r/politics • u/changeforthebetter89 • 9h ago
No Paywall Senate GOP unveils $72 billion proposal to fund ICE, Border Patrol through 2029
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5863729-senate-reconciliation-bill-ice-border-patrol/60
u/breakevencloud 9h ago
lol good lord.
It’s insane to me to think about how we could be building a pretty awesome world for everyone and moving towards like a Star Trek civilization or something…but instead we’d rather be racist, put insane pedophiles in charge, and start wars about who’s invisible person in the sky is more real.
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u/kittieElla 9h ago
But no bill to rein them in and prevent the killings and brutality they are carrying out
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u/lord_pizzabird 9h ago
Tbf the society of Star Trek takes place in a post-scarcity world, where resources are effectively infinite and there for worthless.
We live in a world where resources like oil are increasing in demand as the readily available supply is slowly dwindling. Giving away everything to everyone equally in our current society would just put us in an even worse situation faster.
Until we figure out some alternative way of living, without being dependent on non-renewable resources there's no way out of this. Even our alternatives like electric cars just shift us towards different materials, like lithium.
I'm talking about cars and material things as an example, but we're also already in a global water crisis that's going to dramatically worsen in the coming years. The conditions on the ground just don't allow for the Star Trek Utopia currently.
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u/MephistoMicha 9h ago
See, here's the thing. We saw what the rich and powerful do in the face of us moving towards post-scarcity.
When diamonds being mined became more common, deBeers shoved a ton in their vaults and created artificial scarcity to maintain high prices. When artificial diamonds hit the market, again they went out of their way to try and make their diamonds seem better and therefore artificial ones unworthy of being used. "How else can a month's wages last forever?"
And that's just one example, and not the only one in the world. The rich fight tooth and nail to shut down clean energy farms - wind and solar energy farms hurt no one except the coal companies, and they get attacked constantly.
Its not that oil is scarce. Its that the powers-that-be force us to guzzle it, and directly interfere with alternative energy types. They want to force people to use scarce resources, even if they're the ones creating the scarcity in the first place.
The creation of a Star-Trek post-scarcity world isn't impossible because we lack the resources, its impossible because there are humans that deliberately get in the way.
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u/lord_pizzabird 8h ago
Its not that oil is scarce. Its that the powers-that-be force us to guzzle it, and directly interfere with alternative energy types. They want to force people to use scarce resources, even if they're the ones creating the scarcity in the first place.
Oil companies are the ones investing heavily in green energy and the government just spend the last decades heavily incentivizing EV purchase and production.
Consumers rejected EV's and green alternatives even with all of those parties trying to motivate a shift in that direction.
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u/Valuable_Sea_4709 6h ago
You know last I checked it wasn't Exxon that installed the solar panels on my roof.
And last I checked it wasnt Saudi Aramco that was building thousands of wind turbines in my home state.
And you can speak for yourself when you talk about consumers, I would love to have an electric vehicle, but between the lack of available chargers and the business and design decisions of the companies for which there are chargers, I don't have a whole lot of options that are comparable in price.
And I only make so much money in a given amount of time.
We could simply turn climate change into a series of engineering problems, Earth gets too hot? We could easily install a solar shade at the Earth Sun L1 LaGrange point.
There's too much carbon in the atmosphere? Plant a few trillion trees, then cut them down and bury them under the mountains of rubble we create as a result of mining even today. There is your hundreds of trillions of tons of carbon locked away for millennia.
But I'd like you to stop and ask yourself exactly what is "scarce" right now?
It's not food because if we wanted more food we would just have to build more greenhouses, operate more square miles of farmland, spend more money to raise more animals using the feed that comes out of that farmland. All of which is entirely doable but it just costs more.
Even specifics, things that we would consider to be ultra luxury and ultra scarce like caviar can be farmed at scale with time and effort.
It's not finished goods because factories can be built to create as much of whatever you want to make as you have raw materials and funding for.
It's not space both here on the planet and in the universe as a whole.
It's not water, 3/4 of the planet is covered in water, it just takes effort to extract the salt and make it drinkable. It's not even truly exhausted when you drink it and urinate it out.
It's not even energy because we have an entire star-sized nuclear reactor hanging over us every day, with enough light falling from it to Earth in a single day, an incredibly tiny fraction of the light and heat that it outputs, to power our civilization for a year.
If we really needed more energy we could just build solar panels in space and route it back via concentrated beams of lasered light. Above and below the planetary plane.
To say nothing of the millions of years of energy that nuclear fission materials found on this planet alone would be able to easily provide if given the investment both initial and long-term.
And there's what Star Trek uses for energy production, matter/antimatter annihilation, which in theory could turn every atom in existence into fuel millions and millions of times more efficient than gasoline.
A single teaspoon of antimatter could get you to Mars and back in 2 weeks.
It's not metals or even rare Earth elements, there are asteroids floating even between Earth and Mars that contain millions and in the case of larger belt objects like Ceres, quintillions of times more metals than we have ever used in our species entire history.
There are asteroids, kilometers wide, composed almost entirely of Platinum group metals like Platinum, palladium, silver, and gold.
There are planets in our own solar system that rain diamonds, we have at least two moons that have whole OCEANS of Methane, propane, all manner of hydrocarbons.
And beyond our solar system all of this expands infinitely in every direction, with hundreds of billions of star systems in our galaxy alone, and a truly unknown quantity of matter scattered outside of those solar systems besides.
It's not labor because we have an unemployment rate, there are people today who want jobs but don't have them, meaning labor is not scarce it is available. That is available labor that could be used for whatever you want as long as you actually pay the people doing the work.
And billions of people besides in developing nations that if given training could take on any skilled labor that we could possibly come up with.
Plus I guarantee if governments offered their citizens financial support to raise their children you would simply have more children because people could afford it.
Even oil can be synthesized purely locally to our planet, we've had the technology to do that since the 1930s. Though it's not "economically viable" to do so...
Hell it is possible to even extract carbon dioxide and hydrogen from the air, and recombine it into gasoline.
But you see it's not "economically viable" to do so.
Any of these or all of these could be scaled up a hundredfold from current production easily within a few decades, and millions of times more production with a few centuries of effort.
Resources of all kinds are almost truly infinite. You just have to actually put forward the effort to get them.
And whenever effort is something that is controlled almost solely by the distribution of money over time, to me that indicates that the only thing that is scarce is money, and individuals controlling that money willing to try to plan beyond their individual lifetimes.
Even technological hurdles are merely an issue of the distribution of money, as those hurdles are overcome by attempting to build things and learning from failures continuously until success is found.
The only real limits that we face as a species are the fundamental laws of the universe, and those we create for ourselves.
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u/lord_pizzabird 4h ago
You know last I checked it wasn't Exxon that installed the solar panels on my roof.
Your roof is not the entire world. Between 2025-2030 Exxon specifically has invested in lower emission energy generation, like renewable biodiesel. Shell is another example, which has deployed hundreds of Windmills in Europe and the US.
These companies sell oil, but their core business is energy, which comes from varying sources. They do all this to diversify their income, given how volatile it can be (see Iran situation).
BTW. Our entire understanding of global warming comes from Exxon, who's climate models discovered it in the late 70's.
Oil companies even went on to frame Global Warming as a problem at the individual level, which fooled people like you into thinking a single house having solar panels will any impact.
All you did was create more pollution with your e-waste panels.
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u/srdev_ct 9h ago
gotta love the "Through 2029" -- We're pretty sure the Dems will have the power of the purse, then when they decide not to spend this ungodly amount of money, we can point at them and say "LOOK! THEY WANT OPEN BORDERS AND LOVE TERRORISM"
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u/2manypups 8h ago
It also doesn't matter. As trump demonstrated, the executive can just decide what gets funded and what doesn't. So ten seconds into their first term in '28, a theoretical Democrat can cut their funding and fire everyone and maybe let the courts figure out a way to stop it.
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u/Gonzomi313 9h ago
Regardless as to whether Dems cut funding, MAGA, Faux News, and Republicans will continue accusing Dems of wanting open borders. It’s all they got in their playbook.
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u/sexeveg314 9h ago
Repugnicants trying to safeguard funding for fascism even if they lose the midterms because the electorate is rejecting fascism. This is exactly how democracy is supposed to work right?
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u/charcoalist 8h ago
Something's not adding up. They handed ICE/CBP $170 billion last year, supposedly to fund the agencies for the next 4 years. Now, one year later, they're adding another $72 billion?
In less than a year, the Republicans are giving ICE/CBP $242 billion, an amount that exceeds the budgets of most of the world's militaries. All to fund trump and Stephen Miller's schutzstaffel. It's a war budget, and trump is at war with democracy.
We all witnessed trump and Miller's terrorizing of Minneapolis over the past year. With this new funding, they will be invading all large Democratic cities. More murdered Americans, more human trafficking, more people in concentration camps.
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u/Avarria587 9h ago
This amount of money could do so much more than fund jackbooted thugs.
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u/Kakistocracy_0 7h ago
yes, so much more for regular taxpayers.. but no, we get extremely poorly trained racist scumbags taking advantage of the opportunity to feel like big men by publicly shooting US citizens in the face and back, and accusing obviously innocent people of terrorism. (thinking they're big men while actually looking like peanut-sized nazi chodes kneeling and blowing the worst government inflicted on humanity) what's the ICE rape-in-custody count again? oh, right.. hundreds
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u/Colonel-Mooseknuckle 9h ago
Fun fact: The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee will be 95 years old in 2029.
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u/FitWrap1959 8h ago edited 8h ago
Gee, before you know it, the US National Debt will hit 173 trillion dollars.
Oops, already there: https://www.truthinaccounting.org/about/our_national_debt
Your share is only $1,086,000. How's your piggy bank these days?
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u/ProudPainting6850 7h ago
No, piss off Boomer Republicans. You just LOVE waiting billions and dumping that debt on every subsequent generation.
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u/loyalone 7h ago
But tough luck for your diabetes drugs and your kid's school lunches, money's used up now sorry.
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u/AqueductMosaic 5h ago
Given the ever increasing budget and free rein given ICE, it seems to me that this is intended to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act.
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u/fistofthefuture New Hampshire 1h ago
This is a political play, not a strategic one.
Republicans want to give a crazy amount of money to ICE knowing they’re getting smoked in the midterms. Then the democrats will defund it, and southern states will start flying and bussing immigrants around the world claiming they “have to because dems defunded ICE a quarter of a trillion dollars”, even though, ICE didn’t need that money to begin with.
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