Patterico's Pontifications

2/5/2025

There’s a Hole in the Budget, Dear Liza

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:23 am



There’s a hole in the budget
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
There’s a hole in the budget
Dear Liza
A hole

Well fix it
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Well fix it
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Fix it

With what shall I fix it
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
With what shall I fix it
Dear Liza
With what

With Elon
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
With Elon
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
With him

He’s on ketamine
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
He’s on ketamine
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
A lot

So fire him
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
So fire him
Dear Donald
“Dear Elon: you’re fired!”

He bribed me
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
He bribed me
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
So much

Do tariffs
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Do tariffs
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Raise them

But the markets
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
The markets
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
They tank

Create an American Sovereign Wealth fund
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Create an American Sovereign Wealth fund
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
It’s done

With what shall I fund it
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
With what shall I fund it
Dear Liza
With what

With money
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
With money
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
With that

But where shall I get it
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
But where shall I get it
Dear Liza
From where

From the budget
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
The budget
Dear Donald
Dear Donald
The budget

*chords play repeatedly as Donald thinks*
*the audience titters*
*chords continue*
*finally…*

There’s a hole in the budget
Dear Liza
Dear Liza
There’s a hole in the budget
Dear Liza
But what the hell I’ll do it anyway

16 Responses to “There’s a Hole in the Budget, Dear Liza”

  1. Clever write-up.

    Possible cronyism with a wealth fund? No way! It would never happen!!

    Dear Liza must loath Trump as much as she loathed dear Henry at the end of the nursery rhyme. Lol. Feckless fools, both.

    Dana (c643a9)

  2. Trump fired all the Inspector Generals, but he seems to have unofficially appointed Elon Musk as Inspector General for the entire United States government.

    Sammy Finkelman (4f7c0b)

  3. Trump fired all the Inspector Generals……

    No, he didn’t. There are 72 IGs throughout the government, and only 17 (24%) were fired.

    Rip Murdock (d2a2a8)

  4. That comes from not reading news articles carefully and also relying on what pundits or Democrats said.

    The truth is, the media did not know who was fired and who was not.

    The story went:

    “At last 18…”

    https://www.kaine.senate.gov/press-releases/warner-kaine-colleagues-call-for-reinstatement-of-inspectors-general-illegally-fired-by-president-trump

    … IGs were removed from at least 18 departments and agencies, including Departments of Defense, State, Education, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

    In addition to Warner and Kaine, the letter was signed by U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Ed Markey (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Jack Reed (D-RI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Patty Murray (D-WA), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), and John Fetterman (D-PA).

    I think they enumerated more than 18

    Sammy Finkelman (e4ef09)

  5. Trump is a Rorschach test. How you see him says a lot more about you than about him.

    norcal (a72384)

  6. Even DU is saying chuckie schumer needs to be replayed. Acting goofy isn’t cutting it. ICE fires smoke grenades going door to door into apartments chasing children coughing out into the cold. DU.

    asset (64cd62)

  7. Hey,, Ketamine isn’t that bad. Of course, this isn’t good for Hegseth.

    Kevin M (a9545f)

  8. DU = unsourced propaganda.

    Kevin M (a9545f)

  9. Trump can’t fire “all the IGs.” Only some. Here’s a list.

    Note that Reagan fired 16 IGs as he entered office.

    Kevin M (a9545f)

  10. Everyone ready for Super Musk to solve the FAA?

    https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5129134-el-musk-urges-quick-safety-upgrades-faa/

    Appalled (b413f8)

  11. But really, with all these firings in the CIA and FBI and elsewhere, what we will see is lawsuit after lawsuit, followed by rehiring all these people with back pay and maybe damages. And yet another hole in the budget.

    Kevin M (a9545f)

  12. Retirees should be worried.

    Plutocrats know not to muzzles the ox which treads the grain.

    Productive workers who continue to generate profits and taxes will be largely left alone, and maybe even given a carrot or sugar cube in the way of illusionary tax cuts and minor perks.

    Retirees no longer generate either profits or taxes.

    But they have their nest eggs, pensions and retirement accounts, and last but not least the Social Security Fund, for the apartheid weasels let loose in the hen coop to snap up.

    nk (e5e23e)

  13. And one more thing for those who were talking “death panels” in Obama times.

    I read that Tesla Boy has now infiltrated Medicare and Medicaid.

    Can you say Aktion Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Afrikaans?

    nk (e5e23e)

  14. When Musk goes after the military, a true money sink, maybe they roll tanks. I think there are some who would welcome a military coup defense of the constitution even now.

    Kevin M (a9545f)

  15. Last night, the CBS Evening News reported that that there were 16 Inspector Generals fired. Does anyone know?

    There can also be longstanding vacancies. The State Department had no Inspector general during the entire four year tenure of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

    Sammy Finkelman (e4ef09)

  16. Kevin M (a9545f) — 2/6/2025 @ 7:37 am

    When Musk goes after the military, a true money sink,

    Trump is asking to waste money. He wants the U.S. (and other countries) to spend 5% of GDP on the military. That’s not a formula for efficiency.

    https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-to-spend-1-million-in-a-hurry-a-lesson-in-budgeting-and-bureaucracies-makes-me-skeptical-of-doge-1ea97897

    …Working for a big corporation and regulated entity has many lessons for DOGE. Here’s one that may handcuff it: I was all of 23 years old and working on chips for modems, enabling digital communications over phone lines. The nice thing about Bell Labs is that no one ever told you what to do. You just figured it out. So I did what I wanted and had a lot of fun. It was the early 1980s, and I think I made $21,000 that year.

    On Dec. 20 my boss pulled me into his office: “Got a second?” I thought I was going to be fired. He smiled and told me that our department was under budget for the year. I was confused. “The way things work here is that if we don’t spend a bunch of money before the end of the year, we lose it in next year’s budget.” So? “Well, Andy, this is your lucky day. You can be a hero around here if you can figure out how to spend a bit over $1 million quickly.” That was a lot of money back then. And now. It was regulated ratepayers’ money. AT&T overcharged for long-distance calls. Who cares? “Oh,” my boss added, “and it has to be delivered by Dec 31.”

    He didn’t have to tell me twice. I had a wish list of computer power that I needed for chip design and testing. The hottest machine at the time I could run myself was from Digital Equipment, a DEC VAX 11/780, which required an air-conditioned room with raised floors. It ran about one million instructions per second. By comparison, today’s iPhone can do about 38 trillion operations per second.

    I called the DEC salesman and told him I wanted a VAX and three 176-megabyte disk drives. He laughed and said, “Who doesn’t?” I mentioned I had a signed purchase order in my hand, but I needed it on our loading dock by Dec. 31 or the deal was off. He stopped laughing. He even started calling me “sir.”

    Thankfully, a VAX showed up on Dec. 30. I was a hero—for about a week, then forgotten. But I had my own million-dollar “personal computer.” The next December, the same underbudgeting happened. The salesman, who I noticed was driving a fancy new car, told me he had several 11/780s sitting in a truck ready to roll. We took one. The next year, AT&T was broken up into many pieces….

    Sammy Finkelman (e4ef09)

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