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OT: American Politics

It will be interesting to see how the cult-mentality works as more and more of trumps interactions with epstein come to light.

They've already brushed aside rape, and they don't really like to think about what a weird coincidence it is that a guy who owned a teenage beauty pageant (where it has been corroborated that he would walk in while 14 yr old girls were changing) spent so much time with a man who sold underage girls for sex...I think this is where we see just how sad and fucked up being in a cult is.
 
FlyGuy said:
Helps stop draining and misdirecting resources ($$$) to pointless bullshit that only puts money in oligarchs pockets (Ukraine) or pointless deals of which the US is disproportionally the largest financer of, yet whose benefit and impact is nominal.
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You have a deep misunderstanding of what money is being spent and where imo. The vast, vast majority is being used to replenish American stocks of weapons that have been sitting for decades. The dollars figures you're seeing thrown around regarding what Ukraine is receiving is an accounting trick of sorts. If Ukraine is given 100 Bradley's that were in storage and set to be decommissioned (aka: destroyed) in 2029, and the cost of those Bradley's when they were constructed in 1995 was 1.5 million each that number gets adjusted for inflation and calculated as a cost for the military to give the Bradley's to Ukraine. So that would be appox 320 million as a line item in aid. Then the government rolls in the replacement cost of those 100 Bradley's (but the newer shiny ones that were already approved spending) into the bill (the new ones are ~4.5 million a pop) and voila, you've now approved ~750 million dollars in military aid to Ukraine. No mention made of the previous costs in storing the old 100 Bradley's, the costs of decommissioning them in 5 years, etc.

From the last round of funding here's the breakdown:

- 13.6 billion in equipment drawdowns (see my example about the Bradley's above)
- 1.6 billion in arms purchased for Ukraine, provided by US suppliers (Most common use here would be replenishing things like patriot air defence munitions)
- 7 billion is to increase arms production....in the United States. The production capacity to build more 155mm shells is the highlight here.
- 13.8 Billion is for training Ukrainian forces on new weapons systems (F16's, Bradley's, Abrams, etc) and the purchase of existing soviet era systems from allied european countries, that the Ukrainians don't need supplementary training on.
- 8 Billion in economic support to help Ukraine rebuild shit the Russians continue to blow up (like Children's Hospitals and power grids). But this is a loan.
- 2.5 Billion in humanitarian aid through out central europe to help manage the 7 million Ukrainian refugees that have fled the country into neighbouring countries.

The idea that Ukrainian oligarchs are getting stuffed on all of this is a Kremlin narrative, full stop. Wars are fucking expensive.

FlyGuy said:
I think the key part of your sentence is IDGAF about "American power".
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But you should.

FlyGuy said:
The USD has so much inertia that I highly doubt it could be replaced.
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It doesn't need to be replaced by a single currency. It can easily be balkanized, and I mean fucking easily. To be pretty blunt mate, from a non American's standpoint the idea that the rest of the world needs an America that has no interest in the rest of us is some crazy american centric bullshit. The reason America is the "Indispensable Nation" is that it made itself so (and I mean that in the positive sense). It was a bulwark against authoritarian power, a safe home for capital and ideas, etc, etc. A beacon for the good things in the world. A deeply flawed one, granted, but to riff off of an old Churchill quote, the USA might not be the best nation possible, but it's the best we've come up with yet.

When America stops making itself indispensable, the rest of the world will adjust. Regional economic power centres will coalesce into blocs and will find pathways around the absence of American power. American power absolutely declines in that scenario, and in ways that have major impacts on domestic American life that I don't think the average American appreciates.

FlyGuy said:
Reduce bloated budgets and stupid spending, reduce debt.
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You could do that now....do you really think that your wasteful spending actually leaves your borders? The entire US international aid budget is like 70 Billion and as I showed with the example of aid to Ukraine, the bulk of that money remains within the US.

FlyGuy said:
Focus on the shit that actually matters. Finances, infrastructure, retirement, leave any stupid social side-show issues to states to F around with. Reduce government subsidies substantially, take the short-term hit, normalize costs of things like college and healthcare.
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Again...international aid isn't why that stuff doesn't get fixed. But let me give you a quick, very real world scenario:

Taiwan. Without international military power projection to dissuade them, China will 100% re take Taiwan. When they do that, there will be a massive shortage of semi conductors that are absolutely necessary for the modern world to function. The cost of electronic goods of all classes (consumer, industrial, medical, etc, etc) will fucking sky rocket (remember the "chip shortage" during covid when Americans couldn't buy new pickup trucks without paying big mark ups? Multiply that event by a factor of 5-10 easily). The impact on American (and world) GDP will be massive. Regular people will lose jobs, businesses, etc all because of something that happened 10,000 miles away. Eventually China will take full control of the island, and will start getting chips to market, within a few years normalcy of sorts will return to the economy. But now an expansionary authoritarian government has a stranglehold on chips and can open or close access to a vital resource in a way OPEC in the 70's could only dream of and now instead of the US holding the hammer both militarily and economically, it's the US that is beholden to Chinese "interests". An insular America is a deeply vulnerable power, and your quality of life as an American is inextricably linked to American power. Also inB4 "but this is why America first! We shouldn't need anyone else" even with expenditures like the Chips Act, the US is a generation away from catching up, and that generation requires China to not invade Taiwan before the US has caught up.

That's one of numerous examples of how events outside of American borders, without American intervention can have massive implications for quality of life inside Americas borders.
 
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