One of my Facebook friends complained about Trump’s proposed $10 million military parade:
Our government is actually wasting money this way amidst so many real economic issues? … If they care about vets, invest that money in veterans’ affairs: in their hospitals, in their mental health support programs. In prosthetics and lowering costs of medications, in improving the VAs. This parade is an outrageous waste of resources.
I pointed out that she and Donald Trump were mostly on common ground. Both are passionate about increasing the funding for the VA. Trump’s proposed budget for FY2019:
President Trump proposes a total of $198.6 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This request, an increase of $12.1 billion over 2018, will ensure the Nation’s Veterans receive high-quality health care and timely access to benefits and services.
A lot of folks think that the VA’s health care system should be eliminated. From a retired colonel (NBC):
The relationship between the VA and the American public used to be a very close one. The VA was founded and then expanded to a huge size to serve the needs of veterans at a time when we had lots of them, when nearly every household included someone who wore, or once wore, a uniform.
That’s no longer the case. Most Americans no longer know anyone in uniform, and so for many, military service, and the obligation to take care of those who serve, has become an abstraction. We say we love our troops, but that’s because we don’t have to be the troops.
And now we have a huge bureaucracy that most citizens know little about, and our expectations have been mismanaged. We think this large government structure can take care of our veterans, but it can’t, no matter who is in charge, or how much money we throw at it. Bureaucracies are excellent at doing routine things in a routine way, but as any physician can attest, medicine is not routine.
We have created a large bureaucracy with thousands of hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms and employees to deliver medical care, and it needs to be abandoned. It makes no sense to have a parallel universe to take care of our veterans, separate doctors, separate facilities, equipment and even protocols. There is no reason that veterans who would otherwise wait for months to be seen at a VA health clinic can’t be seen by private doctors, the same doctors who treat everyone else. The procedure doesn’t need to be complicated: patient is seen by private doctor, private doctor treats patient, doctor sends bill to government, government pays doctor.
[A friend worked as a doctor at the VA and described union agreements and bureaucracy that made it impossible to serve patients properly. Unionized nurses would refuse to assist with critically ill patients when it was time for their break. A unionized nurse also tied up one of his colleagues with a harassment complaint (both the survivor and the abuser identified as non-lesbian females so it was not a “sexual harassment” dispute).
She and Trump both want to keep pouring money down this hole, though (though she characterized the $12 billion bump for FY2019 as “not enough”). I asked “If you see the issues as related, why get into a fight with Trump over a $10 million parade when you agree with him on the VA funding issue ($200 billion per year; 20,000X the cost of the parade)? Are you willing to let him have his parade if he gives you the bigger VA budget that you want?” The answer was “no”.
Since it is not guaranteed that Congress will approve this requested increase, why wouldn’t she go down to Capitol Hill and lobby for support? She has no children or job to hold her back (she has more than 20 years of education and is in “prime age” for working, but is not seeking employment).
[Note that I wouldn’t personally choose to spend $10+ million (out of a $4 trillion total federal budget) on a parade in D.C., mostly because I am generally opposed to taking money from taxpayers in the Midwest to pay for more free fun stuff that residents of the imperial capital can enjoy.]
Trump was a Manhattan Democrat for most of his life, so it should be the case that my coastal Facebook friends would find at least some things to agree on with him. But instead they are outraged and enraged 24/7 on every conceivable issue. I assume that this is rational behavior, but why? What are they getting out of it?
Related:
- Mitt Romney and military funding (a 2012 post on how to save $1.8 billion per year easily)
- Russian military budget (the VA turns out to cost 4X what the Russians spend on their entire active-duty military)
This is bog-standard “arguments are soldiers” (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers) and/or “No friends to the right, no enemies to the left” stuff.
To be fair, I’m sure that plenty of the kind of folks who are Duck Dynasty fans couldn’t come up with a single thing that President Obama did that they agree with.
As you said, he _was_ a Democrat. Religious fanatics have always hated apostates more than nonbelievers.
A unionized nurse also tied up one of his colleagues with a harassment complaint (both the survivor and the abuser identified as non-lesbian females so it was not a “sexual harassment” dispute
So there was a dispute between two employees. How did it turn out? Mentioning the fact that the nurse was in a union just sounds like a gratuitous slap at unions.
Good points, of course. Numbers illiteracy and financial illiteracy is very common, unfortunately. Even amongst the “well educated.”
This doesn’t help encourage any kind of rational political discourse.
@G C: Numbers illiteracy and financial illiteracy is very common, unfortunately. Even amongst the “well educated.”
Which is why a smooth talker runs for office. It is all about how the messenger delivers the message.
Numbers illiteracy and financial illiteracy is very common, unfortunately. Even amongst the “well educated.”
Which is why a smooth talker runs for office.
A numbers-illiterate, well educated, smooth talker…
“The math stuff I was fine with up until about the seventh grade.”
https://youtu.be/LvZHTmA-www
Ken is quite “on point” (as Tom Ashbrook used to say when he was gainfully employed). The hatred exhibited by your F-friend is religious not rational, and the chap violated quite a few lefty/commie/proggy commandments.
Nothing will save the apostate, even abdicating the throne — witness the Nicholas II of Russia fate.
Ivan,
I have thought a lot about how we have really just swapped out our sky gods and mythical tales for recent government progressive.
God = Government
Jesus = FDR
Saint = Kennedy
Pope = Democratic Presidents since Woodrow Wilson
The Church + Clergy = Civil Servants
Seven deadly sins:
1. Racism
2. Sexism
3. Fat Shaming
4. Slut Shaming
5. Victim Blaming
6. “Privilege”
7. Voting Republican
But feel free to hi-jack these analogies with far better ones!
America’s Hitler moment is almost here. No it is not Bush–yes 3,000,000+ Iraqis (99% innocents) have died because of Bush, but that is only half a Hitler. This is about the full Hitler: Trump. The full Hitler is almost upon us with a few million Americans eagerly marching behind him. They’ll ride high, just the same as the Nazis did. Unimaginable opulence from blood money. But most of us will pray for an end to the insatiable right wing terrorism that will soon reach into every corner of America.
ZZAZZ2 – Are you serious? If so, what evil has Trump committed to rival the bogeyman of the 20th century?
Sam—genocide in Syria and Yemen? Turned ICE into Gestapo? In any case my remark said that the Hitler moment is about to arrive, not that it had come and gone.