It’s not often you see an itemized list of total failure. The Trump administration’s little efforts so far are just the warmup. Even the mathematics are Illiterate. America could be one big broke red state overnight at this rate.
The strategy, or rather lack of it, however, is far worse.
Please note that this is a very much abbreviated overview of core principles with examples. The sheer number of issues raised by the budget proposals doesn’t allow a detailed analysis.
America’s greatest strengths are being decimated systematically. The headlines may look bad, but the future projections are horrific. If you take a look at the budget headlines, you will see a pretty gruesome picture, which superficially equates to defunding practically everything. It’s much worse than that.
DOGE has been a total disaster. The scope and scale of defunding are roughly the equivalent of driving a big rig through a crowded kindergarten. Public spending props up a lot of America’s economy. The struggling lower end of America’s economy will be hit extremely hard.
The ridiculous theory that you can somehow solve a 32 trillion dollar deficit with a couple of hundred billion dollars in spending cuts is simply ridiculous. You’d flunk grade school arithmetic.
The idea that you can also do it while simultaneously spending a fortune on deporting people and threatening wars with several other countries is even more absurd.
Doing these things while flatlining your own foreign trade is imbecilic at best. The future mega-problem is that that is nothing like the worst of what’s wrong with this worldview.
As a national strategy, this is likely to be a 360-degree catastrophe.
For example:
Cuts to NASA and the space program. One of the more absurd ideas is to ignore the current moon project and focus on Mars. This will effectively give the moon to China. Mars is far too hard a target at the moment for current levels of technology. This really is a “giant leap” off a very predictable cliff.
Cuts to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. At a time when cyber espionage is decimating security, this is beyond stupid. These highly effective agencies and the overall intelligence environment require more assets, not less. This dovetails with the mysterious winding back of counterintelligence operations against Russian espionage.
Cutting back expenditure in either of these areas is largely illusory. These are core strategic areas critical to the US in the real world right now. America won’t get refunds on years of incapacity, inadequacy, and inability to function properly. These years will be total losses.
This is the pattern that is echoing through an administration that simply won’t be able to function. The net effect is to cut the essentials, destroy functional capacity, and talk about things which haven’t happened yet and probably never will.
The defense budget is mainly noise. A proposed $1 trillion defense budget isn’t really all that much of a surprise. Nor is it likely to achieve very much. It’s more like a singalong. Between “modernization” and “increased lethality” are about $108 billion dollars. This is being done while implementing other rather vague cuts.
Of course, this also involves slashing more jobs. The sheer cost of paying off hundreds of thousands of lost administration jobs isn’t getting much of a mention. If every one of the nearly 200,000 jobs requires a $10,000 payout, how much does that come to?
Who’s going to do the work? Who’s going to train the people to do the work? Who’ll pay for the training? AI can’t do those jobs. What gets done in the meantime? What can be done? Not much, if anything.
Your worst enemies will tell you that you’re a genius. Your best friends will tell you you’re an idiot.
Congress should shut down this mess before it happens.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
