The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Ah...it's a trifecta of failure! Biden's magic touch at turning everything he does into a massive, jiggling pile of excrement, the government's fantastic, wide-ranging skill at being absolutely awful at everything it does, and the delightful frisson of DEI, which always injects additional failure points!

Frankly, I'm amazed that they only pissed away $42.5 billion!

Trump Administration Overhauls Biden's DEI Broadband Program that Connected Zero Households in 4 Years

The $42.5 billion federal program prioritized woke corporate mandates and handouts to the politically connected fiber and broadband lobby, while discriminating against far more efficient Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite technology, such as SpaceX's Starlink. Four years after it passed, it proposed spending tens of thousands of dollars per household, but failed to connect a single American.

Just do the math, and Starlink is by far the most efficient answer to providing connectivity to rural America.

But...why the hell are we spending one dollar on connectivity for anyone? Maybe I missed it in the Constitution, but as far as I can tell, it isn't the core mission of the United States government to make sure that every American has access to high-speed internet porn and cat videos. Why not also spend $42.5 billion on high speed trains, so people can get to work, or subsidize their cellular service and equipment? Oh...wait...we are doing that already.

We piss away oceans of money on stuff the government has no business supporting, while simultaneously doing a horrifically inefficient job at it. Welfare? Airport security? Education? Infrastructure? They are all fantastically expensive boondoggles that no doubt pump lots of money into the coffers of friendly corporations and fellow-traveler nonprofits.

But internet might be the silliest of the bunch! It is a perfect application of market economics, and the cost should be borne by the users. Why should I have to pay for someone else's access to the internet, when I am already paying for my own? Is it a natural right to surf busty lesbian porn and buy paper napkins and lipstick from Amazon?

What this typical mess of a government program represents is the inexorable creep of what government should do. We have moved from the basics in 1791, to an incomprehensibly complex labyrinth of spending for results that never come. President Trump's rational attempt to rein in spending is a laudable beginning, but it must accelerate and expand for it to have any long-lasting effect on our budgetary woes, and our ridiculous drift away from the core function of government.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter]. If you folks who are on X/Twitter would follow us it would be much appreciated!

posted by CBD at 11:03 AM

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