House budget bill adds $4.5B to debt, Musk chasing pennies and Trump says entitlements off the table so what's your point? Trump's foreign policy is by far the biggest threat to dollar's reserve currency status.

No, it’s the same conversation. If you don’t see how public sector unions decrease efficiency, you’re not paying attention.

Supporting union mechanics who are skilled tradesmen like we are is far more logical than supporting 'union' toothpaste hunters. Things seem to be going well for union autoworkers and looking up for union shipbuilders. This is a labor friendly administration as long as they do productive things for GDP.

Even Roosevelt (hardly a far-right demagogue) argued against public sector unions. It's apples and oranges.

News flash: Our union decreases effiency, to the QWL benefit of its membership.

True. A little ironic that a guy who ran the debt up as aggressively as Trump45 is suddenly the champion of fiscal responsibility but hey, if he’s gonna do it, great.

Problem is if you look at federal spending, it’s almost entirely SocSec, healthcare, & defense- with interest becoming a growing cost. So if you're at all realistic about making a difference, you’ve got to either go after those three, or increase your income (ie raise taxes) or more likely at this point, both.

The federal workforce- where EM seems to be focused- makes up about 4% of spending so even if you make huge cuts in that area (which he seems intent on doing) it simply won’t be felt. Unlike the 6x bankrupt Trump, Musk is no dummy so it’s literally impossible he doesn’t understand this. Rather than affecting the bottom line, he seems to be more motivated by a general contempt for labor, which is pretty much in keeping with his conduct at Tesla & Twitter/X.

Show me a real budget plan than makes meaningful changes (not nebulous claims of having saved nebulous billions that always seem to be proven false) toward fiscal sustainability & I’m listening. Until then all I see is the most aggressively anti-labor administration of my lifetime marching under the banner of “getting spending under control”.

Thanks for the good laugh.

Exactly. Non military discretionary spending is less than a trillion of the almost 7 trillion dollar federal budget. FBI, DHS, CBP, all of it is in that trillion dollar sliver of the pie chart. Making a big stink with a chain saw talking about firing a couple billion dollars worth of government payroll worker bees is entirely performative. If you want to balance the budget you can:

1. cut SS/medicare/medicaid (no happening)
2. Drastically cut the military budget (not happening)
3. Raise taxes (not happening)

And your point is? Is your TDS preventing you from reading? There need to be cuts EVERYWHERE. DOD, FBI, DHS, Department of Education, EVERYWHERE. There are over 420 government departments. There are so many departments that the government itself doesn’t know how many there are!

His foreign policy is the problem? He is getting Ukraine and Russia to come the negotiating table for the first time in 3 years! Hopefully it will save us another 120 BILLION that we already spent. More than any other country combined!

You guys are so worried about “Orange Man Bad!” that you can’t see we are spending ourselves into a huge hole that we may not be able to get out of as it is!

If they want to fix the deficit why did they start with pennies? Why is the House budget $4.5T in the red from the start?

Start with finding out why the $ is the reserve currency then ask yourself if starting fights with our allies and cozying up to our enemies will help with keeping it that way. Germany and Poland considering nuclear weapons ought to be a clue.

Yes it does. Thanks for reinforcing the point.