Lord Ratner

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Am I required to comment on your every thought? I'm not nearly as interested in staffing or FOIA. The government spends more money, has more employees, and does more things than it ever has. Funny how people act like it's always operating right at the minimum. But we did less before, we can (and should) do less again.

Good. Mail in voting is absurd, outside of it's original intent, and should not be conflated with early-voting, which is a good thing. Military and out-of-state only.

Depends on how you are interpreting it. I can see a lot of people hyperventilating by claiming that this is some sort of attempt to bypass the judiciary, but there's no good evidence of that. This seems to be a memo declaring that within the executive branch, interpretations will be made at the highest level. Everything about that is a good thing.

Sales tax for all taxation as the baseline. This allows for removing sales tax on targeted items as tax relief for those who make less and therefore spend a higher percentage of their income on essentials. It also means workers never have to do taxes ever again. Tax fraud is harder because taxes are collected *from* the taxed by a business who does not want to go to jail for tax fraud. This would have to be done by constitutional amendment. Make the amendment such that the tax is only adjustable to 0%. No intermediate tax levels to favor this industry or that. Limit exemptions to a fixed level, let's say a max of $5,000 (just an example). If the item or service costs more than that, the rest is taxed. The exceptions are solely for helping low-income Americans, but everyone gets the same exemptions. Income tax was always a stupid and complicated solution.

https://thefga.org/research/universal-work-requirements/ It used to be the case. It is not the case now.

You believe that reducing taxes is "giving" money to the taxed and "taking" from the untaxed? Hot take, but very honest. Okay, then what do we do? Right now the system you believe in is running 2 trillion dollar per year deficits. This is during one of the most financially successful times in American history. We are running deficits (deficit/GDP) that have not been seen since WWII. If we keep interest rates where they are, the deficit will rise another trillion dollars as our interest payments spin out of control. If we lower interest rates we risk reigniting inflation. So what do we do with this broadly popular concept of spending more money than we have on everyone just because they like it? How much of my money do I deserve to keep, and do you believe the bottom 50% of the country with no net federal income tax liability should be contributing anything towards this massive shortfall that funds their "general welfare?"

Turning with an engine out for non-terrain considerations. Aircraft with less than 500' vertical separation on final. Modified landing data for the shorter runway. That shit doesn't fly at other airfields. That's the deviance. Only a few select "special" places is it allowed. That's the normalization. The helo flying high is just "deviance."

This has always been the answer. Don't worry, I don't think it will be much longer before we have it.

@nsplayer I'm against cutting taxes until we clean up spending. I'm also against raising them. But they do need to be standardized and lowered soon after getting debt levels down. We need a constitutional amendment that absolutely nothing can be funded for longer than ten years, and all funding must be a specific dollar amount. No future adjustments for inflation, no COLA, no fixed percentages, no per capita budget, nothing. Every single program and expense gets a fixed dollar amount in the budget, and can't exceed 10 years of funding. Right now it takes an act of God to get a program defunded. It should take an act of God to get the program funded. Yes this includes SSI and Medicare/Medicaid. You will always have rot and bloat and ancient politicians rape the future to fund their bullshit, but it should be just as easy for the next generation of politicians to turn off the spigot.

I'm no fan of the f-35, but I think this downplays how much the government itself is responsible for what a shit show that program is. It wasn't Lockheed who demanded a VSTOL version in the same basic chassis. And it wasn't Boeing who signed off on the ridiculous digital boom pod on the kc-46. The problem is a bunch of generals and bureaucrats who have never existed in the business world putting insane wish lists together and just assuming that it all happens somehow. And that ignores changing the requirements halfway through the program, or never mentioning that one of the primary requirements is that the plane looks cool, so you start doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to pick the airplane that you just want to win. And we need to start locking people in prison for the rest of their lives if they abuse these programs for personal gain. No more getting a job at the contractor whose product you selected, and that includes your family. Basically, let's continue the "fix the government" crusade first, then we can worry about which airplanes we buy.

All that talk about hyperbole then you throw this bullshit out. 😂🤣 No you wouldn't. Just admit that. It's a valid position, even if I disagree.

Truly? You said that you, a progressive who voted for a progressive candidate who pitched Donald Trump as the literal end to American democracy, would somehow be more mad if you were a Republican who voted for the Republican president who immediately started doing what he campaigned on doing. And you didn't see how that comment is bananas-dumb? Donald Trump is wiping out the bureaucrats that used administrivia and procedure to thwart and outlast his first administration. He's bringing in experts on efficiency and modernization to slash departments that shouldn't exist in the first place. He's purging an ideology that destroyed our academic institutions and violated the very core principals the country was founded on. I know why you're mad about all of these things, but if you're so delusional to think any of this would make a conservative mad, you clearly do live in a mental bubble with no grasp at all on how other people in this country think. That wouldn't be particularly remarkable except for you've been in a primarily conservative organization for what, two decades? The only thing I'm mad about right now is that we had to wait for a reality TV star with a gold toilet and plastic wife to do what conservative presidents should have been doing for the last 30 years.

This is the dumbest thing you've ever said, and that's quite a threshold.

If that's how it shakes out, I agree. But I think Trump is inclined towards something different, and he hinted at it a couple times when he said they'd have to give something back, maybe a lot, maybe a little. But he understands totalitarianism and saving face, so he's not going to lay out a what the final resolution looks like. My guess is that Putin will announce some amount of territory being returned to the Ukrainians, and then that idiot bashi will be here trying to convince everybody that it was Putin's idea to do so 😂🤣