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Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
There's a lot of hype and bluster but it doesn't appear different in kind than the sort of omnibus bills that have become common. Section 174 is the big win. The SALT deduction cap is a lot of sound and fury signifying little; some house-poors in California and NY/NJ will benefit, but most of those who would benefit from a higher cap will have incomes too high to take advantage of that. I think it ended up being a $40,000 cap up to $500,000 in income, phasing back to $10,000 by $600,000, but the numbers changed a lot and that may not be the final. Reducing the clean energy stuff is all good; getting Tesla (or Tesla buyers, depending on incidence) off the tit is good, cutting off the various scammers is even better.
This is just TDS, I'm afraid. ICE is not personally loyal to Trump, and getting more money in a budget will not make them so. If they are loyal to Trump as President and other existing forces are not (perhaps having been captured in the march through the institutions), then that's a bad situation and increasing their budget is probably a good thing.
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
Last I checked Trump doesn't distribute the belongings of deported illegals to ICE officers, so I don't know what parallel you see.
I actually wonder if this is true. I have heard of a few scattered abuses of asset forfeiture by police, no idea how common it is, but I could imagine something similar for ICE.
That’s said I think the more compelling reason to be skeptical is that large government agencies don’t like to be bored. Personally I’m not that torn up about it although my personal ethics would prevent me from working for ICE (which is saying something because I wouldn’t mind working for most defense contractors or the CIA), but you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.
Not the immigration branch of ICE though. It does have HSI branch that does investigations and asset forfeitures. Curiously, nobody gave a hoot about it until Trump. Trump has this peculiar quality that once he does something people start noticing how big the government is and how much abuse is possible - only to immediately forget it forever once it's not about Trump anymore. Example: https://archive.ph/QiXfH - this is from 2017. For the last 8 years, how much high profile public discussion did you hear about this? I'd assume "none at all" is not too far off the target.
If you want to go that road, you have plenty of targets beyond ICE. THe FBI itself, the ATF, the DEA, the NSA, not to speak of the leviathan in the room that is the CIA... I mean, operation Fast and Furious alone is a horrendous example, if Hollywood made a movie where a government agency forces US merchants to sell weapons to drug cartels, and then tries to prosecute them for it and use it as a basis for trying to kill the Second Amendment - people would say it's cartoonish, hammy and bordering on libel. Yet it happened, and people generally just let it slide, shrugged it off. And there are many examples on the same cartoonishly evil level. So is there a danger in a powerful government enforcement agency to go rogue? You betcha there is. Is there anything special in Trump financing immigration enforcement to increase this danger? You'd have to work a bit harder to establish any basis for it. I mean, if you have a hardcore libertarian credentials going back to 1960s on opposing any budget increase for federal law enforcement - ok, kudos for remaining consistent. If that's the first time when you're asking this question, I'd have much harder time taking it seriously.
Think you mean https://archive.is/QiXfh for your link...
The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?
Fair enough, for whatever reason the .ph link flat-out wasn't working for me.
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