It makes complete sense if you are looking at it from the perspective of an oligarch. They are just trying to tank the economy to hoover up even more assets. They’re banking on an eventual recovery, after which they’ll be even richer and more powerful than they are now.

As with most things in life, assuming some grander Machiavellian scheme is usually wrong. People don’t think and plan like that outside of movies and TV. Most people, especially the very rich and powerful, only plan for the short term.

There is no 3-4 steps down the road. They’re just trying to repeat exactly what they did during/after the COVID recession. And the Great Recession. And the '01 dot-com recession, etc, etc, etc.

1. Belgium for 10 days as part of a school exchange trip in high school. Was a lot of fun. We saw a lot of touristy stuff, but also the first time I was able to legally buy alcohol or go to a bar. That was over 20 years ago and I still have a pair of bowling shoes I stole from a bowling alley on that trip.

2. Belize. I’ve been twice. The first was for 2 weeks when my uncle was marrying a woman from Belize. We spent a week near where her family is from so we could meet that side of the family, then a week on the island where the wedding was. The second time was for a week for a vacation. My friend’s dad owns a house in Belize, so we had a free place to stay. Second trip was MUCH less touristy than the first one, which was nice. We mostly hung out in local bars.

3. Guatemala. During my first trip to Belize we took a day trip to visit Tikal. I really wouldn’t say I “visited” the country as Tikal was the only place we stopped, but my passport got stamped, so I’ll include it.

4. Mexico. Spent a week on vacation. We stayed in Playa del Carmen and did some very touristy things.

5. Costa Rica. Again, for a week. Again, pretty touristy. I liked Costa Rica a lot.

6. China. Went for the first week of my honeymoon. I have friends who live in Beijing. We spent the first half of the week there, mostly going to restaurants, bars, parks, and other places my friends hang out at. We also went to the Great Wall. For the second half of the week we went to Xian to see the Terracotta Soldiers.

7. Malaysia. Spent the second week of our honeymoon here. First few days were on a resort island to do the SUPER honeymoon resort thing. Second half was in Kulala Lumpur where we mostly just wandered around checking out the city.

8. Japan. Spent an hour layover there on our flight home from Malaysia. Again, I wouldn’t really count it, but they stamped my passport.

9. Cuba. Spent a week in Cuba on vacation. By far, the most enjoyable country I’ve ever visited and most fun vacation I’ve ever had. Before getting to the country, the only prep we did was book a room for our first night. Everything else we just figured out along the way and stayed where people suggested might be fun. Also the only country I’ve felt a strong desire to visit again. (Not that the others were bad, but I tend to want to go somewhere I’ve never been when I vacation).

Maybe dumb people who bought the Trump line on tariffs think that, but most people know it’s not true.

All the talk about bringing back manufacturing is just a smoke screen to cover the fact they’re intentionally tanking the economy so the oligarchs can buy the dip and get even richer when the economy recovers. That’s all it is.

It’s not that complex or Machiavellian.

Look at what rich people have done after every recession of the past 40 years and how what’s happened to their wealth after the recovery. The economy crashes forcing middle-class people to sell off what scant assets they own. Even people on the lower end of upper-class tend to sell off assets when the stock market crashes. Super rich people who have enough money to weather the economic downturn buy the dip, gobbling up all those assets people are selling. Then when the economy recovers the rich people make out like bandits (which they are).

That’s all that’s happening. He’s tanking the economy so Musk and his other rich friends can buy the dip and increase their wealth even more when the economy improves.

WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.

I’m not debating the the Democratic Party has moved to the right over the past decade. However, (a) I wouldn’t call the Democrats Progressive, and they never really have been. There is a fringe of the party that is progressive, but they’ve never been the majority or leadership. And (b) both progressives and the Democratic Party are still to the left of George W Bush on most issues. He campaigned on a same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. He was a climate denier. He fabricated evidence of WMDs in Iraq in order to start his second of what would become decades-long wars. He opened Gitmo. He institutionalized a torture program as policy. None of that is anywhere close to what progressives are pushing for now.

I guess my main question to you is this: who are you defining as ‘progressives’?

All the President’s Men is my favorite political movie.

It was a gradual thing. I remember when my uncle got married in 2006 he told me that he had met his wife on Match.com, but it was a bit of a secret. My uncle didn’t mind if I and my siblings knew (I was 20 at the time), but didn’t want my dad or grandparents to learn because he felt there would be some stigma because they met online.

It was my generation (I was born in '86) that kicked off the apps/online dating thing. I started dating my (now) wife in 2010. We met at a party and neither of us ever did online dating or the dating apps. But so many of our friends did/do.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were the fist generation to socialize on the internet on a large scale. We grew up in high school on AOL Instant Messenger and Myspace. We got on Facebook back in 2004/2005 when it launched. We were just very primed to be open to online socializing, which is just a step away from dating.

As soon as we became old enough to be in charge of our own finances and be a demographic group businesses were willing to market to, the online dating world opened up in a BIG way.

Friendliest country I’ve ever been to was Cuba. Everyone was incredibly nice and helpful with anything we could want. Malaysia was a close second.

Least friendliest was Belgium, but I went as part of a school exchange trip, so I was pretty much always in a large group of mostly teenage Americans with a few teachers. Understandable why people might not have been as friendly.

It’s democratic confederalism

I’m not claiming the Democrats had full control of anything. And no, a shut down would not have been much faster. It would have been more chaotic, but not faster. And maybe the chaos would have helped get more people into the streets resisting. I don’t know.

But I do know that capitulating to fascists is never a good strategy. There has never once been a situation where capitulating to fascists has resulted in a better outcome. Schumer got played. You got played.

Right, it was lose/lose. Either way bad things are going to happen. So why sign on to participate and take ownership of it? What does anyone gain by that.

The situation would not be worse under a shutdown. It would just be a different type of bad. Trump and Musk are still firing anyone they want without regard to the law or courts. They’re still gutting funding wherever they want.

The ONLY difference between passing this CR and not is that the Vichy Democrats put their stamp of approval on what’s happening now.

I need you to explain why you think it’s a better choice to give Trump the ability to indiscriminately terminate non-essential government employees than to have control of the budget.

Who do you think has control of the budget? Do you really think that by rolling over and giving Trump everything he wants now Schumer will somehow have control of anything in September?

And why do you think passing the CR will stop Trump and Musk from terminating anyone they want? They’re still doing that.

ALL spending bills are “temporary” in that they don’t provide unlimited funds for forever. The CR doesn’t say, “give as much money as is needed until September.” It says “we allocated $XXXX”. And since we know how to predict how much money the government spends, we know that amount of money will run out in September.

This is the same way it works if they passed an appropriations bill. The only difference is that they based spending levels on the previous spending bills rather than on a budget bill.

You have no clue what you’re talking about, which is demonstrated by your repeated use of the term “budget reconciliation bill” as if it applies to anything here. The budget reconciliation process can only happen after an appropriation bill is passed, which this CR was.

So you are admitting that passing the CR did nothing to protect these jobs you seem so concerned for? Then why are you arguing so fervently in favor of Vichy collaborationists?

Why are you pretending like they’re not doing that anyways? There are people right now lined up outside NIH and HHS buildings because DOGE has shut them out and is firing them. The last of the USAID workers lost their jobs yesterday. Yet you’re here pretending like allowing the CR to pass prevented people from losing their jobs? Brother, you’ve been duped into being a collaborationist!

Yes. Let them take the shutdown and own it. You seem to be operating from the premise that a shutdown would have been popular and had no negative political blowback on the fascists. History does not support this assumption.

Make Trump and Musk go tell people that they don’t deserve the services they’d lose from a shutdown. Instead, Schumer said that Democrats agree with all the cuts that were already in the CR.

If you can’t extract concessions, then you let them take the loss alone. Instead, Vichy Schumer just agreed to sign the Democrats on as collaborators.

You don’t understand what a CR is if you think it’s permanent. A continuing resolution is stopgap funding when a budget reconciliation fails to be passed.

You don’t understand how Congress works. A CR isn’t used when Budget Reconciliation isn’t passed. It’s used when spending bills don’t pass.

The "normal’ (or what’s supposed to be normal) process for funding the government is that the Congress passes a Budget, which is a set of funding guidelines, but doesn’t actually allocate money. That budget is then used by various committees to write appropriations bills, which is what actually allows the government to spend money. Those spending bills are typically supposed to only cover 1 year, with new appropriations given every year.

Except Congress has been a dysfunctional mess for decades. They rarely actually pass Budget or appropriations bills. That’s why we’re always under these shutdown threats, because Congress doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. So when they come down to crunch time and can’t pass spending bills, they pass a Continuing Resolution (CR). A CR is an appropriations bill, but instead of using a recent budget as a guideline, the CR just says “continue funding the government at the exact levels it was with these minor adjustments” (usually cutting funding by 2-5% and/or increasing in specific areas, like disaster relief if there was just a hurricane or something).

A CR, just like a normal appropriations bill, funds only to a set level. They don’t have a time limit in that they say “funding will stop on X date”, but they know how fast the government spends money, so they can predict that $XXX will last YYY days. In that way, they can say “fund $XXX worth” knowing that will expire on a certain date. CRs are just as “permanent” as any appropriations bill

A Budget Reconciliation is a completely different thing. It’s a process that allows the Senate to adjust existing spending bills while bypassing the 60 vote threshold for cloture required by the filibuster rules. When the Congress writes a spending bill, they include language within it to say, “this portion of the budget can later be adjusted through reconciliation”. The intention is to strip out particularly contentious parts of the larger bill to allow the larger bill to pass while letting Congress then address the stickier issue on its own. So, for example, you don’t have to hold up funding national parks just because you can’t decide how much to spend on a new military drone program, for example.

However, since Reconciliation allows the majority party to bypass the filibuster, it’s use is primarily to pass legislation that the majority knows they can’t do through normal legislation (due to the 60 vote threshold the filibuster puts on everything). There are certain rules which I can get into if you want that limit what types of things can be done through reconciliation and how often. But your framing in your comment above about how CRs are supposedly temporary until a Reconciliation Bill is passed is just flat out wrong.