Dumpster fire in my ass

I’ve seen so many of these I have gained the ability to read them straight on. In this case it doesn’t matter, but I always feel like I’ve got one over the meme creator when it says something like “You look dumb holding your phone like that”

Billionaires

Gaslighting? I’m pretty sure the term you’re looking for is gaslamping. Don’t worry, it’s a pretty common mistake for people to make.

I’m in my mid 20s. Maybe it’s because I grew up poor and was using outdated tech when I was a kid.

I didn’t use vinyl or a film camera until a few years ago though, I have been really enjoying the physicality and ritualism of analog tech recently

I get what you’re saying, but both work in this case, yours is just more precise. We’ve just lived in the late 1900s so it feels weird to lump the years we’ve experienced in with 900+ that we haven’t. But if someone says “late 1800s” for something like 1894, it wouldn’t feel weird at all.

They aren’t? “Late 1900s” would be the latter 3rd of the century. 1994 would be in that latter third, so they are using it correctly.

This belief is held by many older folks due to propoganda, and it is passed down to their children when their parents teach them about taxes. Since almost all younger folks use automated tax services, if they aren’t doing the math themselves, the fact that this isn’t true isn’t going to be discovered. I was taught the incorrect way when I was a kid, but noticed that it was wrong the first time I had to do my own taxes. But when I told my parents the way it actually worked, they didn’t believe me until I showed them the .gov site that breaks it down. I grew up in a small, blue collar town, and every single person I talked to about taxes parroted the same incorrect system.

Eh, I’ve traveled a lot, and while people in places like the US west/east coasts tend to be a lot less racist, the entire middle/south of the US are just as racist as most places in Europe and Asia. Growing up, I was sold the narrative that European countries had little to no racism, and the US is the problem. But racism is everywhere, and not just the mild racism that the US coasts get, but like, openly telling a stranger to watch out for <insert racial slur> because they are going about ruining <neighborhood/city/country/etc.> I will say that anecdotally, the US west coast is the least blatantly racist, but you can see systemic racism literally everywhere.

Based on their reported numbers, DOGE has “saved” the US 55B so far. Based on actual receipts, it has “saved” 8B dollars.

Let’s say they aren’t lying, and they have in fact saved 55B in the last 4 months. Let’s also say for the sake of the argument that they are somehow able to keep up this pace for the entirety of the 4 year term.

That would be 660B dollars. It sounds like a lot, right? 660B in 4 years. However, basing off of this year’s budget, the military would have spent 3.2T dollars. This means we’ve only saved 20% of what the military spends in the same amount of time.

Currently, the DoD cannot account for 2.46T dollars. That means that doge will have “saved” only 26% of the DoD’s spending discrepancy. Remember, these numbers are based on the savings that Doge claims but have not proven.

If we use the number that they actually have receipts for, (8B) and still assume they will somehow keep their pace for the full 4 year term, they will have saved 96B. That would mean that they will have saved 4% of the DoD’s spending discrepancy, or 3% of the DoD’s budget for those 4 years, or 11% of the DoD’s yearly budget, which is actually expected to keep going up year over year.

Realistically, the amount of money “saved” by the DOGE will be somewhere between those two numbers, and given the track record of the government, as well as Musk, it’s likely closer to the 8B than the 55B.

Sorry, that was a lot of numbers to throw out there all at once, but my point is this: DOGE is going after the wrong places to find wasted money in the government. Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut spending for departments that have such a long track record of aggregiously overspending? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut funding from programs that would have less negative impact on the lives of normal US citizens?

Imagine that, instead of cutting all of these programs, ones that are helping the lives of millions of Americans, we instead gave the military somewhere between 80% and 97% of the money it was expecting, and had the exact same amount of savings of our taxes, while still putting money into the development of future generations.