"They say, ‘Evil prevails when good men fail to act.’ What they ought to say is, ‘Evil prevails.’

Bleak quote from Lord of War that has stuck with me. Reminds me of Sophie Scholl.

Apologies, assumed it was implied by community rules. To be fair it is a serious conservative statement, and IMO one worth mocking.

Then why aren’t you nicer to Trump? Hmm?

Edit: /s

Social security and Medicare are considered mandatory spending. The chart above is presumably showing discretionary spending, which is a subset of the overall budget. I can’t speak to it’s accuracy beyond that.

I’m curious to see how DOGE ends up handling this. Given the scale of potential fraud, you’d probably need a dedicated task force just to help sift through cases and figure out what’s going on. If you do uncover fraud, then you’d need more people to hold the guilty parties accountable. It might take a few years to work through such a huge number of cases, and with more people aging out of the system each year, it’d likely need to be an ongoing effort. You’d basically need to create a whole new fraud agency to deal with this problem, which is ironic given that the IRS already does this and we’re actively trying to downsize them.

Wouldn’t this have had value as a bargaining chip in peace talks? The fact that they’re saying this now suggests that they’re about to pressure Ukraine into a truly shitty deal.