Doesn't it matter if we can't ever trust our government again?

It matters to me, and pretty much everyone I am willing to associate with. But think of all those cis het white men who are so happy to return to the 1950s, and not have to consider all those uppity “others”. Which includes you and me, @Jeruba.

Don’t mean to sound dismissive – because things are certainly getting worse. But it might be helpful to question what you mean by “again”. We’ve repeatedly asked red MAGA what they refer to when they claim to want to make “America” great again. We want them to point out a specific time when “America” was great. You might want to ask yourself specifically when it would have been appropriate to trust the government.

Nowhere in her question does she say the word “great”, @hat. We know that you’ve been very dismissive of all of this, while some of us recognize that there were flaws and problems, but things still seemed somewhat doable. Yeah, yeah, you’ve made it clear that you never agreed, but have the courtesy to recognize that the chicken is not the same as the shit with ground glass.

Fair enough. My bad if I wasn’t clear. I honestly meant to ask what work “again” is doing in the question. When could you trust the government. Because that is a very important question.

Then ask it.

Don’t mean to sound dismissive – because things are certainly getting worse. But it might be helpful to question what you mean by “again”. We’ve repeatedly asked red MAGA what they refer to when they claim to want to make “America” great again. We want them to point out a specific time when “America” was great. You might want to ask yourself specifically when it would have been appropriate to trust the government. When – specifically – could we trust the government?

@hat You have a point. There have been times when things were going well, but I’ve always known that the govt is keeping information from us, sometimes info that we should know. But I suspect that’s the way it is in every country.

I pretty much stopped trusting the government about 50 years ago.

“Doesn’t it matter if we can’t ever trust our government again?”
– Of course, from a perspective of rational truth.

“It feels like we’re on the edge of something terrible. A self-inflicted tragedy.”
We’re well-past the tragedy point.

But at least it appears to me that it’s not entirely self-inflicted, having seen more than enough evidence that the election was electronically falsified. So at least there’s that.

I never fully trust the government. Every census I think twice about putting what countries my family and my husband’s family are from. Every time I am at the hospital I don’t list my religion. I want to get a DNA test done, but I don’t because I am afraid to have the information out there, although I realize the government could easily get a DNA sample from me if they really wanted it. Even though I write quite a bit on social media, I am a little paranoid about it. I think people like me practice stifling or setting aside our paranoia about these things.

I think what is happening is the trust we are supposed to be able to have in the United States government is breaking down and possibly heading towards the things I always feared, so it worries me, but I would not say it surprises me.

I was taught in school and at home: if it can happen in Germany it can happen anywhere.

As far as the specific article you linked and the data sharing, if there was a promise of there being a wall between IRS and ICE, which it seems there was, then it is horrible that this might be breached. Undocumented people in the country also are told when census time comes that they should be counted and not to worry that their information will not be used to find them and deport them, and that the census info has some “walls” also. To break this guarantee that has been given previously by our government is really bad. Probably, undocumented people are reluctant anyway, no matter what the promise was, to fill out any paperwork for any type of benefits or reporting, so only a portion are counted, but those who have complied to now have it turn on them is scary stuff.

Maybe the courts will step in and stop it from happening. We currently have a bombardment on protections for citizens and anyone within the boundary of our country.

The question reminds me of the old poem, First They Came by Niemöller.

Many of us aren’t surprised at all. For example, minorities and the poor knew exactly what this country and the world was all about long ago.

But the prevailing attitude has always been “stop acting like a victim and don’t complain, or you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist.”

So we played along and ignored everything, but we already knew the country and the people in it were trash.

The people that cut the ponytails off native americans and killed anyone who didn’t assimilate and do a nice dance and smile for the europeans.

So we played along and ignored everything…

Similar to my, I think people like me practice stifling or setting aside our paranoia about these things.

It is the minority experience and passed down through generations to be hyper-vigilant and a little anxious, and at the same time put on a show that it’s all ok and try not to act in a way that others will think we are crazy.

This was foreseen 250 years ago and institutions were set up so we might have trust in government if not the president. Whether these institutions can pass the currrent test remains to be seen. Strange days, I hope the old wisdom prevails.

I lost trust in our government ages ago. Much of what I was taught in school turns out to be lies. I can’t trust mainstream media, or much else of what I’m told is trustworthy.

Fun times.

People have lived under autocratic rulers before and many survived. I always remind myself there are worse things happening all over the world, tens of thousands of people starve to death every single day. I do what I can to help, such as donations of money to Red Cross and ACLU, and I wonder how I got so lucky.

Of course it matters, but we have allowed them to have way too much power.

One more post. I’m one of the Democratic jellies who is always trying to not believe that what is reported isn’t as bad as the news report says. Have you noticed that? I often accuse the media of spinning and editing to make it sound worse or at minimum I question the details of the story trying to find something that makes the actions valid and not extreme. Habit. Talking myself out of the fear.

@YARNLADY I told my mom that plenty of people live in countries with bad governments; the whole country doesn’t necessarily collapse. I think it depends what the bad is.

People like me worry we will be threatened or killed if it gets bad. Some citizens are worried about other groups being threatened, and everyone losing freedom to speak freely, and losing some safety, and maybe losing money. I’d guess the Native Americans have a similar bit of paranoia that I described, similar generational trauma to Jews, Blacks, Asians, but I really have never talked to anyone who strongly identifies as native about it.

Do Native Americans worry about funding to the reservations being changed? Tax exempt status, tuition help being taken away, the amount of legal independence and authority being reduced. What about racism and direct threats to safety?

I am sure that illegals don’t pay their taxes so the info will help get non tax payers and illegals.

^ Stop with the “illegals” shit.

And undocumented immigrants pay taxes – way more then their fair share.

Also, for obvious reasons – I am unable to discuss what I do for a living. However, this directly affects what I do, and makes my actions far more challenging. Things were already pretty bad, and we were doing our best to help. But this certainly makes things worse. More people are about to suffer.

@KRD – You are deeply ignorant of this issue.

And in case you’re not following the math – this will dramatically decrease money collected by the IRS. And that’s the point. Reduce revenue, which will “require” drastic cuts in services that actually benefit people. This is just more money redistribution from the the majority of workers to the wealthy.

Government as we have known it won’t exist anymore as it will lie hidden behind an all pervasive propaganda campaign. There will be no news, not even fake news as it will be propaganda. The concept of trust will disappear as you can’t put your trust in an illusion. Nevertheless you will be trusting as you will be told to be and there is nothing else to hold on to.
That I believe is where we might be headed.

There is no doubt many undocumented workers pay into federal taxes, and they will never reep the benefit of social security. When I was a teenager I knew people who used fake SA numbers to work, and so their employer was pulling taxes out of their paychecks. This was 40 years ago.

If you read articles that state just how much they pay in, they almost never say what percentage of undocumented don’t pay in at all. The authors usually use a dollar amount to state their case. This is incomplete information like so many stats that are given about so many things. Maybe you can google and find more complete info, but I would have to do the math to try to figure it out based on how many undocumented adults are estimated to be in the country, the average they pay in income taxes, guess the average paid by people do pay in full what they would owe if they were documented, it’s a little bit of a guessing game.

Obviously, they all pay sales tax whenever they buy something here if the state has a sales tax.

It’s ridiculous that we don’t make working papers easier to get and give workers legal status.

@hat What is wrong calling illegals illegals? They entered the country illegally. Also how do you know that undocumented illegals pay their taxes? Also a lot of services will increase taxes. Also cutting taxes will help economy.

Typo: Fake SS numbers.