Amerika

Headlines shout scary stuff at you because newspapers know that inside every human is a rodent. That rodent responds to impossible hopes and implausible fears with equal interest, and so the MBAs got out the Excel spreadsheets and cut out everything that was not one of those. This is why newspapers are clickbait and have always been sensationalist.

Lately they are telling us that the Trump revolution is over, much as they assured us that Brexit was done and white people were inherently bad. Some have said that it is the victory of the swamp, or the deep state, because Trump signed the new and bloated $1.3 trillion American budget.

These newspapers are selling you a bill of goods. They want people to think that hope is gone so they roll over, go back to sleep, and keep purchasing newspapers. We might call that the parasite cycle: parasites want you to forget everything but taking care of the parasite.

In reality, almost everyone in America has forgotten how complex our system of government is and how little a president can do. Trump wanted an expanded military budget and in order to do that in a timely fashion, he had to retreat today to fight tomorrow. This led to him signing a budget he hates:

But, he added, the omnibus bill was important because it boosted defense spending by $60 billion over last year, including pay hikes for the troops.

“As a matter of national security I’ll sign this omnibus budget bill,” he said, but warned that he would never sign such a hastily prepared bill again.

“There are a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things we shouldn’t have had in this bill but we were, in a sense, forced [to] if we want to build our military, we were forced to have,” he added during an event in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.

Trump has made his foreign policy strong by ending the Obama-era policy of nagging people with guilt anytime they threatened us. He intends to project power further as a means of deterrence against the various leaders around the world whose nations are not thriving, and are depending on militarism to unite those nations.

In order to do this, he had to get military funding now so that he does not have to wait another year to move his military into full operating status. After that, he can focus on refining that military.

Most people do not understand the amount of time it will take to fix military spending and organization. Trump has deferred doing so because of how much time will be involved, although his winning move is to get this new budget and then set his staff toward fixing military spending so that he can free up additional funds within the military.

What we can take away from this budget experience is the knowledge that the American system was designed to restrict big government, but now that big government has been created, the same checks and balances are serving to protect big government. In the future, fewer people will emulate the American model because of this obvious fatal failing.

For those of us out here in the cheap seats, Trump has enabled government to keep functioning instead of fighting the budget battle now, which means that he both foresees a need for the military soon and he is busy with other tasks, most likely slashing away at the permanent bureaucracy (swamp/deep state) from within.

Tags: budget, deep state, donald j. trump, military, permanent bureaucracy, swamp