Outside the Beltway

Lazy Tabby Sunday

· Sunday, April 13, 2025 · 9 comments

He previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective.

What? Only 85% short of the goal? (I suspect that even the 15% saved ends up not actually being anywhere near that much real savings).

And this sounds familiar.

…there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

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Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.

Comments

  1. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    I’m convinced the reason the felon is so intent on deporting people without due process, is because few, if any, of the claims against his victims would stand up in court.

    Imagine if he were to pay millions to the tinpot tyrant in El Salvador just to reserve space in his gulag for no one at all.

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  2. Daryl says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    What? Only 85% short of the goal? (I suspect that even the 15% saved ends up not actually being anywhere near that much real savings).

    This, even if accurate – which it ain’t, is a sliver of the $5T just added to the deficit by MAGA Moses and the rest of the House Congress-Cretins.
    Also – to date only about 100,000 so-called illegal aliens have been deported. That’s only about 10% of Trumps promised 1,000,000 Mass Deportation.
    The incompetence is staggering.
    But at least we can still get A-One steak sauce.

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  3. charontwo says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    Don Moynihan has a post up about international students having their visas revoked over trivial bullshit:

    “Don Moynihan”

    The reality is that we cannot rely on the Secretary of State to accurately explain why he is purging international students from America. He makes vague claims that they are threats, but refuses to get into the specifics. Instead, we have to look at the cases of individual students, and try to understand them. Based on those stories, we can see two broad categories of students being removed:

    Students removed for using political voice or being associated with protests — These are the most visible and obviously political cases, raising troubling issues about free speech. This includes Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who was a visible figure in protests in Columbia, Badar Khan Suri, an Indian scholar at Georgetown University whose studies peacebuilding, and or Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts co-wrote an op-ed in a student newspaper opposing the war in Gaza.

    Students removed for minor infractions with the law — This is likely the majority of cases, but Rubio does not mention them. Here, students removed not for political voice, but for low-level engagements with law enforcement. Dozens of students reported that their visas were revoked for traffic violations, such as speeding. One immigration lawyer said: “This is totally unprecedented…A brush with law enforcement that didn’t necessarily result in an arrest or a conviction is all it took.” Her client had a DUI from a decade ago, which he disclosed when applying for a new visa, which was approved. But now that visa has been revoked. Another immigration lawyer spoke to a woman who had been arrested when a man assaulted her; police subsequently acknowledged she was the victim, but her visa was terminated anyway.

    There may also be a third category: students who are genuinely dangerous radicals, or who have engaged in serious lawbreaking. But the administration has not shown that such students exist. They have every incentive to find some truly bad apples to justify their broad-based attack on international students, but have not done so. One reason this might be the case is that all of these international students are already subject to intense legal oversight: they have to go through a vetting process to get to the United States, and are subject to deportation if they engage in serious criminal activity.

    What is common across both categories is the absence of any sort of due process where the government feels the need to present evidence to justify the revocations of visas. Non-citizens have less due process rights, of course, and some of those affected are suing. But broadly, the government is imposing dramatic costs on these students with little evidence of actual or serious wrongdoing.

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  4. Kevin says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    @Kathy: I don’t think that’s entirely right. It’s not that he knows whatever “evidence” there is won’t stand up in court, it’s that he doesn’t care if it would.

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  5. gVOR10 says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    Also at The Guardian this morning, Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature.

    Why (is Trump’s approval still 43-48%)? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.
    …
    There is strong evidence of a causal association between growing inequality and the rise of populist authoritarian movements. A paper in the Journal of European Public Policy found that a one-unit rise in the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) increases support for demagogues by 1%.
    …
    But such killer clowns can’t pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democrats’ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: “One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.”
    …
    The one thing that can stop the rise of the far right is the one thing mainstream parties are currently not prepared to deliver: greater equality. The rich should be taxed more, and the revenue used to improve the lives of the poor. However frantically centrist parties avoid the issue, there is no other way.

    The author seems to get the vicious cycle GOPs depend on. Suck up most of the money. Stoke resentment over the consequences to get re-elected. Suck up even more money. Rinse and repeat.

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  6. CSK says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    Did Whitmer think she wouldn’t be identified?

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  7. Steven L. Taylor says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    @gVOR10: I absolutely think that the increase in inequality/concentration of wealth in the US is hugely responsible for why we are seeing the nationalist/populist surge. The problem is, as you elude, that the GOP’s policies are largely responsible, and yet they are now reaping the political benefit.

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  8. Daryl says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    @gVOR10:
    @Steven L. Taylor:
    Inequality has been THE project of the Right since Reagan. Biden talked about ending trickle-down economics but was limited in what he could, or was willing to, do. And for whatever reason it was never sold hard. This is the front to win in this war. Yet “These people have been conning you for 50 years” is central to THEIR con. So what’s the bumper sticker?
    And Chuck Schumer isn’t who we need to deliver the message.
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trickle-down/

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  9. Just nutha ignint cracker says:
    Sunday, 13 April 2025 at

    @gVOR10: Your source reveals a terrible problem for America: you can’t win by promoting equality and improving conditions for the poor by taxing the rich. 🙁

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