Billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to pay TSA personnel during the partial government shutdown poses “great legal challenges,” according to the White House.
The world’s richest man recently shared a social media post offering to pay TSA employees amid the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which began in mid-February after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on funding the agency. TSA employees are working without pay which has led to staffing shortages and long security lines at airports nationwide.
Just pay your fucking taxes and shut the fuck up. Alternatively, do a shit load more ket and shut the fuck up permanently.
For those asking what he gets out of it… 1.Anything he can do to snub trump, he will and 2.Anything he can do to normalize privatizing gov, he will
The white house refused because republicans are not paying the tsa by choice and intent. The republicans have multiple times voted down funding for the tsa alone. They want the tsa to be unfunded.
Why? Do they want private security firms put in place?
He can’t pay them wages…
But if he wanted to, he could just give them money.
Set up a website with embedded id.me and any TSA agent can get verified and get $X sent to whatever payment method they enter.
For the guy who claims to have personally built PayPal, should be able to knock it out in an afternoon.
Never forget with billionaires:
They all claim to be economic geniuses about making money, but when it’s time to hand out money, suddenly their hands are tied by the letter or spirit of the law and there’s nothing they can do.
Because it’s a lie both times.
Elon Musty did that online pledge thing not long ago, where you agreed to talk to someone about voting or something… I can’t really recall. But I learned about it because CardsAgainstHumanity set up a Reddit post telling everyone to sign it saying you’ll tell CardsAgainstHumanity to vote. CAH said they’ll sue Musk when it all ends, ensuring he pays. I filled it out like 14 times just to be a troll. 6 months later, kid you not, I had the same number of checks come in the mail. Each check individually accounting for a single signature.
Oh yeah, this Whitehouse is certainly one to stay away from checks notes…
“Great Legal Challenges”
…
But why would Musk want to in the first place? What’s his angle?
He is the kind of narcissist wants to be seen as helping people in very visible ways. He swoops in when something is big in the news in hopes because that makes you pay attention to him. He doesn’t go where help is most needed, but where its most visible.
Like that time there were kids stuck in a cave. International news, so he very loudly told everyone he was using all his resources to solve it. Pay attention to me I’m doing good!!!
And because its narcissism, next step is rage.
I think it’s similar to why Bill Gates gives away his wealth. They know they need to do something benevolent with their money to keep up the facade that it’s best for humanity if they have it.
Of course, Elon Musk is conveniently offering to do it for something that is currently impacting rich people.
I’m thinking his angle is to show that this isn’t really about the money but is actually just an excuse the whitehouse is using to move their private army into airports.
That presumes Musk would oppose it, which doesn’t make much sense.
Overthinking it. He wants media attention. Just like Trump, he wants to hear his name mentioned.
He seems to want to be the one who “saves the day” to get attention pretty often (the cave in Thailand, that dumb ventilator thing at the beginning of COVID). I wouldn’t be surprised if he genuinely thinks funding is the issue and that him giving the TSA money makes him the hero.
That’s dumb as Hell (on Musk’s part, not yours), but seems more plausible than any other reason I can think of.
When you have that kind of money and power, you can do really dumb things, including being a huge narcissistic idiot, and not have any consequences worth losing sleep over.
It’s just that Musk isn’t so stupid that I would discount the possibility that he’s got some more nefarious motive in mind. Like, IDK, maybe he’s trying to buy off the loyalty of Trump’s brownshirts, or he’s got another transportation-related grift up his sleeve and wants control of the airports for some reason, or something like that.
Maybe he feels guilty about how he made so much of his money by stealing from American taxpayers and how he pays so little in taxes, and he just wants to give back a little bit of what he stole. /s
Ask yourself why he would offer to pay them directly instead of routing that same money through established vehicles like taxes.
Because the reason the TSA isn’t getting paid isn’t because there’s no money…
It’s because the money has to appropriated to the TSA first.
Like, that’s just the basics of how our government works…
He should pay his taxes, the vast majority of his wealth should go to taxes, but that wouldn’t change a single thing about this.
I think we can figure out the legal challenges here if we just expand a bit and tax billionaires properly. Boom, balanced budget.
Technically it’s not a lack of funds it’s a lack of appropriations.
So even if we taxed billionaires till there were no more billionaires, TSA can’t get paid till Congress sets money aside to do so.
TSA is suffering because of their sister organization ICE. That said, TSA just needs to be abolished, things worked much better before they existed. Let the airports pay for their own x-ray operators and just skip the mandatory groping, metal detectors worked better anyway.
Has anything really even proven TSA has made flying safer? I’ve seen studies that show weapons and shit still get past them on a regular basis. Meanwhile; Judy gets pulled aside and her luggage rummaged through and her 4 oz. bottle of lotion is confiscated, thank God I feel safe now!
I mean, literally all of DHS was created in 02…
So the logical thing would be to say just to get rid of DHS and revert to pre-9/11 measures.
But don’t let facts get in the way of your opinions.
I’m not quite sure what the attitude is for, I don’t disagree with anything you said. Whether it’s all of DHS or just TSA, either way there’s no point in it existing.
The point is…
People should at least know what the thing they’re advocating to abolish actually is, or they’re running off the same logic as trumpets.
And that train of thinking is dangerous for reasons that should be readily apparent.
Ignorance is dangerous, if people trying to help you upsets you, then you’re gonna stay ignorant and be a danger to the rest of us…
I take your actual danger to everyone else as a bigger issue than you’re feelings about how people should help you.
I don’t understand what you’re so upset about here. I’m well aware of what the DHS and TSA are, I’m older than both and remember how flying used to be before the TSA came in and screwed it all up. What makes you think I don’t know what the TSA is?
If you took a billion dollars from a billionaire, and gave it to everyone, we would all get $3 dollars.
Now do that a thousand times. We would all 3k each. But who would pay for it your ask? Since billionaire have stocks and assets and not cash we would need to sell everything. Who would buy it? China maybe? So we give china tesla, Amazon, all the boats and mansions, and we get 3k.
I don’t think this is a good idea. It’s short term influx of cash, but long term we work for china now.
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