The Republican Agenda 2021 and Forward

I see this as the counter-woke culture, a really drastic swing in the opposite direction. It will just be a matter of time before this backfires on them as woke has for liberals I suspect. They're also throwing out the constitution in order to make many of these changes so there will be plenty of legal challenges.

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Like I said in another post, this will become the Trump Youth that will make them even less employable than our already failing school system spits them out. Permanent under class to exploit. Not to mention for profit voucher schools outside public have proven over and over to be fraud funnels with less than public school results. If your kid's school is in a strip mall expect them to live with/off you for the rest of your life.
 
Trump has no ten-point plan. Anyone can come up with a list of liberal or conservative “wish list” items.

-Wide access to birth control
-Better health and social classes in schools, including mandated training for all teachers.
-Removal of all religious material in secular public schools.

Etc.

These things mean nothing on paper, and less with a reeree windbag at the helm.
 
I don't know how CA works, or most states for that matter, but I do know how the Federal government works.

First, baseline budgeting needs to go. No department should get an automatic % increase whether they need it or not. Also, no department should lose part of their budget if they don't spend it. But that is how government works. A friend who works IT for the Federal government has to buy new computers every couple of years or they lose the money in their budget. What desktop that is just used as a dumb terminal to the network needs replaced every 2 years? I am typing this on a 9-year old iMac which has gotten a new HHD drive. Still going strong. Departments should be required to justify increases and not get an automatic one "just because".

Also, when using baseline budgeting, a "cut" might not really be a cut. For example, if there is supposed to be a 10% increase in the budget, but is slashed to only a 6% increase, in DC, that is a cut. Even though the budget went up.

I know from my business dealings with the post office that they get unlimited vacation PTO rollover and payout when they leave. So when they retire not only do they have a nice pension, but many of them get a large check for the 6 months to a year of vacation time they never took over their career. That needs to stop. My employer caps my available vacation PTO at 6 weeks. Once I hit that I stop accruing more PTO time.
 
I know from my business dealings with the post office that they get unlimited vacation PTO rollover and payout when they leave.

And they are not really government. Sort of a quasi government agency.

My daughter gets "unlimited" PTO. Sounds great, but it seems everyone is afraid to take it so they end up with less vacation than if they got a set amount. But in fairness, her company does get Friday afternoon's off Memorial Day through Labor Day and she gets off for Christmas from the 23rd through the 1st. But with unlimited PTO, there is no cashing out unused vacation days since their aren't any.
 
I know from my business dealings with the post office that they get unlimited vacation PTO rollover and payout when they leave. So when they retire not only do they have a nice pension, but many of them get a large check for the 6 months to a year of vacation time they never took over their career. That needs to stop. My employer caps my available vacation PTO at 6 weeks. Once I hit that I stop accruing more PTO time.
I work at a site with > 1000 people. We do have rollover limits on PTO but I wouldn’t know what they are because nobody, and I mean nobody I know at that site doesn’t use their full PTO. I’ve worked there over 18 years.
 
And they are not really government. Sort of a quasi government agency.

My daughter gets "unlimited" PTO. Sounds great, but it seems everyone is afraid to take it so they end up with less vacation than if they got a set amount. But in fairness, her company does get Friday afternoon's off Memorial Day through Labor Day and she gets off for Christmas from the 23rd through the 1st. But with unlimited PTO, there is no cashing out unused vacation days since their aren't any.


Unlimited PTO is a mind game pioneered in Silicon Valley. “You can take as much time off as you like as long as you got your job done. Did you get the job done? Are you sure? Every detail? Nothing could go wrong while you are gone?”
 
Unlimited PTO is a mind game pioneered in Silicon Valley. “You can take as much time off as you like as long as you got your job done. Did you get the job done? Are you sure? Every detail? Nothing could go wrong while you are gone?”

I actually have been getting into some interesting "discussions" with my boss since we moved over to this system. I'm wondering if other folks at my company are getting a bit of "buyer's remorse" after getting their PTO paid out as part of the switch. There's been such an AI push internally, that it does feel like we're constantly under crunch. Not the same company it was even a decade ago.
 
I work at a site with > 1000 people. We do have rollover limits on PTO but I wouldn’t know what they are because nobody, and I mean nobody I know at that site doesn’t use their full PTO. I’ve worked there over 18 years.

I had a coworker who would schedule a day off as soon as he accrued a full 8 hours. I have several coworkers who regularly take no pay because they plowed through their PTO. “When I was a kid” when you missed a lot of days of work you got fired, but that no longer seems to be the case, or at least not where I work. One former coworker made it through 4 months straight of not working a full week, at least 1 day off or a half day every week. She never got fired. She quit.

This seems to mostly be an age thing though. Those of us 50 or over at least several times a year take a day off because we reached the limit of PTO accrual.
 
Unlimited PTO is a mind game pioneered in Silicon Valley. “You can take as much time off as you like as long as you got your job done. Did you get the job done? Are you sure? Every detail? Nothing could go wrong while you are gone?”
100% this. I spent years on unlimited PTO and got way less vacation than I ever would have on standard, because at least with that you either use it or get paid out. So even two weeks standard PTO is way better than unlimited.

There were years I never even got a full week, the problem is if you have anything on the ball you will be utilized at twice your capacity and getting the right coverage to take time off or being gone for more than a few days at a time would totally blow up your projects. I would say this was one of the biggest driving factors in my early retirement, I just wanted a break that I could never get otherwise.
 
Many people - especially in manufacturing and other blue color jobs - will soon have a lot of time off to figure this stuff out. Give them a few weeks after the tariffs hit.
I'm not so sure. We have MAGAs who point out when gas prices go up just a bit, but don't notice anything when they go back down. Selective memory, selective observance. Plus, facts don't really matter, anyway.
 
Many people - especially in manufacturing and other blue color jobs - will soon have a lot of time off to figure this stuff out. Give them a few weeks after the tariffs hit.
I do wonder if tariffs are something he’ll back out of before he does it. Sounds good at rallies, especially if Biden isn’t doing it.
 
Center to left journalists need to start collectively posting a list of all the positive economic numbers Trump is going to attempt to take credit for that are actually the result of the Biden administration or residual from it. Then the networks need to turn it into a bingo card game every time he does it. There also needs to be a separate “out of touch with real Americans” bingo card when he tells us to look at the stock market, unemployment numbers, and lower inflation growth.
 
I do wonder if tariffs are something he’ll back out of before he does it. Sounds good at rallies, especially if Biden isn’t doing it.

I heard somebody, I assume a politician, say something along the lines of it we have the money to support illegal immigrants then we have the money to bail out farmers. I don’t have a problem helping out farmers but I do have a problem with a system that requires us to bail them out. So I looked into it. Due to Trump’s tariff wars farmers greatly reduced their access to the global market. So our tax dollars had to make up for that loss. At the same time there’s pretty much zero oversite. “Have a farm? Here’s a check. We’re not going to look into what you are spending it on.”

At the same time this has caused our tariff targets to start doing agriculture business with countries who aren’t going to play that game. So we’ll just continue to bail out farmers at greater levels as that becomes worse with isolationism while also paying higher prices at the grocery store. It’s a double dip screwing. Let’s make it worse by deporting the agriculture workforce. Trifecta!
 
The Supreme Court better get all their billionaire paid vacations out of the way in the next couple months. They’re going to be putting in some OT over the next couple years. First on the docket, Trump’s Presidential order to eliminate all lower courts. What a novel idea.
 
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