2d ago

Cuts to US national parks and forests spark outrage

www.bbc.com Cuts to US national parks and forests spark outrage

Employees who maintained America's most wild places say they are concerned for public safety and for wildlife.

Summary

The Trump administration's recent mass layoffs of national park and forest staff have sparked outrage as services deteriorate and safety concerns grow.

Around 1,000 National Park Service employees (5%) and 3,400 Forest Service workers (10%) were terminated on February 14, causing long entrance lines, trail closures, and reduced visitor services.

Former employees like wilderness ranger Kate White worry about visitor safety and ecological damage at popular destinations.

Conservation work for endangered species has halted, and wildfire response capabilities are threatened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the cuts as deficit reduction, while critics call for policy reversal.

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2d ago

Cuts to US national parks and forests spark outrage

www.bbc.com /news/articles/czx7kez4vx2o

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2d ago

Cuts to US national parks and forests met with backlash

www.bbc.com /news/articles/czx7kez4vx2o

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All these fuckers talk about is deficit reduction. We gotta cut social services and stuff people rely on to save money cuz the deficit. But they aren't trying to save money. They're trying to give themselves the biggest tax break imaginable and add to the deficit. They just want us to pay for it.
It's the biggest fucking scam in the world And your representatives are lying to you so they can get rich.
- Every dollar given to the IRS yields 5-9 dollars back in recovered taxes.
  If I told you you could put a dollar in and multiply that by fivefold in a year, you'd be a fool to not leverage it.
  If you were running america as a business, you would failing a fiducial duty by not investing in it.
  Now, I wonder why the billionaires in charge of government don't do it?
  Hmm.
- All Billionaires are bankrolled by taxpayer subsidiaries.
  Capitalism is Communism for the rich.
- Representatives aren't representing you. They represent their rich donors and themselves.
- There does seem to be a lot of wasteful spending, do you not agree?
  I'd far prefer a minimum income or something along those lines. Or just fund electricity production instead if you're worried about people not working.
  This is where it appears like the progressives don't actually help the average person, and you get someone like Trump elected.
  
  This is where it appears like the progressives don't actually help the average person
  Another instance of "this is what I believe progressives/leftists/liberals do" and being completely off about it. Lol This is becoming a thing around here, isn't it. Third time this week.
  
  They don't support the most useful programs for the poor like universal healthcare, I know that much. I remember when Joe Biden was building entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid as he said he was against universal healthcare.
  
  lol Joe Biden is center right, he is not a progressive
  
  Yes, most Democrats aren't Left enough. Some are trying to push the party to the Left, however.
  I think the confusion here is your blanket "they" is conflating the mainstream Democratic party instead of those of us who are pushing this stuff at the grassroots level, e.g. actual progressives/Leftists etc.
  
  The idea of what they consider to be wasteful and what I consider to be wasteful are very different things. And I don't want to feed into that narrative. They weren't worried about government waste till they wanted to give themselves bigger tax cuts. If they cared about actual waste, they wouldn't remove people in charge of oversight. NIH research isn't wasteful, CFPB isn't wasteful. USAID isn't wasteful. These things pay huge dividends to society. Removing contracts already lined up for other companies and giving it to yourself is the definition of wasteful. Removing the organizations that were investigating your labor practices is cronyism.
  So no I don't agree. So if you wanna talk about helping the average person, maybe point to some changes that have happened that'll in some way actually help people and not just make the obscenely wealthly a little richer. But you're unlikely to find any.
  
  Conservatives generally believe in monetarism or Austrian economics, you're not exactly unveiling a secret conspiracy, they believe tax cuts help the poor and lower the cost of goods. This is what people voted for.
  You really can't find anything in the current DOGE documents outlining waste, something that should be going to actually help the poor instead? I think my point stands that we need to simplify the spending if we want to avoid conservative governance, we all know its not being run efficiently and is rife with corruption.
  
  So let's get this straight, social services are wasteful and don't help the poor. So let's cut them AND raise taxes on the poor while we cut taxes for the rich? Even in that framework it doesn't make any sense.
  I don't know for a fact that any of the US spending is all that corrupt at the federal level, don't presume that we agree there. The straws they grasp at as "wasteful" are pennies.
  Notice how they don't touch military, social security or medicare. The latter two paper over social issues that could be addressed but conservatives can't cut them because it would be massively unpopular. No amount of "simplified spending" can fix the fundamental flaws in these programs. So in the structure of government spending we're allowed to have, it's not wasteful. It's literally all PR and conservative talking points.
  
  It makes sense in the eyes of Milton Friedman and Austrian economist, who believe that it raises the price of goods. Taxing the rich is usually taxing corporations, since the rich aren't exactly liquidating their holdings every year.
  
  This is the welfare queen argument applied to all of governance and it was a lie then. None of the fraud is adding up and none of this will absolutely help the poor. It's all gonna go to making billionaires a slightly higher billionaire.
  
  What economic theory do you tend to gravitate towards that says the US should be running outlandish deficits every year, and that it benefits the citizens?
  I'd be curious to read more into it.
  
  The economic theory that "cutting" critical services (ie: privatizing or starving the beast) is more expensive than just paying for what's needed. The only cheap form of government is no government at all, and I don't think many people would like that in practice.
  
  Well that's silly, America is still running emergency Covid level deficits. Powell himself said its not sustainable.
  
  The problem runs deeper than 5 years ago. For example, imagine if the de facto official retirement plan wasn't siphoning public tax money to be locked into the private stock market. Uncle Sam doesn't get to touch those tax deferred contributions for decades.
  So instead of having that money to decrease the deficit or invest in programs that would reduce the financial burden of retirees (training nurses, preventative healthcare, etc...), they only get their cut at the end of the line. That money explicitly does no public good during those years, that would run counter to the profit motive of their private pool of shareholders.
  There are dozens of examples like this, look at the banks and automakers we bail out with no public equity. We leverage our public good on the promise of private growth making up the difference later. Turns out, it doesn't work so well...

41 comments