President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Only certain evangelical Christians believe this, BTW. I don’t. I’m an amillennialist. revelation is symbolic to me.

 

Good. Run him out.

 

If that was the case, I'm sure KFC would've been on the menu. (The other stereotypical item is out of season.)

 

The problem is that these people have actual influence over Trump. At least two of the members of his Bible-thumping religious advisory board are in that klan.

 

Ah. I thought his pulling troops out of Syria was destabilizing Israel.

 

When I worked for the feds 1985-2013, the conventional wisdom was that secretaries and other lower-skilled workers were paid more than they would be paid in the private sector and higher-skilled workers were paid less, which was partly compensated by the better pensions & other benefits. The WaPo's Federal Diary column covered studies of this issue pretty regularly. I certainly didn't see a lot of people leave voluntarily before retirement. A few did go into lobbying midcareer, but most waited until they qualified for their pension and retired, often in their early 50s, which gave them time to make higher salaries.

The guy's argument that federal workers should have assumed that (significant) shutdowns were likely is bogus. Nearly all of the shutdowns he cited over the last couple of decades were short and ended well before the first pay period that covered any of the unworked hours. He's only partly right that it's like a free vacation. In 1995 it sort of was for people in my situation - not living paycheck-to-paycheck and reasonably sure we'd eventually be paid for the shutdown hours - but many people were not in that situation, and I assume with the increase in contractors it's an even higher percentage now.

The closest I am to agreeing with any of his points is on saving. I was surprised in 1995 how many people in upper-middle-class jobs earning maybe $80K at the time with free housing & nice cars who took nice vacations were living paycheck-to-paycheck and were under a lot of stress during that shutdown. I felt sorry for them, but at the same time it was partly their fault - no you can't expect a shutdown, but you can expect that something may go wrong in some way (health, job, family, whatever), and you need a cushion. I doubt it's improved since then; on a thread here a month or two ago, people wrote about how many new $60K+ pickups they were seeing, and Ragu writes regularly about all our consumer debt. There are plenty of save-don't-spend messages out there, but lots of people don't seem to be listening.

 

Have team invites ever been an occasion for a meal, or is this another Trump thing? Most I recall have been during the day, a tour followed by a public event on the South Lawn or indoors.

 

In Soviet Russia, Swamp cleans up you!