Dr. Tom Woods has weighed in on the recently exposed scandal that our government was paying media outlets through US AID. Of course, this was just one of the many fraudulent schemes that have been revealed to the public as the result of the work of Elon Musk and his group of geniuses.
Dr. Woods:
I can’t even keep track of the various stories about government waste nowadays.
Of course, you know ol’ Woods: to me it’s all waste, but you get the point.
Every time I see one of them, and the excuse factory comes along with its defenses of the waste, I’m reminded of the Politico story that kicked a lot of this off.
It was discovered that Politico was receiving $8 million in federal funding. The excuse factory churned into overdrive: most of this spending takes the form of subscriptions to their Politico Pro, dummy!
Yeah, but you see, that’s not really a good answer. One of my old friends just explained why:
I found almost a dozen “fact check” articles purporting to debunk Elon Musk’s “false claim” that Politico receives $8m per year in federal funding. These articles are mostly copy-and-paste jobs of each other, dutifully repeating the argument that the $8m comes from subscriptions to Politico Pro rather than grants or conventional subsidies and thus that Politico should be regarded as an independent and unbiased news agency.
I searched in vain, however, for answers to basic questions such as:
- * What percentage of Politico’s total revenue does the $8m represent?
- * What percentage of Politico Pro subscribers are federal government employees?
- * What is the Politico Pro subscription price, and how does it compare to the “pro” versions of similar, competing services?
- * What do you actually get for your Pro subscription (the articles refer to unspecified “special” features)?
Not one of the fact checking pieces seems to grasp the conceptual point that, if these fees are inflated or oversold, then the payments do represent a subsidy. And even if the fees represent legitimate contractor payments, then that makes Politico a government contractor — again, it would be useful to know the magnitudes — and thus no more “independent” than Lockheed Martin or Boeing.
We’re likely to find ever more examples of this kind of thing now that somebody is actually bothering to look, and you can expect the excuse factory to do its best to deflect.
What’s a little demoralizing is how many people, for idiotic partisan reasons, seem to be against uncovering these truths. “Long live the ruling class! May their sinecures be permanent!
The long term net effect of these kind of revelations to awaken more of the public to the vast corruption that exists in Washington. I would expect that we will see “voluntary” retirements of House members and Senators increase.