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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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chapotraphouse
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This is actually a wonderful idea and it's never going to happen, hear me out:
Everything on the Blockchain is recorded permanently.
Every single dollar of the US budget would be open to external auditing by anyone.
There's zero chance that agencies like the DoD and the State Department want to have a perfectly transparent ledger of where every red cent goes because it would blow the cover off of a ton of bullshit (although it would probably require years of data analysis and investigative journalism).
The Panama Papers had people sweating. The entire US budget being on the Blockchain would make RFK the top candidate for the John F Kennedy award for excellence in presidential policy and I am here for it.
When Americans talk about “the budget,” they don’t include the CIA/DOD wunderwaffe/Epstein black projects. Those will never be listed no matter what any politician advocates for. When they say “budget” what they really mean is whether cops, companies, the military are funded and whether schools, healthcare, social security, etc. are defunded
No it didn’t lol. They bombed a journalist who was investigating it (or the other leak). Then what? We all moved on.
Fair enough re: the three letter agencies but I still think that having a huge chunk of the pie chart for the budget being left greyed out would be more of a reveal than they'd be comfortable with.
I was using past tense there intentionally and I'd argue that the fact that they had to assassinate people is evidence that they were sweating.
I'd say the same thing about Epstein's flight logs and his trial - that had people sweating (even Prince Andrew who, fortunately, recovered his ability to sweat after many years of intense therapy) then Epstein died under the absolute shadiest of circumstances and then what? The world moved on.
If I wanted to say that the Panama Papers created any significant impact on the world I would have said as much.
Crypto nonsense on Hexbear? Is this a bit?
The federal gov already has a million ways to "lose" money and turn it into dark money for ops. Blockchain makes it even easier, because it's possible to set up networks of anonymous wallets that create a huge amount of transactions and cover up the destination of a transaction. This is something state actors have already used to siphon money using the blockchain (DPRK based as always). If this coked up plan ever went through, the 3 letter boys would obviously reserve the right to do transactions using obfuscation for national security purposes or whatever.
I'd say that my comment is pretty much the antithesis of crypto nonsense because I'm arguing that it's basically the polar opposite of anonymous transactions and that it would be an avenue for government "overreach" or "tyranny", or however they would refer to it.
Don't they usually claim that it's super anonymous and that it's the magic bullet for dealing with government tyranny?
I did give mention that it would take years of work and investigative journalism to uncover stuff so I was referring to the ways that the government would obscure its spending without going right into the weeds on this but if we're going there either:
The government disperses money across an immense array of wallets (?? Idk the term) or accounts and there's a huge churn as all the money gets moved around, each dollar changing hands a thousand times before it lands where it's supposed to go. That's pretty scandalous in itself and it would be a good emperor-has-no-clothes moment for the blockchain and for the public who are advocating for naive reformist ideas like "transparency in government" and "getting lobbying out of the government" because it will reveal power for what it is.
Governments will have a single point where money goes from the budget to the particular department or agency, so everyone can see the government sent the department of education x million. And then the trail ends. This would also reveal how any measures to establish transparency are going to be strangled at birth so same as above.
The government actually allows full transparency and there's no attempts to obscure where the money goes (lol), which would be its own disaster.
Whatever happens it seems like it would be a real poison pill and having the three letter agencies demanding an exclusion would also definitely happen but it would draw a lot of unwanted attention to the dark/semi-dark money and you would get another uncomfortable moment of revealing the true power and demonstrating these reforms as being wholly ineffectual (as mentioned above).
I'm not saying that it's a good thing or that the plan would ever have a chance of working - what I'm saying is that if someone actually tried to implement it (which in itself is very speculative and exceedingly unlikely) then every foreseeable consequence of it would be an absolute win, going by my own political objectives.
Appropriating even a single dollar of the $2T budget would take too long to validate
If there's anything that you should have learned from Snowden and Assange, it's that exposure is not enough. Websites like Open secrets have not made a dent in how dark money is tossed around.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it would achieve any change - hence why the most impact I could see it having would be to make people sweat and possibly get them to take RFK out.
I'm just saying that if it was going to happen (it won't) then however the government chose manage it would be a good outcome.