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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18927 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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I don't think you could have looked very sincerely if you're mostly seeing quotes from 2010.

For example, in August, Ron Johnson was saying regarding social security:

“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. It’s on automatic pilot. It never — you just don’t do proper oversight. You don’t get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It’s just on automatic pilot.”

“What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson said. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/

Now I'd say that it's a bit hysterical to call this destroying social security, but making social security discretionary would dramatically change how secure that program is.

Reminds me of the story of the Super-Conducting Super Collider and how the physicists working on it oddly resisted implementing cost-control software. Now, in terms of vibes, I can imagine that the public, or at least the pro-welfare people, would probably also resist cost-control scrutinization of current welfare programs, but on the other hand, could it be any worse than existing means-testing?

Just to be clear, are you calling social security "welfare"?

I know it's not the same as assistance for poverty, but I figured it was a similar idea. I guess I should have said "social expenditures" instead of "welfare."

Maybe Google just wasn't showing me paywalled results, or my phrasing was selecting for outlets like Rawstory.

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