have the intellectual honesty to stop arguing with false accusations and actually take the time to listen to people. It's easy to win an argument when you're going up against the strawman you created

I said very little has been revealed, and your list confirms it. You only listed a dozen things that don't even amount to the total that Musk contributed to Trump's campaign. They keep talking about "billions in savings", but your list doesn't even come close to half

@TinyViolins Way to move the goalposts. I gave you a taste to show you that there are revelations and its being revealed how much over time.

So a quick calculation shows this is more than $12 million is savings. It's a start. You don't want to save $12 million dollars?

And going over it, you support all these things? You think a DEI musical in Ireland is a good use of tax payer money? Paying for a transgender opera in Columbia?

It should be showing you how we have been lied to for years about government spending. It's being wasted and Trump and Musk are trying to cut costs.

When you are in serious debt what is the first thing you do? Cut costs....

@BlueGreenGrey Oh shutup strawman...how much money does it take to fly American diplomats to Davos and other exotic locations for Climate Change bickering? Since we are engaging in strawman arguments....

Here's a taste, this is what it costs to even be a member...

@SumKindaMunster Why do you think that this "corrupt" spending is all going to developing nations? If the US is really all about graft and corruption, why not spend in places that offer a little more in return?

To make a long story short, spending money in those countries helps towards building global stability. What do you think those Afghans and Syrians are going to do when their economies collapse or they start going hungry? Where do you think transgendered Latin Americans are going to go when their countries won't accept them? What makes Egypt particularly special to the world's economy that stability is important there?

Transgendered people exist, whether you acknowledge them or not, and society is going to have to reckon with them one way or the other. It's probably for the best to cultivate acceptance so that developed nations don't have to take on more asylum seekers.

None of those things you listed are particularly corrupt. They might be questionable depending on which things you value more, but they're not without their benefits. Winning hearts and minds is vital to cooperation, and cooperation is vital to peace.

Speaking of corruption, look at how much Elon paid to have this job. Let's also not pretend that Trump isn't about to give huge tax breaks to billionaires

@TinyViolins
Because that is the easiest way to launder it, send it to corrupt countries with no checks and balances for transgender operas. Then they spend the money with local cronies and get kickbacks and pay offs for American equipment and American money.


Yeah maybe. You know what would be better? Not sending our military and war machine to those countries to destroy them if they displease us. How many people died in Afghanistan and Syria due to America's involvement. Keep that money at home, more people will be alive because of it.


Yeah yeah they exist. And not funding their propaganda does nothing to erase their existence.


Hm, you say billionaires but I am not a billionaire...not even close and I saw a break on my taxes during the first Trump administration.

@SumKindaMunster I'm sorry, but I'm calling BS on the money laundering thing. Do you have any proof at all that money laundering is going on at the scale you're describing? Do you have any names?

You can make an accusation on the basis of cynicism, but can you make one on the basis of proof? You're operating purely on motivated reasoning.

Wouldn't Republicans and Fox News have a field day by taking down some Democrat appointees accused of corruption? It'll be a lot more fruitful to their cause thank investigating Hunter Biden for the 50th time. Russia, China, North Korea could easily use that information to their advantage.

Fine, let Musk start slashing defense spending. Let's see how far he goes with that.

You still haven't answered the question on where those transgendered Latin Americans are going to go when society refuses to accept them. It's only propaganda if it's intentionally misleading. Again, you're making an accusation purely on the basis of cynicism. You don't know the content of the things you brought up, so you're not able to make a statement on it. For all we know, it can just be about trans people telling their stories or appealing towards decency and humanity.

Congrats on having your taxes lowered, that makes you just like everyone else. However, and I suggest you look this up to increase the shock factor, how much bigger of a tax cut do you think the billionaires got compared to you?

If the answer doesn't make you feel any different, you are definitely a useful tool for the elite. While we all got crumbs, they got to have several slices, thanks to Trump and the GOP

@TinyViolins
The Afghanistan Papers. https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Papers-Secret-History-War/dp/1982159006

Approximately 2 TRILLION dollars in waste and fraud.


Ugh. 🙄I'm not even touching that absurd partisan comment.


I don't care. Transgender activists decided that they didn't want tolerance, they wanted compliance. They blew their chance beating up women, telling me I am cis-gendered, and mutilating children. This is the consequence of their overreach.



If my taxes go down, I can afford my life and the federal deficit is being reduced, then I don't care what other people pay in taxes. What matters is that the system works for everyone.

@SumKindaMunster The Afghanistan waste has long been public knowledge. But that's much less about US officials being corrupt and more about how Afghan officials defrauded the US over and over with fake promises. It's about a refusal of our military brass to admit failure or to have an exit strategy, not about people colluding with cronies to get kickbacks

Yeah, you're really good at dodging questions. I suppose it works wonders for you. It's hard to be wrong when you never think critically about anything.

I'm well aware you don't care. That's your MO. Other people's perspectives are just something for you to have a knee jerk reaction to. You take the bait damn near every time.

The very fact that you have easy access to all the answers you could possibly have a question to, and then go on to believe the blatant falsehood of trans activists focusing on beating up women and mutilating children, just goes to prove the need for trans people to be heard.

The federal deficit doesn't get reduced when billionaires don't pay their share. Trump added more to the national debt in 4 years than any other president. If he cuts their taxes again, you can probably expect more of the same

@TinyViolins
Oh please. You ask me for an example, I give you a massive one and you deny it. Do you really think this level of waste and fraud would have occurred if the people in charge of the money did their job? You want to dismiss this out of hand because it isn't convenient to your point.

You used to be a fair and sincere debater. Now its just ad hominem and strawman replies.

You ask questions, I give you sincere replies and you get angry. Sorry I don't care about transgenders from Guatemala. I doubt you do either, and are only mentioning this because it suites your pre-existing beliefs about people like me.

Oh look a simple google search easily debunks your propaganda:
Wrong wrong wrong...read it and weep.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/may/22/hakeem-jeffries/did-donald-trump-rack-up-more-debt-than-any-other/

@SumKindaMunster Your example literally has nothing to do with US officials laundering money, which was your initial claim. This is why I stopped being a sincere debater with you. You can never back up your claims, you keep moving the goalposts, you dismiss any scrutiny of your positions, and then you go on to attack strawmen. You're just a never-ending chain of logical fallacies vying for moral superiority. You're a joke.

To illustrate my point perfectly, you completely misread my statement. I said Trump rose the national debt more in 4 years than any other president, then your example is how Obama spent slightly more in 8 years, despite inheriting 2 wars and the worst economy since the Great Depression.

@TinyViolins I'm sorry you don't agree that the Afghanistan papers detail massive fraud and waste. Not sure what you read about it, but it goes into a LOT of detail about how payoffs, kickbacks and graft were the norm there. What do you think laundering money entails? It means spending it in ostensibly a productive fashion so it LOOKS like it was spent somewhere and then it is pocketed. Afghanistan was rife with this.

Fair enough on the pedantic 4 years vs 8 years comment. If YOU were being fair, you'd acknowledge the debt at the end of Trump's term was due to Covid and it was a bipartisan effort because of the pandemic.

I take exception to your character assassination.I do back up my claims, you just don't like what I say apparently.

Obviously whatever productive conversations we had in the past are over.

@SumKindaMunster I'm not arguing that there wasn't fraud and waste in Afghanistan, you're just completely wrong about US officials profiting from kickbacks and money laundering, especially on the scale you alluded to. You can't call an apple an orange just because they're both fruits

You clearly didn't even read your source. It doesn't talk about money laundering, it's about fraud and embezzlement on behalf of the Afghans. Once again, you're not able to back up your statements.

Trump's share of the debt was going up long before Covid. Look it up. It was due to massive revenue losses as a result of his tax cuts. Then he had a couple of free money giveaways that generated billions of dollars in fraudulent losses. The irony is that now he claims that to care about wasteful spending

For the record, I don't recall having productive conversations with you. All I remember is someone far too biased to allow for critical thinking. Someone who dodged question after question in an attempt to plaster his reality on top of someone else's. Someone who made every attempt possible to dismiss objective facts with his own opinions.

The reason I don't treat your arguments with respect is because they merit none. You're better off just going back to your echo chamber

@SumKindaMunster I never said there wasn't, but you can't go around accusing US officials of money laundering and then back your claim up with a source that has no instances of it .

I doubt it. Without a group of people to lord yourself over, you're nothing. Hating anything remotely associated with liberalism is like a reflex to you. You've never been able to resist polluting a political post with the half-informed contrarian version of reality your echo chamber feeds you.

Unfortunately for everyone else, you have a very unbalanced news diet, and you jump into arguments too arrogant to realize you're not playing with a full deck. I'm sure your need to prove to everyone how smart you think you are will bring you back to me again. I'm already looking forward to seeing you try to warp reality to suit your biases, almost as much as you're looking forward to dodging any scrutiny of your pseudo-facts