That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.

tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.

Until last November, Hegseth's "whole thing" was being a frat anchor / defense witness for Fox. Talking about him being anything like a serious figure is absurd.

I should have said is that defense is the largest single category of discretionary spending, by a large margin. The thrust of the point remains.

sigh

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59729

Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.

I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.

tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".

That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.

> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.

Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.

It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.

Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40423035

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No, I don't think being pickpocketed (or having my car stolen or whatever) is "equally as scary" as if my daughter were assaulted or kidnapped. I'd be ashamed to think they're equivalent, lest my daughter believe I view her as valuable as a hunk of steel or a wad of cash.

> Property crimes lead to a generally dangerous living area and people don't like to live in dangerous areas because it necessarily leads to more violent crime.

This is deeply incorrect. As has been repeated and cited over and over, violent crime in e.g. SF is not particularly high (lower than most other US cities), while its property crime rate is outrageously high.

However, property crime is absolutely irrelevant when presented with the news of someone's murder, yet so many people here are quick to conflate them as somehow equivalent vis a vis personal safety, etc.

(Sidenote: I personally don't understand anyone thinking that property crime is "scary". Your car is not your kid. Your wallet is not your body. Your house is not your family. These things are not in the same class, and a loss in one category is not the same as a loss in the other. I'm not sure how one could argue otherwise, but it's apparently a widely-held worldview.)

I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.

Saying stuff like "a lot of [violent] crime goes unreported" is straight up fanciful thinking, and leads one to make claims that aren't falsifiable. People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.