What exactly has the current administration gotten us? Not lower prices (as was promised). For now, not apparently safer skies.
Source: Bloomberg via ClaimsJournal.
So, my view. If you’re dealing with an aging air traffic control infrastructure (equipment, wiring, software), don’t take that as a message to cut staff with experience in dealing with … aging infrastructure).
but look at all the cash doge saved with its cuts. must have been worth it. these are smart people making all these cut decisions. I am sure they understood some of these hidden costs, and felt the moves were worth it. it’s not like we have an administration full of morons making decisions here in the usa. right?
Don’t you think, given who was actually making the decisions – late-adolescence white males – that cuts were as much a competition as a managemwnt exercise? “I cut 300 people!” “Oh, yeah? Well I cut a whole department!”
Haven’t we been short of the number of personal in the towers since that Reagan decision to be the early version of Elon Musk?
James Harold McClure: For sure, it’s been a long time (I’m sure there’s a GAO report on this). However, now we have extreme staffing shortages on top of failing (not just old) air traffic infrastructure, as DOGE intermittently tries to fire the most experienced staffers (probably including lots of people who know how to nurse along the legacy software — I am inferring if as Sec. Duffy says they’re using floppy disks).
Social Security runs Cobol. That is reportedly one reason the DOGE children wanted to update the SS system – they can’t make it cough up personal data.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107001
GAO report from September. Trump was warned but as you said he made a tough situation much worse.
Did Sec. Duffy really say it was Biden’s fault that we did not fix this when COVID kept the airports at low traffic (that would be in 2020)?
Yes indeed – the DOGE duchess took a bad problem and made it worse.
Off topic – climate risk and bank oversight:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/global-banking-regulators-agree-to-prioritise-climate-risk-work/ar-AA1EDRWu
The Basel Committee has decided to step back from requiring climate risk to be taken into account in capital ratios. Now, the goal is to assess the effect of major climate events. In other words, do nothing because to do anything would be to acknowledge that climate change is a problem.
As the article notes, but which all of you probably already knew, the U.S. has prevented action on climate change risk.
in the mean time, home insurance near the southern coastline has nearly doubled recently. but that has nothing to do with natural disasters and climate change. it is just a random increase in natural disasters causing all the damage…but climate change has not appeared in the economy, because as everybody knows, it does not exist. its just weather, as some fool here used to say.
Problem is that you can change the perception of reality and even hide data documenting reality – but neither of those ignorance enhancing actions will CHANGE reality. It simply makes it a lot more likely that you will be hurt by reality and possibly without much, if any, warning.
Climate change IS real, it IS mainly caused by human activities, and it WILL become increasingly costly and interruptive to humans and their organization into orderly and functional societies. Observable facts support that statement even though most people don’t have the knowledge or intellectual capacity to understand that.
The exact levels and cost of those interruptions are hard to predict. So far, the expert predictions consensus has been “below” the reality that later showed up. This has in part been the result of political pressure from the powerful short-term interests that could lose out if we reduce the human activities that are causing climate change.
Climate change reality is beginning to force itself upon both those who saw it coming and those who denied it.
Dimwit Duffy says: “During Covid, when people weren’t flying, that was a perfect time to fix these problems.”
Uh, the year when people weren’t flying was 2020, one-third of normal. I wonder who was President in 2020?
don’t bother us with inconvenient facts, when the goal is to blame biden for all of the bad that has happened.
its like blaming biden for the delay in air force one that trump ordered. trump changed the air force one orders multiple times, and demanded a configuration that was deemed expensive and delay prone. but now it is somebody else’s fault that the plane became expensive and delayed? by skipping an administration term, he is now having to deal with the cleanup of messes most democratic presidents must do after a republican term. trump is simply dealing with the mess he created in the first trump term.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-newark-debacle
Krugman brings a larger overview and a whole lot of facts.