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Blue Bronc
1 month ago

We passed the point of being so safe nothing can get done a long time ago.  Today we reached the point of not even being able to find out what is causing being safe.  WashPoo changed how the comment section works.  And, Norton security has declared the WashPoo a phishing site and blocks the access to it.  Fortunately I have been using Norton from the very beginning and eventually stumbled on to the switch that turned it off.  WashPoo comment section is another issue, it is FUBAR.  Norton I can somewhat control, WashPoo is continuing its work to become irrelevant.

Jamie
1 month ago
: How many people actually work for the federal government?

The US grew a lot in the past 40 years.

 

The US population expanded by about 100 million people

 

Government spending skyrocketed

 

The US spent around $900 billion in 1984 ($2.7 trillion in 2024 dollars), compared with more than $7 trillion in 2024. Some of that money goes via contracts to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is working with Ramaswamy on the Department of Government Efficiency, a new nongovernmental commission.

 

The national debt has more than exploded

 

It went from less than $1.6 trillion in 1984 ($4.8 trillion in 2024 dollars) to more than $35.5 trillion today, which should concern every American and is plenty of reason to make any effort to control federal spending a serious and bipartisan push.

 

Cut federal workers?

 

The current effort, run by Ramaswamy and Musk, has made a show of eyeing the size of the federal workforce. One percolating idea, according to CNN’s reporting, is that they could recommend firing every federal worker hired in the last year.

 

Hold on a sec

 

In those 40 years of explosive population, spending and debt growth, the size of the federal workforce – this is actually kind of shocking – has stayed pretty much the same, confounding the popular presumption that the number of federal workers must have skyrocketed with federal spending.

 

“The number of federal employees have skyrocketed over the past four years, especially the number that are working from home and not even coming to work,” the House Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Thursday, expressing that view.

 

A closer look at available data shows a variation of a few hundred thousand workers – which seems large but is not a grand expansion of the federal workforce.

 

Close to 3 million federal civilian workers for decades

 

There were about 2.96 million civilians, including postal workers, getting full-time paychecks from the federal government at the end of 1984, before Ramaswamy was born, and there are a hair over 3 million working for the federal government today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The official tally from the Office of Personnel Management is a smidge lower, at about 2.87 million, including postal workers.

 

In fact, the number of full-time federal workers has been relatively static, within a few hundred thousand civilians, since the 1960s.

 

Even a drawdown of the size of the military and Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration and of the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands during the Clinton administration did not markedly change the size of the federal workforce, which has hovered within a few hundred thousand of 3 million workers for decades.

 

Hundreds of thousands in, hundreds of thousands out every year

 

Of people who come into and go out of the federal workforce each year, there were hundreds of thousands of civilian employees (not counting postal workers) – about 250,000 to just over 300,000 – newly hired by the federal government in each of the past three years. Those are largely offset by the hundreds of thousands of civilian employees who leave the civil service each year.

Blue Bronc
1 month ago

The last program I worked on was initially created for twenty-five full time people. The maximum ever was four, at times dropping to two or three. 

craigcrawford
1 month ago

We’re back to apologizing to Canada for our dumbass president.

craigcrawford
1 month ago

And we’re back to counting lies.

CNN — Fact check: Trump makes numerous false claims about immigration, tariffs and global conflicts in a Monday news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

blueINdallas
1 month ago

Tax the wealthy!  Find out where the black hole is in Pentagon spending and stop it.  Cut corporate subsidies.  (If they are viable, they should be able to stand on their own.)   No more corporate welfare queens!  Talking to you, Elon!!!   Medicare for all.  There. Fixed it. 

blueINdallas
1 month ago

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/16/donald-trump-legal-case-immunity-00194656

“Donald Trump lost one of his efforts to toss his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case Monday as a judge ruled that the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on presidential immunity doesn’t apply to evidence used in the case.”

“Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw the hush money trial in May, rejected Trump’s contentionthat Manhattan prosecutors had improperly introduced evidence of Trump’s official conduct from his first presidential term.
The evidence at issue, Merchan wrote in a 41-page ruling, actually related to Trump’s private conduct — specifically, his effort to conceal a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Because the evidence related solely to unofficial conduct, Merchan wrote, it was not covered by the immunity principles the Supreme Court laid out in its July decision in a different Trump case.”

*F U Russian warship!

craigcrawford
1 month ago

Now that he’s up against Putin and Trump looks like Zelenskyy gonna fight dirty:

“A Ukrainian official said Kyiv was responsible for the assassination of Gen. Igor Kirillov, the chief of Russia’s radioactive, chemical and biological defense forces”..
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/world/europe/russian-general-bombing-moscow.html

craigcrawford
1 month ago

Don’t think even Viktor Orban thought about this media control tactic:

Trump files suit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and Des Moines Register newspaper, seeks “accountability for brazen election interference”..
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-files-suit-iowa-pollster-anne-selzer-des-moines-register-newspap-rcna184494

 

craigcrawford
1 month ago

We are losing freedom of the press. The Fascist playbook: Muzzle the media, politicize the military and sideline the courts.

craigcrawford
1 month ago

Resistance fighters get ready! Trump Fascists already talking about revoking/amending the 22d Amendment’s limit to two four-year terms. He just needs 38 of 50 state legislatures to ratify (3/4ths). Trump won 30 in 2024.

Pogo
1 month ago

War ain’t pretty.  At least Kirillov didn’t fall out of a window.

whskyjack
1 month ago

Another day another angry person with a gun. Shooting up another school is so passe, boring, Ho Hum. Where is the attention there?  You want real studly attention take out a billionaire CEO. Take out a billionaire and become a sex symbol, What a world we live in. 
Some facts going through my mind. We have basically reached peak guns. It is so easy today to get a quality weapon, Not an AR15, which is spray and pray weapon but real quality target/sniper rifles. The kind of weapon that with a bit of training can reach out and hit a target at a 1/4 of a mile. The beauty of our modern world is that training is available in about every city in our great nation and plenty of opportunities to practice your marksmanship. Need some information to help you make your choice?  There is a magazine just for you
Makes me happy that I’m an old fart that is too unimportant to kill. I just have to watch out for idiots texting and letting their car drive itself. For that problem I’m driving an F150, fasten my seat belt and let the little bastard run under me and not over me.
Jack

whskyjack
1 month ago

BTW, to research the previous rant I didn’t use google but used a browser/search engine that doesn’t track me and blocks attempts to track me. Not that that makes me safe but no reason to make it easy for them.
Paranoid me? Why did you ask?
Jack

RebelliousRenee
1 month ago

today’s meme…
 
 

Jamie
1 month ago

Truly unusual for a girl to be the shooter.  How much pain she must have been in and what were the causes.  With girls sexual abuse and bullying move to the top of the list

IvyGreen
1 month ago

I suppose we’ll end up with him in a glass-cased coffin so he can rule from the grave. 

IvyGreen
1 month ago

We cannot take for granted that our Constitution will be anything other than compost after the next four years. 

blueINdallas
1 month ago

Just wait until the fascists are all together at the inaugural ball. It’s gonna be a real sh/t show.  You can’t shine turds.

Blue Bronc
1 month ago

bID – in the budget, black programs are those that are not named or the budget shown, at least to commoners.  Within those black programs are programs so secret they are nicknamed “deep black”.  

blueINdallas
1 month ago

BB – Hope one of those “deep black” programs can save us from the incoming administration…who will never leave any other way. 
F U Russian warship aka tRUMPsky! 

IvyGreen
1 month ago

We already have gone from innocent-until-proven-guilty to off-the-hook-even-though-proven-guilty. 

craigcrawford
1 month ago

More corporate media capture in our new fascist state. What’s next, another Hays Code? With separate beds and ridiculous euphemisms: “not the marrying kind” — “in the family way”

Disney Pulls Transgender Storyline from Pixar’s ‘Win or Lose’ Streaming Series
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/disney-pulls-transgender-storyline-win-or-lose-1236088172/

craigcrawford
1 month ago

Never gets old: translator’s face when genius says the U.S. and Italy have been allies since Ancient Rome.

IvyGreen
1 month ago

Him bragging about graduating Wharton was code for I paid somebody to take my exams. 

Blue Bronc
1 month ago

Hard to tell when a translator is listening to the idiot talking about his universe, which is completely made up of hammered pig s#)t or when he does a big dump into his diaper.  The look is so similar it is like both stink.

craigcrawford
1 month ago

That got me remembering when he thought George Washington captured airports, and in the same passage (at Lincoln Memorial July 4th event) he mixed up the Revolution and the War of 1812.

“Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory.”

He tried to blame that one on the teleprompter, but video showed he wasn’t looking at prompter, and what he said wasn’t even close to the prompter text anyway.

As his own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said after trying in vain to educate him about basic WWII history, “He’s a fucking moron”. 

IvyGreen
1 month ago

Might as well include academic dishonesty along with all his other forms of deceit and deception. 

Blue Bronc
1 month ago

After a week of garbage, I now watch my cat look like she is after a mouse.  ARGggg, it has to be one she brought in this afternoon.  So now I have to watch out where I step tonight.  Welcome to life with cats and dogs.

blueINdallas
1 month ago

Luigi Mangione should only be charged with murder.  He shouldn’t be charged with terrorism unless insurance companies are also charged with terrorism for what they do to folks.  

What some school kids have to endure at school is actually terrorism, and the gun lobby should be considered a terrorist organization.

The victims of yesterday’s shootings will be responsible for medical bills. The gun manufacturers should be responsible. The families will have to deal with the financial terrorists at the insurance company.

Mangione may not be a hero, but he’s not a terrorist, either. That charge is just the system scared of upsetting the status quo.

blueINdallas
1 month ago

Rumor has it that tRUMPsky is barely literate, so is the teleprompter really necessary?

blueINdallas
1 month ago

If Orange Adolf is going to play the tariffs game, refuse to back NATO members, and basically act like a mob boss, shouldn’t all of those other countries just make new connections with each other and cut the US out as much as possible.   There’s strength in numbers and I hope they gang up on the next administration.  We’re already going to suffer from the money grab by those who don’t need more, so just go ahead and make sure to kick them in the can, too. 

IvyGreen
1 month ago

The end of Hitler did not come because his people turned on him, though a few did. The end came because the threat and danger he posed to other countries became so great they united to defeat him.