Trump: "I don't want poor people in my cabinet"

[Badger]

Be honest people: how many poor people do you know who'd even be qualified to run a federal department? Using a sensible definition of poor, anyway...

But we're not. We're using a Trump definition.

[Torie]

I would hire someone economically successful to be a economic secretary if I were POTUS. I don't see the problem.

If you were POTUS, you'd have declared bankruptcy five times.

*sigh*

The point is that Republicans are excusing in Trump behavior they would condemn in a worker. Bankruptcy, I've been taught, is a sign of a moral failing in the working class. It takes on spiritual overtones when conservatives speak of it - in the context of laborers.

In my view, you excuse it because Trump didn't acquire his wealth in an individualistic fashion. He didn't work for it, as I and others of my class have. He's old money pretending to be new money.

Who on earth taught you the bolded part? It is one of the most out to lunch things that I have read in some time. What is a moral failing is credit card companies preying on such folks to run up credit card debt at a 25% interest rate. In fact, in my book, that is just plain evil.

[mencken]

I would hire someone economically successful to be a economic secretary if I were POTUS. I don't see the problem.

Because "have wealthy and well-connected parents, go to Ivy League schools, then work on Wall Street" isn't readily transferable to an $18 trillion dollar economy of 325 million people.

It is amazing that one can realize this and not reject socialism and central planning on a more general basis.

[Badger]

I would hire someone economically successful to be a economic secretary if I were POTUS. I don't see the problem.

Because "have wealthy and well-connected parents, go to Ivy League schools, then work on Wall Street" isn't readily transferable to an $18 trillion dollar economy of 325 million people.

It is amazing that one can realize this and not reject socialism and central planning on a more general basis.

What's even more amazing if some people still conflate opposing further tax cuts for the top 1% with socialism, let alone Central planning.

[mencken]

I would hire someone economically successful to be a economic secretary if I were POTUS. I don't see the problem.

Because "have wealthy and well-connected parents, go to Ivy League schools, then work on Wall Street" isn't readily transferable to an $18 trillion dollar economy of 325 million people.

It is amazing that one can realize this and not reject socialism and central planning on a more general basis.

What's even more amazing if some people still conflate opposing further tax cuts for the top 1% with socialism, let alone Central planning.

I apologize for reaching to conclusions and assuming that someone supporting a candidate who was a self-declared socialist was at least sympathetic to the ideology.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The odd thing about Trumps cabinet is almost without fail, every single member made their fortune in entirely parasitic manners. I mean it's most obvious with DeVos, considering how her family made their fortune, but asset strippers and rentiers are the predominant species within cabinet (in addition to career politicians and military figures) rather than, say, inventors or innovators.

You could say the same of most of the power elite in the United States. This is true even among the the Silicon Valley crowd, even though it is sometimes noted as the chief exception to the trend toward "complacency," which run the gamut from obvious and outright fraud (e.g. Theranos) to products like Facebook that succeed mostly because natural monopolies allow them to cannibalize attention, ad revenue, page views and so forth.

Oh I think there's no "even" about it, the Silicon Valley elite are completely parasitic in their use of IP and monopolistic behaviours to enhance their own fortunes.

Thing is Obama's cabinet did contain people like Chu, Moniz, Gina McCarthy, Lisa Jackson etc. You can disagree with their actions in office, but they were people notable for the ideas they held, not the amount of money they had accumulated. The only Devos/Mnuchinesque figure I can think of in Obama's cabinet is Pritzker.