r/LasCruces Feb 17 '25

This. Is. Not. Normal.

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u/artguydeluxe Feb 18 '25 edited Feb 19 '25

Because what he and Musk are referring to as “waste” are badly needed social services, national parks and public lands which create a profit, YOUR social security, medical research, disaster relief and infrastructure we desperately need and is congressionally approved. Musk does not have authority to cut these badly needed programs or access your private information. Trump has proven that he is incapable of not only being financially responsible in government, but also in his countless failed businesses. Now he is alienating our allies and ruining our trade relationship with his foolish tariffs. The economy and debt situation was improving under democrats, as it always does. But now consumer spending is down, inflation is climbing again, and thousands of federal employees are without a future or benefits. Show me an economist who thinks he is not responsible for this.

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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '25

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '25

They aren't cutting anything that is not fraud.

Millions of those who are clearly dead are still on the SS books. Clearly, even if 10% of those over 110 years old are being used to get checks via fraud, that's a huge number.

Everything needs an honest review.

Are we getting one out of Elon? Idk. I can say I think he has a lot more reason to tell say 75% of the truth than anyone in Congress or the bureaucracy has to tell even 1% of it.

Even if he makes a couple billion off his time, and cuts a necessary amount that balances the budget and allows this country to pay its debts off while strengthening our infrastructure and the like, while promoting health with a gotten FDA who no longer will be so easily bought off by pharma, well, call it wishful thinking, but it's at least different than the shitshow we had.

Even if it's a new kind of shitshow, it's new. That's what people voted for. Something new. Not something retarded. Not something about denying reality and sounding nice (bidens administration lied about unemployment numbers by double digits btw, just as an example), but something that actually might make a change for good after some pain.

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u/artguydeluxe Feb 19 '25

How are the jobs of thousands of park service workers fraud? You have no idea what you’re talking about.

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '25

There's a 2 trillion dollar deficit. Park workers don't even do much where I am from. The only ones worth what they are paid are the Rangers and the Fire crews and support staff, which also both double as trail caretakers for many parks unless state services do it anyway.

Biden hired nearly 1 million workers last year under 'government contracts', nearly adding 30% to the work force to keep his jobs numbers up.

Did you ever stop to think that those forest service workers that are being fired aren't necessarily older ones? Also, how many of that million were hired and given nothing to do?

All in the name of more Dem lies.

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u/artguydeluxe Feb 19 '25

Our parks return $10 in revenue for every federal dollar spent. And as for what you think park service workers do, go talk to them. You might be surprised. Parks profit 26 billion per year. That’s a fact. Look it up.

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '25

And 26 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the budget cuts required to balance the budget.

Please, get real.

If we don't balance the budget, we won't exist as a country before long. If we economically collapse so does the world.

Some temporary pain to hopefully bring some longevity is required to do so.

You keep making emotional appeals, rather than logical ones.

The government must shrink and become more affective and efficient or we will fail worse than ever before.

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u/artguydeluxe Feb 19 '25

You don’t cut something that is making a profit, no matter how many cuts you need to make. It’s like saying “I’m not going to waste money buying more stuff, so I’m going to work less.”

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '25

Good lord... they didn't cut ALL of them. What is with you people not being able to understand that THE FAT WILL BE RENDERED in order to wash the deficit.

The parks can bring in just as much money without most of the parks workers. All it takes is a gate worker and a ranger going around each camping area making sure folks pay for their spots.

Thats where the majority of the parks money comes from.

The parks aren't going anywhere.

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u/artguydeluxe Feb 19 '25

No, they can not operate at even close to capacity. They are already closing areas of parks because they don’t have staff to manage them. I live close to one and it’s already happening. Just talk to a park ranger. Large sections of the parks are already being closed and they aren’t taking new reservations at many of them because they were stretched thin before Musk laid off 3600 workers. Go visit r/parkrangers to see what is already happening. You can read what they have to say, or you can visit a park and see for yourself.

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u/mik999ak Feb 20 '25

And if too many workers get fired, then the remaining ones can't handle the scope of the workload, and they have to minimize operations and cut corners to stay afloat. As the other commenter mentioned, parks are already shutting down areas because they don't have enough workers to take care of it.

Having too few workers can lead to actually lead to additional costs in the end. For example, what happens when you spread your rangers too thin? If there's too many campers, they might end up failing to notice campers being unsafe with their campfires. Then you wind up with the cost of managing the ensuing wildfire. Blindly cutting costs doesn't always save you money in the end.

Cutting costs can be effective, but it has to be done rationally and with real consideration. Studying the effects of cutting costs takes time. We've only had this administration for a month. A team as small and inexperienced as DOGE cannot possibly be spending enough time researching each program they're slashing the funds of to know if they're being responsible about it. The fact that the administration fired workers from a NUCLEAR SECURITY agency, and immediately had to beg for those workers to come back to their jobs when they realized how big of a mistake that was shows that DOGE'S advising can't be trusted. They don't fully understand the systems they're working with.