Tag: Government

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Ya know… As disruptive as it is, I think DOGE is a good thing.

I know there are a lot of people who will disagree with me on this.

DOGE is doing exactly what has been needed in our Government for a very long time. I might go so far as to say DOGE is akin to Ivermectin in that it’s killing off parasites.

Then there’s Tulsi Gabbard who summarily fired a bunch of “Intelligence” workers who spent their days using secure servers to hold discussions of a sexual nature.

Pete Hegseth and Trump are cleaning house in The Pentagon and Kash Patel & Dan Bongino are working the FBI.

I’m looking forward to Pam Bondi restructuring the DOJ such that we never see the abuses of past years again.

I’ve been very amused at the Democrats complaining that Bongino isn’t qualified. Folks, he was Secret Service and apparently qualified enough to guard Hillary Clinton. He’s got the degrees, and law enforcement background. So Democrats once again are outright lying, because they don’t like him.

I swear to God, if the Democrats just started telling the freakin truth it would go a long way toward saving their party.

Alas, they’re so used to blatantly lying and getting away with it, that now they can’t stop themselves, indeed, they may not even know they’ve crossed the line between truth and fiction.

All of this popped to mind as I was reading the latest out of Washington.

Adam schiff donald trump.As the government workers scream about being asked to spend 5 minutes writing a bullet list of their activities for the week, and national intelligence resources being used to host sex chats during work hours. Government workers are mad about actually having to show up at their place of business (government offices) and the IRS fires workers then (in my opinion) targets the taxpayers by closing 120 offices that typically provide assistance to said taxpayers in filing taxes, and USAID is closed freeing government workers who should have been raising questions about some of the expenditures to seek employment elsewhere…

As I processed all of this, I couldn’t help but think that government jobs are freakin cushy. After the dust settles I’ll be applying for one of those jobs!

Probably not…

These government jobs appear to be playpens. I say that as someone who while working in technology saw a lot of software development playpens usually populated by mostly Indian workers and very young fresh out of college horribly inexperienced programmers.

Bean bags, video games, expensive coffee and energy drinks, top of the line laptops (when desktop machines 1/2 the price would have done just as well). Entire sections of departments were walled off and “No Go Zones” where the “Developers” spent most of their time chatting in Hindi, playing games, or sleeping. I suspect most of these people were H1B1s but I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that there wasn’t a lot of work getting done. I also know that schedules kept slipping, products kept being delayed, and the quality of what work was being done was generally low.

Given the similarities, Musk & his techies are the perfect people to walk into these government agencies because they’ll take one look and know exactly what the hell is going on.

Even though Mush is a fan of H1B1s, I suspect that when he cleaned out X he saw a fair share of these “Safe Spaces” where screwing around on the company dime had become acceptable.

Someone like him, (God I’d love to help him tear through these government departments,) probably has to head to accounting. I’d love to walk in with him, then peal off to go into the technology wing and IT departments. Believe me, I know where to look for a bunch of lazy useless salaried and expensive individuals, frittering away money on equipment and technologies that are unnecessary to day to day operations but lots of fun to play with.

As an aside, the best day at one place I worked, was the day a new owner walked in, went directly to the developers playpen and fired everyone screwing around in there instantly. “You’re all fired! Go to HR they’ve got your packages waiting for you.”

This new owner had fired our HR department and replaced it with his own the week before. That’s why no-one saw it coming. The H1B1s all freaked out. Some crying, others angrily demanding their jobs be given back to them.

Their cries and complaints fell on deaf ears. The next thing he asked was if the contents of the playpen were personal property or had the company purchased it? When he got no answer, security, and hired movers, stepped in and started carrying the shit to the dumpster.

One of the developers threw his $3000 dollar Apple laptop across the room. The new owner pointed at the guy. Security escorted him and his broken laptop in the direction of HR. The new owner said quite plainly, the cost of that machine would be deducted from the former employee’s pay.

I remember thinking it was a great day even if I was about to lose my job too.

The arrogance and insufferable behavior the developers has shown to those of us tasked with testing their dreck software made it worth it.

Interestingly, we didn’t lose our jobs that day. The new owner asked for our honest evaluation of the state of the software and how far the project really was behind. We told him.

He cancelled the project and merged us into one of his other companies. Our original company disappeared completely.

It turns out this man bought our company for some patents and source code to previous successful products. Products that had been built, prior to the developer playpen being installed.

Because of this experience I see all the screaming, pearl clutching, and clothes rending as nothing more than what I saw at that company that day.

The layabouts have been caught. Unfortunately there are good people, good workers that are also being hurt in the process.

Alexandria ocasio cortez aoc tax rich afp 4268547959.There’s another thing to consider too.

Having USAID, or IRS, or FBI, or CIA on a resume with an end of employment date in 2025 means these people, all of them, might be really screwed.

They’re radioactive and no-one will be able to tell if they’re good employees or bad ones. So potential employers may bypass them entirely. Why hire trouble? Most corporations are generally risk averse.

The lesson that I think everyone should learn from this is as follows;

Crockett outburst 1.The good employees either didn’t, or couldn’t say person X, Y, or Z wasn’t doing their fair share of the work.

Perhaps it was because of fear of retribution, or DEI, or just not wanting to engage in political infighting because the risk was too high.

(I’ve been there, I know those hard choices. “Do I rock the boat and turn this shitty job into hell on earth, or keep my mouth shut, collect my paycheck and pray upper management fixes the problem?” After all it’s their job anyway.)

Thing is, not saying something, not reporting it, does a disservice to the company, the department, and ultimately leads to corporate bloat decreasing the employees share of any bonuses.

There’s nothing worse than doing a shit ton of work, then having to suck it up when the laziest most worthless of your coworkers starts bragging about using their bonus, (that they “earned” simply by occupying space,) to book a vacation, when you know your boss won’t give you time off.

So the lesson everyone should learn, from government workers on down to mini mart employees is to speak up. If someone consistently isn’t doing their job, they shouldn’t have their job.

Hopefully with the rebirth of meritocracy, it won’t matter what race, gender, or national origin someone is. The only criteria will be, as it always should have been, is the person doing their work?

I think our government agencies are all learning that very lesson right now. It’s a hard lesson, there’s going to be a lot of broken eggs but it’s unavoidable because the situation has been allowed to get so bad.

I think that much of the problem can be laid at the feet of DEI, but seniority and tenure have as much to do with it as anything else.

Once meritocracy is removed there’s not much incentive.

When I started working in the late 1970s I worked my ass off because my boss had the ability to reward me with a check, which just made me work harder and yes, inspired competition between me and my colleagues. That in turn made our company successful and in the success we all got good raises!

By the late 1990s bosses couldn’t do that anymore, because it was perceived as unfair.

From then on we got yearly reviews and 2%-3% raises regardless of how hard we worked. So what was the point?

Not all of us were going to be able to move into management. Indeed not all of us wanted to move into management. Some of us liked being in the trenches and what we did without the headache of being a manager.

Unfortunately, that meant that if you wanted a decent raise to buy a house or have a child, you had no choice but to change jobs. In my opinion, the death of meritocracy and rise of employment racial quotas screwed America and American business.

We also had the overarching threat of layoffs, corporate mergers, and companies going bust. So even if we didn’t have merit raises, we still had to be at least a bit leaner, flexible, and aggressive to keep our employment somewhat stable.

The government workers in the news right now seem to have never experienced what we in corporate America took for granted.

For them, it appears that sitting in their cubicles, doing little work, not rocking the boat, and hanging around for years, was enough to get pretty high pay, excellent benefits, and decent raises and never fear being laid off, or losing their jobs for any reason.

I guess the real world intruding in their safe spaces is shocking and unsettling.

Our politicians screaming about unfair treatment of government workers have obviously got to be voted out of office too.

Their unrealistic beliefs and lack of oversight will simply insure that after this mess is cleaned up, they’ll allow the same mistakes to be made all over again.

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But it’s only 1%

Waste of money.I keep seeing people talking about USAID being only 1% of the budget. As if somehow that justifies the waste.

Waste is waste. That 1% is still more money than I’ll ever see. It might be more money than most of the people in the United States will ever see.

That it’s only 1% isn’t the point. The point is what that 1% is being spent on. An alternate point is, “If we see this here, what will we find elsewhere in the miasma we call our government?”

The best thing we could have happening to our government right now, in my opinion, is to have successful businessmen looking at government, not as a black hole of poor investment, but instead looking at it like a failing business that they’re trying to save.

I say that as a preamble to the point I want to try to make.

I don’t understand the logic of trivializing money spent, or money earned.

Let me provide a couple of anecdotes from the opposite perspective. A perspective of companies trying to make a profit.

I once worked for a company that sold software. The software, drove process controls in devices and could easily be integrated into a company’s machines via a pretty clever API. 

The company’s software was in a ton of other manufactures machines. It saved the manufactures time having to write basic control software and allowed them to concentrate on feature differentiation.

The company I worked for sold licenses to use their software. Part of the licensing structure was for updates, modifications, and integration assistance.

One of my friends worked in the Sales department. One day he came to my cubicle really despondent.

He’d been working for weeks on several deals only to have those deals rejected by the ‘powers that be’ because they weren’t big enough. Meaning the individual deals weren’t in the millions of dollars range.

I can understand that philosophy if the smaller deals were going to require a lot of hand holding or customization. But that wasn’t the case. The other companies were looking for just the base software and they were going to handle the integration into their product on their own. They were looking for a jumpstart to get their products to market.

The powers that be, rejected 6, trouble free 1/2 million to 3/4 million dollar sales because they wanted nothing less than million dollar sales.

Neither of us understood the logic. Money is money.

The Company, like so many other I’ve worked for, no longer exists. 

Turns out bad management destroys even the best company. In this particular company’s case their refusal to do smaller contracts opened a door for their competitors to bring their products to market and capitalize on the perception that my company was “Too Elitist”. My colleague and I were long gone by the time everything imploded.

I’ve watched more than my fair share of companies and their dynamite products go down the tubes through bad management, arrogance, and greed.

I worked for another startup company whose CEO said in a meeting, “If smaller investors don’t understand our name change then we don’t need their money. Larger investors will understand and support us.” 

A couple of colleagues & I walked out of that meeting, looked at each other, chuckled, then polished up our resumes. The company was gone 8 months later.

The point of these anecdotes is:

When people trivialize even small amounts of money, (Or waste,) it seems to open the door to foolish decisions, or more waste.

In the case of companies, they lose access to operating capital and sometimes that’s enough to starve a company to death. With companies, they may get a reputation for being difficult to deal with, or slow, and that drives away potential future customers.

In the case of the government, trivializing amounts makes it more likely that smaller amounts of waste will be overlooked as “the cost of doing business”.

For example: If I’d known USAID was so wasteful, I’d have applied for an 80K grant renewing yearly to study frogs in drought affected areas of the mountains where I live. (There aren’t any frogs here.)

It’s a little bit of money, less than .000000000001% of the national budget. Regardless, it would still be a waste, and I’d be living pretty well on the government dime.

If NBC or CNN reported on me doing research on non-existent frogs swindling the government out of 80K a year, most people would be outraged.

Yet this is exactly what a lot of government apologists appear to want to sweep under the carpet and ignore. 1%, 5%, 10% of the national budget?

It’s just a little waste…

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Dont’ know if I’m alone or not in this…

As I’ve been collecting the bits & pieces of paper for TAXES that represent my “Being a good Citizen”, A.K.A. a MORON!

I’ve been angry about taxation for a very long time. My Father was angry about taxation, My Grandfathers (both sides) were angry about taxation. My Great Grandfather was super pissed about taxation.

My Great Grandfather was pissed off especially as I recall, because he was born shortly after the “Damn Yankees” started charging “A God damn tax for living”.

In reality he was talking about the income tax imposed in 1867 to pay for the Civil War. 

He got a double dose of taxation in his lifetime with 1913 income tax being imposed under Taft. He spoke ill of Taft and Franklin Roosevelt until the day he died.

In his case the “Damn Yankees” part was, I’m guessing was something he picked up from his father. You did not want to get him talking about growing up in the aftermath of the Civil War. 

Like a lot of the South, the family was farmers, and most of the time they just barely got by. The mortality rate in the family was very high. If a baby lived more than a year it was notable.

If you asked Great Granddaddy about how many slaves his family had, he would loose his shit! It was hard to follow because he’d be yelling in mostly German with bits of English thrown in.

The translation was something like:

“Why the hell would we have a God damned slave? We could barely feed ourselves. Slaves were expensive and more trouble than they were worth. With a slave you had two people doing the work of one and that didn’t make no damn sense.” He’d go on for at least an hour, and it was obvious that he had very strong opinions. 

I once asked my Grandfather what Great Grandaddy meant by having two men doing the work of one. Grandpa explained that you had to have a strawboss (overseer) making sure the slaves were doing the work. Which was wholly impractical on a small farm.

Grandpa said slavery only worked at scale with large plantations and with crops that could be transported without spoilage. For instance, cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, tea, various nuts, and dried spices.

Can you say East India Trading Company? Good! I knew you could.

Since our family was mostly poor dirt farmers with small farms, a German kind of pragmatism, and some pretty strong religious beliefs about slavery in general, the whole concept of buying and selling people was a non-starter.

Which is why Great Granddaddy was pissed off about the taxation. He viewed it as a bunch of city folk who never did a days work in their lives, punishing everyone in the South whose economy, lands, crops, and homes, had already been destroyed.

His view was the damn war wouldn’t have happened if the northerners had let the cotton plantations sell the damn cotton wherever they wanted to.

There’s a lot more to that story. The oral history in my family, differs from the history I was taught in school, and also from history as is taught now.

In the history I was taught in school, the implication was that all Southern Farmers had slaves, and that everyone in the South took up arms against the North. Neither was true. The Northern Army is always painted as white knights and the Southern Army is painted and horrible, evil, men. From what I’ve learned, the Civil War was like every other war. Atrocities were committed on both sides. 

There were regiments from the North that burned, raped, and pillaged. A friend of mine from Tennessee showed me their family bible. In it, was recorded the atrocities of a Confederate regiment, who shot his great great granddaddy in the front yard, took all the food and anything else of value, then prevented the family from going to help him instead, making the family watch their father bleed to death in agony.

To this day, my friend and his family express a quiet but palpable hatred for anything to do with the Confederacy. I can’t blame them. His people think and act just like my people. He’ll cringe at me saying this, but his people are “Southerners” in that they have a long memory, just like my people. I’ll owe him a Jack Daniels over saying that.

To hear Great Graddaddy tell it, a whole lot of “them boys” (Southerners) only joined the Confederate army after the Yankees had burned their farms and their crops in the fields. Even then it was only so they could get paid and support their wives & children who were homeless and destitute.

Great Granddaddy like most of my family had strong opinions.

I remember him saying a couple of things in particular.

1. It’s damn funny that the Yankees said slavery was bad, then turned around and made us all slaves with taxes.

2. If we ain’t got nothing, they can’t tax nothing. 

There were unconfirmed rumors in the family that Great Granddaddy spent years after Great Grandma died, living in a shack hunting and fishing for his meals.

He supposedly would shoot at the “God Damn Tax men” if they dared stray onto his land. I don’t know if I believe it, but it was said Great Granddaddy would sometimes send a box of offal to the tax assessors office with a note saying, “Here’s your part of my hunt.”

Great Granddaddy eventually ended up living with Grandpa. I remember him reading me bedtime stories drifting between English and German.

I suppose that I’m a product of an environment where the wounds of the Civil War were in living memory. I’m sure that there are a lot of “Boomers” who could tell similar tales from both sides of the Mason Dixon line.

Why is all of this remotely relevant?

Because at tax time I remember my family all being pissed off all the damn time. I remember them calculating their taxes right up to the very edge of legal.

And I remember Great Granddaddy advocating for registering nothing, owning nothing, and being as small and invisible as possible.

He seemed to believe if you’d served in the military to defend the country, that was enough, you shouldn’t have to pay any taxes ever again.

He hated that every year the government grew, every year they exceeded their budget, every year they found something else to spend money, that didn’t directly serve the best interests of the United States.

He, and later, my Grandfather warned that the government was inherently corrupt that our elected leaders were only interested in obtaining wealth. Both of them outright called politicians thieves and liars. Sometimes to their faces.

They both said that the taxation wouldn’t stop until the people rose up and stopped it. As the tax rates climbed, and the government grew, My Grandfather began to suggest that the Communists had won.

The rest of the family shushed him.

After the recent revelations of DOGE. The breathtaking waste, the obvious graft and corruption, I find myself thinking that my Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandfather were absolutely 100% correct.

Add to that, this bullshit about the IRS knowing what you supposedly owe them but forcing you to jump through the hoops and expense of accountants and tax attorneys to come up with the same number and I feel like its just additional punishment for no reason except sadistic pleasure.

Except that it’s not. The IRS puts everyone through this bullshit, so that you do make mistakes, and that allows them to charge you penalties & interest for your mistake. If there’re setting up the situation where you make mistakes, then penalizing you for making the mistakes, isn’t that called entrapment? Just sayin…

The IRS would be just as content if you always err on the side of them keeping a few hundred dollars that they’re not entitled to because people are scared of them.

Why else would the Biden administration have authorized 87,000 new ARMED IRS agents? That told me everything I needed to know to know about what the Democrats had planned for the citizens of this country.

It’s safe to say that the number of armed agents would have increased year over year. I doubt that the millionaires Biden kept telling us weren’t paying their fair share, would have needed to have guns waived in their faces to write checks. They have the resources to hire a battery of attorneys and lock up IRS collection cases in court for years…

I suspect that the armed IRS agents were actually going to be kicking down the doors of citizens like me, and you, and the rest of us that don’t have the necessary cash to lawyer up. If a twitchy IRS agent was waving a gun in the faces of your children or your spouse, you’d give them anything they wanted…

And that was exactly the point.

Politicians in D.C. had rightfully concluded that the people were probably not going to put up with more tax increases it was unsustainable.

But the government needed more money and would always need more money to fund the lies, graft, & corruption.

So the next stage for the politicians was to have armed thugs running a legalized extortion racket to wring every last dime out of average taxpayers teetering on the edge of hunger & homelessness.

Unless Trump is able to unwind the provisions for the IRS in the 16th amendment. We’re only going to see a short reprieve.

Honestly, after a lifetime of this shit where almost 1/3 of my income got sucked down a black hole of waste and corruption, I’m half tempted to send the keys to my house to the fucking IRS and the Fucking State of California, and let them fight over it!

I could see myself just walking away, saying “Fuck it!”

(I think “Fuck It” is the position of a lot of the later generations. I get it! Why play a game you know you’re going to lose before you start? That’s the position our government put them in.)

Me pitting the State and Federal governments against each other might be amusing. Watching them trying to fuck each other over, instead of me for a change would be a welcome sight.

My only income is my God damned Social Security and these fuckers want their share of that.

I ask, “How is that in any way reasonable?”

They’ve had the money for 46 fucking years. I have not had access to it, nor derived any benefit from it.

They on the other hand, could have invested it in any number of funds, or projects and made a profit on the money they took from me. In fact the government probably did exactly that.

Then they’re keeping the interest they made, and in fact they’re not disclosing just how much they made on my money over 46 years.

Then via DOGE we learn that there are people receiving Social Security payments that are over 125 going to 200 years old. News to me that the lifespan is that long. It’s a miracle! Or now we’ve got Vampires… 

We also know that 535 members of Congress one way or another have been raiding Social Security for years.

And yet, somehow I’m supposed to pay the government more from my monthly check that, by the way, is almost $2000 dollars below what is considered to be minimum wage.

How the hell does that make any sense whatsoever? How is it that illegals or people on welfare get more?

Oh right! I’m supposed to be a good citizen and just give my tax money to politicians, the Ukraine, the poor starving children in Africa, let’s not forget condoms for the Congo. 

But we all know none of that money went where we were told it went. We all know a substantial portion of it looped back right into the pockets of politicians or some organization that politicians had an interest in.

See, when I start thinking about what our government has done to us, Not just in the arena of taxation, but health, and infrastructure, and all the ways the government has literally failed in their primary responsibility, I get really pissed off.

Whether you agree with RFK Jr or not. You can at least look at the number of FDA recalls of medications, and medical devices over the past 3 decades and question how some of these things got approved in the first place.

Oh but going to the FDA website and asking for Drugs that have been recalled presents you with a list of mostly OTC products like sunscreens. There are very few Drugs listed. Which makes the “Fact Checkers” right and someone like me automatically wrong because there is no evidence. 

Remember the weight loss miracle FenFen? It caused heart attacks. How about the pacemaker recalls and the hip & knee replacements that disintegrated? Or the use of thalidomide? How about using polypropylene mesh for hernias and as a vaginal mesh to repair the vaginal canal after childbirth? Anybody remember Zantac? Yeah on OTC antacid that’s linked to cancer.

See, I remember these things. Yet according to the fact checkers… It never happened, my memory is faulty, which makes people who do remember wonder if they’re going out of their minds.

Some of these things were approved because they were “Similar” to other approved things, but “Similar” doesn’t mean actually throughly tested.

How many bridges need to be replaced? How about roads that are so full of potholes that a dirt track would be smoother?

These are but a few of the monumental failures of the government whose overarching “loving” embrace we’re supposed to blindly trust.

Somehow, I’m supposed to happily write a check to the United States government essentially paying them to continue butt fucking me.

When I think about it from this perspective, the Southern part of me starts screaming, “ It’s time for the South to rise again!” 30 seconds after that thought, the vision of The Boston Tea party flashes into my head and the best fit algorithm in my head says that’s a more accurate fit.

Maybe we should all dress up as illegal aliens and flood the government offices  in person filling out welfare forms and generally clogging up the government works.

If that doesn’t work then… The Rebel in me starts screaming for politician’s butts on walls.

All of this flashing through my brain at once is painful. It makes me very cranky and me handing the keys to the house to the fucking IRS looks better all the time.

Let them dispose of the shit in the basement, let them dispose of things that due to titles and licenses are locked up by the State in such a way that it takes greater effort to unfuck the mess than to just walk away and let it be their problem.

I’m in favor of doing away with the IRS, the State Tax board, and property tax. 

Before you come at me asking the question, “Then how would we pay for necessary government things?”

Let me put it this way, until I see a balanced budget. Until I see the government living within its means like I have to. Until I see responsible spending domestically, where shit tons of cash isn’t being sent everywhere but here.

My opinion is that obviously the government has more than enough money. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be the possibility of all these un-necessary expenditures. I know on my budget, I don’t have a lot of excess cash to spend!

I guess that like my Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandaddy… I’m just sick and tired of playing the government’s games.

I finally understand why so many politicians have pushed so hard for gun control. I understand why California, an essentially one party, corrupt Democrat run state has made or tried to make gun purchases and ammunition purchases harder and why they want to know who has what kind of gun and where.

The politicians, A.K.A. don’t want to fear the people.

Here ends my raging against the machine. I got it out of my system and for that I’m grateful.

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He’s been right about a lot, wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right about this.

President Trump.Trump said he’s going to be weeding out illegal immigrants from the Social Security system.

Since then, X has been alive with people telling us very seriously that Illegals can’t get Social Security benefits. Then acting like Trump is dumb or crazy or whatever.

Hmmm. Really? So if one of these folks is using a stolen SSN to work, you think that somehow they’re not going to use that SSN to do other things? Apply for credit cards perhaps? Mortgage loans? Bank Accounts?

Really? Nobody is that naive.

The other half had his identity stolen on a couple of occasions. Once, it was just a couple of debit card numbers, but the other time it was his whole credit history. He wasn’t aware there was a problem until he tried to get a loan for an instrument, then he found out that there was someone else running around using his social security number.

How ever did this bad person get the other half’s SSN? Oh that was due either to a medical insurance company breach, or a doctor’s office closing. We later found out that all the medical records had simply been dumped in the dumpster out behind the office.

It didn’t matter. It cost us a lot of time and money to get everything sorted out. 

If someone has your SSN, name, and date of birth, they could possibly start collecting on Social Security too.

That’s called stealing you know. Not that any of the liberals care about little things like stealing, or crime in general.

Unless it disturbs them.

When drugs come to the rentals in their neighborhoods, or an HOA socialite is mugged for her earrings in a common area.

Then liberals who previously wanted to defund the fascist police, while being kind to the poor immigrants seeking a better life, will hire a mercenary goon squad to patrol and harass everyone walking through a neighborhood.

We know that a lot of those liberals manage to look the other way, & pay under the table dirt cheap wages to illegals too. Liberals don’t seem to understand that paying someone 10 cents an hour is essentially slavery. Say that out loud to a liberal and they’ll lose their shit.

I’ve long been annoyed that everything is tied to a SSN. Credit applications, Tax filing, Mortgages, Car Loans, Medical records, Insurance, and God knows what else. 

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

Back at the dawn of time when I got my SS card, the accompanying paperwork said specifically that this number wasn’t to be used as ID.

Yet that’s exactly what it’s been used for. Lots of people forget that SSN is an account number, to your forced contributions to a retirement savings account, that doesn’t pay a particularly good interest rate.

At this point we might as well use the number as our phone number, drivers license, and car plate number. Everyone knows our account numbers.

I’d bet we’ve all received at least 10 notices of security breaches where our name, address, SSN, and phone number has been dumped out on the internet for sale.

I’ve been informed that my personal data was leaked by the Office of Personnel Management of the United States government. You know what they said? Too bad, so sad, perhaps you should invest in a credit counseling service.

At least corporations provided credit monitoring services for a few years!

Given all of this.

Is it that far a stretch to entertain that some number of illegal immigrants might be getting social security payments they’re not entitled to?

Illegal Immigrants, as Tom Homan said, are all criminals. He’s right, and I fell out of my chair when he said it directly to someone questioning him about deportations.

Until I heard him say it, I thought I was some kind of idiot that just didn’t understand the issue.

The moment a person crosses our border without permission, or overstays their Visa, they are, by definition, a criminal because they committed a criminal act. If they’re willing to start out committing a crime, what’s to stop them from stealing someone’s identity?

Liberals would justify even that, as okay (as long as it wasn’t their identity,) because the poor illegal is just trying to work and feed their family and they needed a SSN to work. Or retire.

Here’s something few people ever find out.

If you claim unemployment benefits, or assistance for medical costs, or disability payments, all of which are tired to your SSN. The state sends you a 1099 form. 

YES! Boys and Girls, you have to pay Federal taxes on that “Income” If you’re in a state with income tax, you get to pay them too.

So some illegal running around with your SSN can do a whole lot of damage, before they even begin to fuck you out of your tiny assed social security check.

All of this is to say, it’s very possible that some 87 year old grannie, or someone who’s contacting the Social Security office on Monday morning ready to retire, may find out they’ve got nothing because someone else got there before they did.

Trump saying that he’s ordering it to be looked into is a good thing. Even if they find nothing, at least the American People can have faith in the Social Security Administration. 

If an audit does find fraud, then booting the fraudsters out of the system means people who deserve the funds will likely get them, and perhaps Social Security will last a bit longer.

I question the Democrats screaming about Doge looking into Social Security.

We know over the years, both the Democrats and Republicans have raided SS funds. We the People assume that the money has been paid back. What if it hasn’t? Worse yet, would be finding that money is still being siphoned off for stupid projects like those at USAID.

I’ll tell you what. If all the retirees eating tuna, cutting their medications in half, and paying taxes on their SS income were to find out they’d been spending a billion a year for something like “Condoms for Convents”, or half a billion on “Feed a Jihadi for Jesus”…

The old folks (myself included) would tear down the Capitol and smash every stone to dust with their walkers & canes.

I envision exchanges like this between the Capitol police and the old folks;

“Yeah sonny, that’s a pretty badge, so what? I’m on my last legs here, I’ll be dead in 6 months from cancer. I can’t feel anything on my left side… This here is a kamikaze run for me! Tear gas? That’s all ya got? I’ve been smoking Lucky’s for 65 years! I could huff that canister & chase it with straight bourbon! So bring it, ya pussy!”

(Thanks to Grok for generating the image.)

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This was weird…

I watched the actual swearing in of Trump yesterday.

I loved the Marines walking JD Vances children in. I’ve always been a sucker for Dress Blues.

What was weird is this. I got emotional about it. I’m quick to anger to be sure. But not quick to tears. 

While watching the inauguration I had this weird juxtaposition of time. Trump should have been The President in 2020. For just a moment, I thought I was back in 2020 waking from a nightmare. I expected Jerry to be alive and that I’d tell him of this crazy assed dream. Then we’d laugh at my silliness and all would be well.

But Jerry is still dead. I’m still alone. Things are still much more expensive than they were, injustices still happened, and two tier justice is still the norm. The “Nightmare” was real.

I cried.

Perhaps from relief that Biden wouldn’t be fucking things up worse. Perhaps because It wasn’t a dream and that hit like a ton of bricks. Perhaps it was just the last of my grief leaving, and me looking forward to opportunities the new administration may provide.

I lay a lot of my sadness, angst, and loss at the Biden administrations feet.

Jerry’s life might have been prolonged if he hadn’t had to navigate COVID protocols and repeated cancellations or rescheduling of appointments with his cardiologist.

Eventually, he stopped trying because every appointment was canceled due to someone testing positive for COVID in that office. Which meant they’d shut the place down for a week or two.

Jerry wasn’t alone, a lot of people were denied care for the same reasons. He gave up on his doctor in October of 2022 and was trying to find a new cardiologist but ran into the same BS when scheduling appointments. 

Biden and his shitty administration aren’t directly responsible or that.

They are directly responsible for increasing the stress & fear, and censoring information about COVID that might have brought the pandemic panic to a close sooner.

None of them will ever be held to account.

I can only hope that things get better for this country as fast as they went into the shitter with Biden’s executive orders in the first 100 days.

Somehow, I doubt it. 

It takes a lot more energy to create that to destroy.

On the plus side, the stock market was hopping yesterday. That’s maybe a positive sign.