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We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

> We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

But we can easily affort 500+ million per day for faraway foreign wars! That, no problem.


Also apparently a $5000 “dividend” for everyone if we just “do the right thing”. I thought you had to be profitable to pay a dividend, but apparently not. Oh also, that $1.5T will magically not add to the debt or come from tax dollars.

Isn't that the textbook definition of buying votes?

That's a problem if you live in a country with politically illiterate voters. That's why education is so important in democracies so people don't fall for such crap

Apparently not.

>In Brown v. Hartlage (1982), a Supreme Court case where a Kentucky county commissioner promised to reduce his salary if elected, the Court unanimously drew a line between policy promises and vote buying. “A candidate’s promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua taxpayer, citizen, or member of the general public, does not lie beyond the pale of First Amendment protection,” Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote. Given that precedent, Trump is almost certainly within the bounds of the law (you might remember Elon Musk wasn’t charged for handing out $1 million checks to people during a campaign rally in Wisconsin in exchange for “taking the time to vote.”).

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-dividend-midterm-promise/


This is an asinine decision that essentially makes vote buying totally legal. We see this trick with the recent Supreme Court decisions that essentially make racial gerrymandering legal again by just making the crime impossible to prove by accepting any other justification at face value.

Don't forget: you can accept bribes as long as you receive them after the fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States I guess I will never pay another restaurant bill again, since any possible future "gratuity" I might award them would of course have no bearing on their past decision to bring me a plate of food.

I mean, if you really believe that, then no politician would ever be able say something like "I'll work to get you free health care".

Yeah. I'm not sure how a strict reading doesn't end up with obvious policies ending up making all of the policies below "vote buying":

    - Cancel student loans
    - Reduce federal tax rates
    - Increase unemployment/pension/etc payouts
There is always a state of "this policy upside is contingent on voting for me" - though in Trumps case he is making it contingent Not on his own electoral outcome in some sense. Just messy.

As is often the case with our commander in chief, things once expressed subtly are now expressed brazenly.

Yeah. And? :)

> But we can easily affort 500+ million per day for faraway foreign wars! That, no problem.

That's because War is a wealth transfer program to the billionaire class. Look at the stock prices of the Big-5 War Companies of the Corporate States of America. Look at the wealth of their executive boards and CEO compensation - which has increased even more in 2026.


While this isn't the best way to address the issue, the US is way too dependent on gasoline/diesel for transportation. It's not sustainable.

Being unsustainable isn’t the same as breaking within the lifetime of the people making the decisions. The average US senator is 66, and that’s young compared to the current Supreme Court or the sitting President.

Maybe Trump is secretly for "the green agenda" and this was all part of the plan to stop oil.

He had that big falling out with Elon so that he can't be accused of pandering to him when electric car sales go through the roof.

I have also heard that this is really "big oil's" plan, they always manage to cause a huge price spike just when green energy is about to take over the market, somehow this stops the green revolution and forces everyone to go back to using fossil fuels.


Haven't you heard that thanks to Trump and the Republicans, the start-stop engines are now banned and gas stoves are back? Have you heard the cries of joy every time this has been mentioned in Republican rallies?

Well if that consoles you, the US government has just approved gifting mega-bombs to Israel for another $2.8 billion. Several news call it a "sale" but it's actually a gift since most of the money comes from the US government anyway.

[flagged]


Nothing in the post you are referencing came off as antisemitism. Please do not conflate the arming of a militaristic apartheid regime with criticism of blank checkbook legislating.

standard israeli psyop tactic: use jewish people as human shields from criticism directed at the state of Israel by trying as hard as possible to conflate antisemitism with negative sentiment towards israel.

The gp only mentioned Israel. Actual antisemitism is common enough that it is counterproductive to use the term so loosley.

The antisemitic Claude puts the total US grants (= gifts) to Israel in the past 5 years to $33 billion, which my antisemitic calculator puts at $6.6 billion/ year. Of course these gifts allow Israel to fund its own healthcare while it bombs other people for free.

They did not revoke "the subsidies." The ACA subsidies are still in place. What was allowed to expire was the temporarily increased COVID subsidy levels, which were sold as a temporary emergency expansion. If they had originally passed a genuine and permanent ACA expansion, rather than an expiring one, there's likely nothing that could have been done to "revoke" it by those currently in power.

Maybe you mean this, but it's important to be clear about the distinctions we don't mislead people, and then someone tells them the whole truth, and then they wonder what else we were wrong about.


The parent has been Fox brained

The parent agrees with the American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-electio...

And my privacy? The threat to democracy? Does Flock own that? Why is always the poors that need to own morality?

Nobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.

Isn't that primarily what they offer anyway? So "subscription required" would check that box.

The "use more area" needs to be considered in the sense that, designed properly, they eliminate left turn lanes and "suicide lanes" in the center of the road.

Instead, with proper design, you make this "left turn" by going to the next roundabout, going around to follow the road the opposite direction, and then make a right turn.


It's also only true when compared against a no-frills intersection. A two-lane roundabout has better overall throughput than a two-lane intersection with traffic lights. To increase throughput, they usually add turn lanes to avoid cars having to stop in the through lanes -- but the turn lanes require more road surface than the roundabout would have.

Or you print lotsa yen, which is probably what will happen here

More likely they are going to "monetize" the debt. Aka print yen to pay it off.

So a wildly successful AI startup

Why are people still using X? I mean seriously people, move on and stop using this closed ecosystem that is propaganda around elections.

But make a deal on what? He literally signed the current deal we have with Canada?

That makes me think that what he really wants is either a bribe


Donald has made more money on the presidency than every president before him combined, then add an order of magnitude of wealth on top of that.

It's the Putinification of the Presidency playbook. Too big to jail.

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