A reclusive billionaire, anti-tax crusader and major financial backer of Donald Trump has been named as the anonymous private donor who gave $130m to the government to help pay US troops during the federal shutdown that is now in its fourth week, according to the New York Times.
The donation, which equates to about $100 per service member, appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds in advance or in excess of congressional appropriations – and from accepting voluntary services “except in the case of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”.
Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment.
Sounds like these “troops” are not federal at all, but private mercenaries.
His wikipedia page is something else.
Mellon is a Republican, though in the past was a supporter of and donator to liberal causes.[11] He voted for President Lyndon B. Johnson, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter, before becoming a Republican under Ronald Reagan’s presidency.[7][11]
He is a supporter of President Donald Trump.[6][11] He is anti-tax and anti-union.[13][2] He has criticized teacher unions and the introduction of women studies, LGBT studies, and African American studies into higher education.[22] He was a listener of Rush Limbaugh before his death.[6]
He faced media attention after comments describing his political views in his 2015 self-published autobiography “panam.captain” came to light.[23][22] Mellon calls social safety net programs “slavery Redux” and refers to those receiving benefits as “slaves of a new master, Uncle Sam.”[6] He also stated Black people became “even more belligerent” following the expansion of social programs in the 1960s and 70s.[23][22] Mellon defended his comments in the book and did not apologize.[11]
Also, according to the Daily Mail (I know, but they give his foundation as credit), this is what he currently looks like. He’s 80, so there’s probably a lot of touching up.
Arrest the billionaire, and confiscate his wealth. That should give the other Sociopathic Oligarchs something to think about when they see Trump is calling.
Bribes
Trump is almost done when the elite are desperate enough to show their face.
Ancient Rome shit, Patricians buying the loyalty of the legions. Next they’ll send their Cincinnatus out to crush the plebs when they revolt.
Cincinnatus was actually cool. Rome’s neighbors violated a peace treaty and tried to invade them. They called up Cincinnatus, a retired general, and gave him full dictatorial power. He resolved the situation in two weeks, abdicated all of his powers on day fifteen, and went back to his farm. Then he did it a second time when someone tried to end the republic and make themself a king.
Someone like Crassus would be a more appropriate Roman to reference.
Cincinnatus was an elitist prick, but it appears I confused him with his son, who took more direct and brutal actions against the Plebs:
Cincinnatus was opposed to attempts to raise the legal position of plebeians in Roman society. His son Caeso Quinctius, like his father, was an opponent of the commoners and tried to limit their rights. He often tried to depreciate the role of this stratum in the political life of the country, often against the legal order. In 461 BCE his actions, preventing plebeian tribunes from speaking at the Forum, were accused of breaking the Roman order. Caeso was released on bail and then fled to the Etruscans. He was then sentenced to death, and his father had to sell large tracts of land and concentrate on working on his small farm. Through their hard and arduous work, Cincinnatus and his family managed to feed themselves and survive the time of discomfort.
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/biographies/lucius-quinctius-cincinnatus/amp/
100 whole dollars, while it cost billions a month.
$100? That should keep them going for a good month or two, right?
Billionaires think that somehow we live on wages like that. They couldn’t imagine having to live on less than $100K per year, but somehow all the rest of us figure out how to do it, so we obviously got this, and don’t need any help from them or their money.
But do they have to pay every troop, or just the traitors?
Waaah I don’t want to pay taxes, but I shall give the ruling government more money than most people ever see in their lives in order to help oppress the poors.
This wasn’t a gift, don’t be delusional. He’s buying something or someone, we just don’t know what.
“Okay, TommyBoy - you don’t mind if I call you TommyBoy do you? Of course you don’t - so TommyBoy, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to pay $130 million to pay our troops enough to buy some ramen soup for a month, and I’m going to give you ANYTHING you want. Hell, I just gave Argentina $40 billion, instead of health care for Americans, just so the SecTreas’ friends wouldn’t go belly up in their irresponsibly risky investment with a country that goes bankrupt every 3.5 years.”
“My name is Timothy.”
“What? No, it’s TommyBoy now. So whaddaya say, TommyBoy, you in?”
“Sure, whatever you say, Your Excellency.”
I don’t know how we could ever find out, there are no clues anywhere.
The US debt just hit $38,000,000,000,000. The 0.001% of the US has stolen $76,000,000,000,000 from the working class over the last 45 years.
We could easily pay off all but 5-8 trillion dollars of our debt, which would all be held by US bond holders so that the rest of the countries can trade with each other, and give every single US citizen a $250,000-$500,000 trust fund that would pay them UBI if we reclaimed the dragon hordes held by 400 people.
Edit: currently, paying off our national debt in full would create a worse depression than the one that Jackson created by paying off the US national debt while he was president. Just to clarify, that particular depression was actually worse than The Great Depression, as it affected almost 60% of the monetary value and supply, while TGD only affected about 30% of the monetary value and about 40% of the monetary supply. Basically Jackson caused the worst, by percentages not monetary value, deepest and longest depression in US history. If we were to pay off all of our debt currently, Jackson and The Great Depression would be footnotes in the history of economic crashes.
TRUTH!
In 2020, The Rand Corp issued a report on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think.
In 1974, they re-wrote the tax code, baking Trickle Down Economics into the system.
Since then, the median salary of $43K in 1975 has increased to only $50K today, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn’t been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
That’s a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. Imagine how different your life would be if the average income was $92K, instead of almost half that?
This study was released in 2020, before the Covid Pandemic. It has only gotten worse, and is accelerating under MAGA. A few are getting richer than ever, while everybody else declines.
Read more about it :
New York Magazine:
Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year
Fast Money:
‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%
Reading these articles radicalized me.
There is no actual real reason to ever pay back that debt, at least as long as the USD remains the world’s reserve currency.
Which, of course, may not be the case in upcoming years.
That’s interesting and all, but there’s quite a bit of middle ground between “make the billionaire pay tax” and “entirely pay off the national debt”.
There’s also that tricky part where by nationalizing all that private industry outside investment tanks and the economy crashes.
Can you explain to me like I’m a five year old how paying off debt ruins the economy? I’ve heard it before but was never able to wrap my head around it
Let’s say China wants to buy some Russian tanks. What do they pay Russia? Russia wants Rubels which were illegal to take out of Russia for several hundred years, and China has Yuan which Russia doesn’t want.
However China has US debt bonds which are equivalent to US dollars. So China hands Russia some US bonds and Russia gives China their tanks.
Now expand that to include every single developed country and you can start to see the issue.
The other issue back in Andrew Jackson’s day was that the US dollar was such a new currency that no one wanted dollars so we couldn’t trade with anyone else, kneecapping our own economy that was based on trade.
Ah so other people are trading our debt around. But if we paid that off couldn’t they just trade with the USD that they received?
As far as I understand, all the money/asset value that goes into funding an organization is owed back to the investors, whether it’s as services bck to taxpayers, or dividends back to stock investors. Any start to an organization involves people/ other organizations seeding it with money
Taking on a loan gives you both money (pretty liquid assets) and debt (liabilities). If you just use that money to pay back the debt, you’re back to no liquidity - no leverage to do the things that cost money to get kickstarted or keep maintaining.
So the idea is that, if an organization uses too much in funds/all the assets to pay back the debt, they may not have enough left over to maintain/grow operations.
Source: I’m taking accounting, am struggling, and hate how evrything seems absolutely bonkers at first. But also, it all makes sense. Because real accounting accounts for goddamn evrything.
Just FYI, accounting for a business or household is a whole different beast than high finance of a nation. You or I going into debt is potentially a bad thing. It’s almost never a bad thing for a country.
Paying off the US debt would mean paying back existing bondholders without issuing new bonds. After all existing bonds have been paid back, there would not be any US bonds in circulation, and the US bond market would be no more.
US bonds are the backbone of the global financial system. If they were to disappear overnight, it would be a financial apocalypse. On a larger timeframe, I suppose the global financial system could readjust, but I can only speculate as to how it would do so and what consequences would follow.
In any case, paying off its debt would be detrimental to the US, because global demand for its bonds results in higher bond prices and thus lower bond yields. In other words, the US pays less interest than it otherwise would because its bonds are so sought after. By paying off its debt, the US would not pay any interest whatsoever, but it would lose a great deal of power abroad.
America shouldnt control the worlds economy. No single country should. America should lose most of its power abroad, so we can start to figure out what this country actually is when we arent stealing from everyone else.
Because rich people don’t actually buy anything- they just get a loan, using their potential income as the collateral. You and I aren’t rich enough for that, and paying down debt prevents that sort of thing from happening as well.
Personal or business accounting isn’t the same as nation accounting. Especially a nation with a sovereign currency such as the US.
That’s the thing that shallow political thinkers, like MAGAs ( and many others) don’t understand. The government’s economy is not like a household economy. The idea that we should run the government like we run our households or we run a company is ludicrous.
First of all, recall the largest corporation you can think of. Then think of five more companies that size. Now think of the size of ALL the companies in America. Well, the government is literally larger than ALL of them COMBINED. It doesn’t operate like a company, it operates like the entity that CONTROLS and REGULATES companies, and companies HATE that.
Running a business and running the government require two different skills sets, since one of them is profit based and the other isn’t. Businessmen get successful, and they now think that they should apply their proven principles of success to the government, and save us, but they always fail, because the government is not a business. It has different objectives and responsibilities other than profit and balanced accounts, and businesspeople have a hard time convincing themselves of that.
That’s why, in my book, any billionaire is automatically disqualified for office. They generally do not understand the job at a fundamental level. When a businessman says that he’s going to clean up the national debt and make our country “solvent” again, I know he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about about.
That isn’t relevant to the question being asked. The question is why paying off the national debt is bad and the answer is that the world economy us heavily invested in US Bonds.
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure that Germany has set aside a similar amount of funds to ensure that all of the military personnel in Rammstein Base are paid, and are sending the US government an invoice for the funds they are giving US military so they don’t have a pay gap. Something like €100,000,000 were set aside so that our troops in Germany do not suffer any pay delays.
Can you explain the setup here more? Germany is paying for americans on military bases on their own land?
There’s my source, but essentially yes. I suspect that Germany will send the US military an invoice when the government shutdown ends.
Yeah but does that buy a flashy dictator parade??? /s
he went to malaysia currently, to do that wierd double jerk off dance.
Imagine paying $130M and enabling the destruction of democracy simply to avoid ever having to pay your fair share of taxes.
You can throw millions at an army, but you fight tooth and nail to avoid paying for any public services those soldiers might otherwise benefit from. Typical conservative bullshit. Humans are basically cattle to them.
Force them to be born. Completely hands off for 18 years. Ignore any and all obligations to help make sure that have access to affordable education or healthcare. Stack the deck against the ones that actually survive to adulthood, so that the military is the only option most people have. Then, once they’re old enough to fight to help keep you rich, (this time on the streets of their own country), suddenly they’re worthy of your investment.
See this is something I don’t get about billionaires.
You already have enough money to literally buy ANYTHING you want. You might not be able to buy slaves but you can pay people to do shit for you, there’s even people out there who’d be down for a whipping for a few thousand dollars… You’re literally king of the world, without moving a pinkie.
And instead of using all that money, all that wealth to get new experiences, learn new things, discover new places, literally do things no-one has ever done before… what do you ask for?
More money.
It’s not even greed anymore at that point, it’s a psychological issue, akin to hoarding, except your hoarding ruins the entire planet.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist, period.
Its a form of psychosis, and is considered a mental illness in most countries. America is literally an example of addiction to money.
They are sick. Literally.
Yes it’s a disease. Diseases should be… elinated? Healed? Gullotined?
Healed. The issue is that the only way to heal these people that are literally greedier than dragons is to forcibly make them donate every single dollar over 10-100 million dollars to a “Sovereign Fund for Humanity’s Poor” fund that will distribute their stolen wealth to the poorest of humanity. Said fund would have to be administered by like minded people, but the best would be two fiduciaries, and three data analysts from OxFam currently.
It’s not even greed anymore at that point, it’s a psychological issue, akin to hoarding, except your hoarding ruins the entire planet.
100% this is it. Hoarding usually boils down to OCD and needing to feel a false sense of control.
You never know when you might need to possess all that money you will never be able to spend (even if you do somehow achieve immortality) just like you don’t know when you might need that collection of old newspapers. But when that day comes, you’re convinced you’ll be ready. Then they’ll see. They’ll finally all see. Unless somebody steals or misplaces your “treasures.”
This is literally from a recent article about Thiel and his Antichrist lectures:
Your fucking identity? Bro, you’ll be worm food like the rest of us. That’s why they call it the great equalizer. (And that is also probably exactly why you fear it more than anything else.)
Excellently stated. Thank you for posting that comment.
Anti-tax advocate gives government $130 million to not pay taxes.
These are the smartest people.
His family’s net worth is estimated at $14B. It’s a down-payment on a tax cut that will save him much more.
This’ll make him billions. It was smart
Your upvote ratio on this comment is deeply concerning, and reinforces the point many others are making.
To an american, there’s always an amount of money they will sell their morals and values out for. Most of these up votes are from americans, or westerners who have fallen for american propaganda.
To pretty much everyone else, they would have enough money already. Why waste time pursuing more money when it will literally change nothing in your life.
I think most people understand I’m not happy about it. I wish it weren’t the case but it’s true, it was smart for him. That’s exactly what they always do.
Rich fucks will screw over the general populace to make an extra dollar.
“Smart.”
More money than anyone could ever need in 500,000 lifetimes already, and this is the “smart” move?
How about just shut the fuck up and enjoy the life of a goddamn king
There are people who are quietly living a great life with wealth, I’ve met some of them. Money only amplifies who a person is, because it gives them a bigger platform to act.
You know that person who can never have enough, and has some big hole inside them they keep trying to fill from the outside? Give them a few billion and here you are.
You could have just named Bezos directly there…
He already has billions more than he could spend in a lifetime. It isn’t smart it’s deranged.
Yep. Billionaires only care about that number (their net worth) going up. It doesn’t help them in any substantive way when the number goes up. But they don’t have anything else to give their lives meaning. Just to have some number go up and to have their number be higher than other people’s numbers.
If they didn’t care about that number, and only cared about their selfish lifestyle, without comparing to others, for example, then with the value of money today, they’d probably stop bothering to hoard money long before they hit a billion dollars. It’s a pathetic excuse for a life to keep accumulating like billionaires do. They don’t care who they hurt as long as that fucking number gets bigger.
its a dick measuring contest amonst billionaires, either through donating to conservatives, or money laundeirng through charity like gates.
Billionaires care about that number because it equates to power and influence. This is a great example of that. The Trump Administration is effectively trying to bribe the military/ICE by keeping them paid during this shutdown while he waits for Democrats to cave when medical insurance premiums skyrocket and SNAP runs out and people start to starve. This leaves the population vulnerable for when Trump inevitably orders a purge of the American people.
The big question in the room is will the military and ICE be willing to take on the entire US population? I already know ICE is willing to shoot their own mothers in the face for a paycheck (or even for free cuz some of them be that sick), but the military has too many people who will simply break rank with Trump cuz they take their oath to the Constitution seriously.
It’s sad that it comes down to the consciences of soldiers as to whether America gets to rebuild Democracy or not, but that’s where we are.
Start making a list of Billionaires, MAGA asshats, and Right Wing Grifters though. Cuz the one thing I can tell you is that Americans are going to want a very different flavor of justice should we reinstitute Democratic Norms in this country, and we shouldn’t forget who to eat first.
100$/ soldier isnt going to mean much its also a ONE TIME THING.
Look how excited everybody got over those fucking $600 “stimulus” checks. Not even one month’s rent for anybody.
I wonder how much in total his taxes would contribute to the military if he just played by the rules and wasn’t an evil twat. Like that’s clearly well beyond what 99% of the US could ever earn in their life, let alone pay into taxes. Further more for every dollar you put into taxes, not all of it goes to the military. Forget still you can be sure this asshat has greased some palms of politicians throughout his life. Between the $130M and the
bribestotes legal campaign donations, what would his effective tax rate have needed to be to get to that number?
Doesn’t most of this money go to the mercenaries? Oh I mean military *
appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act,
If we’d had this calibur of journalism about a century ago they would have said the Hindenburg appeared to be experiencing a potential flight delay, I swear
Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment
I mean, this is the sound of a journalist screaming internally “SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING”, but the time to start screaming externally was a while ago
SLAPP protection.
Are you fucking kidding me‽
The Mellon fortune again? After Cordelia Scaife May used it to help establish our racist immigration system?
This is the same Mellon who paid for the “Venezuela Ahead” billboards in Colorado. Interesting how, at the same time, the Ford is headed to the Caribbean with its strike group to go play drug cop.
Damn those ferrous Republican billionaires!
We should really iron out the details here.
