I am wondering if Donald Trump is some kind of a Rorschach test. Hear me out, now. Suppose some advanced alien civilization wants to figure out just how stupid the beings on this planet are, so they put Trump into politics. And they write all his lies for him and choose the members of his Cabinet and staff, who also lie. The test here is to just keep pushing the envelope until it not only tears, but bursts into flames. Here is the next stupid thing you are asked to believe. Yes, you, me, and Alice In Wonderland who stated, “I’ve learned to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” You were born too soon, Alice. You belong in 2025 with us.
This is the hardest I laughed since Trump became president. pic.twitter.com/qTvUgRxOtj
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 14, 2025
And Howard Lutnick is quite the comedian. The post of Secretary of Commerce is one not usually associated with high comedy but that was before Lutnick came on the scene. Now we get utter hilarity from him on a daily basis.
So if you’re making under $150K welcome to the Vast Majority. Over 80% of us fall into this category and we will have the yoke of paying taxes lifted from our weary shoulders soon, we are told. Donald Trump will do it. And the only thing between that Nirvana and us? Oh, not a biggy: Trump just has to balance the budget, easy as cake, piece of pie.
Bill Clinton had the budget balanced for the first time in 29 years. That was in 2001. Then you remember Dubya getting in and running us over a financial cliff. And you remember the recession of 2008. And you remember all the work that Obama had to do to get us out of economic hot water. Then we had four years of Trump, where all Obama’s work began to be undone and then we had the intermission of Joe Biden, coping with post-pandemic global inflation (and very well) and now we have Trump back for the second half of this horror movie.
You might want to glance at this article in the New York Times regarding how long it would take to balance the budget. Spoiler alert: It can’t happen in four years. It probably can’t happen in ten. And it sure in hell can’t happen without going after Social Security and Medicare.
The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a recent analysis from the committee.
Balancing the budget without tax increases, or cuts to the military, Medicare or Social Security, would mean cutting the rest of the budget by a whopping 70 percent. Cuts of that magnitude would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the F.B.I., the Parks Service and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.
And Medicaid and SNAP would be long gone as well. Trump listens a lot to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and their neofeudalism notions. They pump up his ego, telling him he could be the most consequential president in American history (which may end up being the case, only not the way they mean it, or he thinks it.) They want him to change society to their utopian vision but their utopian vision is dystopian for the rest of us.
They are pushing for neofeudalism and here’s the definition of that from Wikipedia. Neo-feudalism or new feudalism is a theorized contemporary rebirth of policies of governance, economy, and public life, reminiscent of those which were present in many feudal societies. Such aspects include, but are not limited to: Unequal rights and legal protections for common people and for nobility,[1] dominance of societies by a small and powerful elite, a lack of social mobility, and relations of lordship and serfdom between the elite and the people, where the former are rich and the latter poor.[2]
In many ways we are there and have been there for quite some time. There are definitely two criminal justice systems in this country, one for the rich and one for the poor. And elites do dominate for the most part. Most of us work for The Man our entire lives. Few of us get to work for ourselves. We still have the ballot but with Musk in bed with Trump, who knows how long that will be the case?
Trump is a puppet. He is Putin’s puppet, he is the billionaire oligarch’s puppet. He takes direction from the last person he speaks to, that’s well known. He shoots from the hip and then doubles down on his ill advised decisions. But this pipe dream of Lutnick’s truly takes the cake. Let’s see if it gets any traction. Me thinks it might be just another Trumpian trial balloon. He’s just putting it up there to see peoples’ reactions.
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This is just their lame excuse for all the havoc being created by Musk and Doge. Unfortunately, there are millions of stupid rubes in this country that will buy into it, even as they lose their own social security, health care, veterans services and education for their kids. We are an intellectual waste land.
They’ll ‘balance the budget’ right after ‘Infrastructure Week’.
I didn’t need the definition of feudalism to know it was a raw deal for the masses, I’ve seen it portrayed in books and movies too many times to count. The gist of it is, you have no rights but those the feudal lord chooses to give you, and they can be revoked at any time without notice. Second, crimes are only committed by the masses, the feudal lords are above the law, hell, they are the law. The feudal lord is answerable only to the king. Sound good? I didn’t think so.