I cannot even figure out what he is complaining about. I expect him to complain for four years, no matter what.
He is entitled to his political views, but he cannot explain how Kamala Harris would have been better than Donald Trump on anything.
He believes in many-worlds theory, so I should not expect him to be rational about anything.
Update: Here is a physicist trying to reason with his fellow academic leftists:
The thoughtlessness of guilt by associationI am surprised that this needs to be said. You would think that professors would be trained to judge ideas on their merit. No, he says the leftists are engaged in an ideological war, where leftists favor transgendering children in order to maintain an opposition to right-wingers like Trump.We cannot judge ideas on the basis of the people who happen to hold them
Mr. Aaronson can take solace in his beliefs, as in an infinite number of purely imaginary other universes, he got his way and Kamala became President and is happily drinking her way through her first administration.
ReplyDeleteWow, I love this many worlds garbage, I can do literally anything with it.
Who needs causality?
David Stockman is right to say that Trump will increase deficits more than Harris. With all of his talk about cuts, he doesn't want to reform entitlements and wants to spend even more on defense. He is going to bankrupt this country:
ReplyDeleteDuring his first term in the Oval Office, Donald Trump added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt. That was more than 43 presidents had combined to accumulate during the first 216 years of the Republic.
But that was apparently just a warm-up, given that the self-described “king of debt” spent the 2024 campaign slicing and dicing the federal income tax nearly as fast as he served up fries at the McDonald’s drive-through. He thus proposed to extend the huge 2017 tax cuts and to exempt tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime wages from the federal income tax. In the final weeks of the campaign, he also said he’d consider extending these exemptions to the nation’s approximately 370,000 firefighters, 1.4 million police officers, 1.3 million active duty military personnel, and 16 million veterans.
In sum, candidate Trump tossed out proposals to cut federal income taxes for upward of 150 million filers at a 10-year cost of $12 trillion. Such relief would amount to about 32 percent of the country’s income tax revenue over that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it would reduce total federal revenue collections from all sources to just $55 trillion.
Meanwhile, the CBO’s spending baseline totals about $89 trillion over the same 10-year period ending in fiscal 2035. So either Trump is looking to add a staggering $34 trillion to the nation’s already towering $36 trillion of existing debt or he means to slash spending by truly massive amounts.
Well, it’s obviously not the latter. The president has pledged to protect Social Security and Medicare and indicated he supports current veterans' benefits, which together account for nearly half, or $42 trillion, of CBO’s current spending baseline. Trump has also promised to increase spending for defense, security assistance to other countries, homeland security, law enforcement, and border control, which under current policy would amount to about $12 trillion over 10 years. And whether they acknowledge it or not, Trump administration staffers can’t cut net interest expense or legally protected military and civilian employee pensions, which will cost upward of $16 trillion over the next decade.
The problem, of course, is that these programs alone add up to $70 trillion, or nearly 80 percent of the CBO spending baseline. So even if the Trump administration massively slashed the rest of the federal government — including Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Labor, Interior, Energy, and Transportation — the red ink would still total far more than $30 trillion through 2035.
Either way you cut it, this amounts to plunging into a paroxysm of fiscal madness. Yet the alternative routes often advocated by MAGA partisans — taking the ax to fraud and waste or spurring accelerated economic growth with tax cuts and deregulation — simply won’t make a dent in the Brobdingnagian magnitude of the nation’s debt spiral.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/opinion/trump-30-trillion-added-debt/
Trump is doing what he promised to do. You may not agree with all his spending decisions.
ReplyDeleteHis recent statement is very encouraging but contradicts his earlier position. We need to cut like mad.
DeleteScott Aaronson is REALLY having fits now that Trump has halted NSF, the source of free cash to postmodernist obscurantist rent-seekers!
ReplyDelete