a deal with China. Partly because it's such a big complicated thing and partly because it's China. But apparently we're having some kind of conversation with them. It's better than nothing.

According to Axios, Trump is looking to bail out American farmers if they get too damaged by the tariffs and trade war because you don't want to lose your farmers. So I don't know if there'll be other industries that Trump will try to save, but that's going to get really expensive really quickly, isn't it? If Trump does some kind of a major spending thing to save certain industries so they can keep the trade war going, it's going to be really expensive at the same time that they're looking at the budget. I don't know how that's going to work.

Trump has, according to Zero Hedge, he's floating this idea of eliminating income taxes for people who make under $200,000 a year and instead using the bonanza of tariff income to make up the difference. I don't think that's going to happen. To me that sounds like total bullshit. So if I could be honest, I don't think there's the slightest chance that people who earn under $200,000 are going to have no income tax and we're going to make up the difference with tariff income. Now it might be good persuasion to make people feel good and maybe it helps him politically, but no, that's not going to happen and there's no world in which that happens. I don't think so. You can mock me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any chance that happens.

So according to The Hill, the House of Representatives is now working on the budget bill, which is not as easy as you think because they've got all these different committees. So there'll be five House committees and they'll all go look at every part of the bill and it's the big funding bill that has all Trump's priorities in it. And they've been asked to remove $1.5 trillion in spending. Do you think the House is going to find $1.5 trillion to remove from the budget? Again, there's no chance of that at all. My best guess is that they'll remove nothing and that the budget will be bigger than it was last time. I don't think there's any chance of that. How ridiculous.

And I saw that David Sacks was talking on the All-In pod about how he was hoping that the DOGE savings and especially where DOGE found there was some corruption, that when the House gets down to the nuts and bolts, they will protect all of the DOGE savings and they'll protect whatever DOGE did to get rid of the corruption, you know, that they'll get rid of entities and that sort of thing. To which I say, we got a problem here. Congress has a system for adding corruption. Adding corruption. And that system is they negotiate with each other. And one senator will say, well, you know, if you give me this funding for my state, I'll vote for your funding for this other thing. So that's a mechanism or a system for adding corruption or at least adding spending that you didn't want, which I would call corruption.

What is our system for getting rid of corruption? There isn't one. If we had a system for getting rid of corruption, it would already be used. There's no such thing as a system for getting rid of corruption. So when David Sacks says he's worried that the DOGE savings and the corruption recommendations won't be taken seriously, that's the only thing that could happen because there is no system for removing corruption once it gets to the House. It's only an add-corruption system. It's not a minus-corruption system.

So if you had to guess what's going to happen with the budget reconciliation, it's going to look like every other year. They won't be able to cut anything because it'll always be somebody who's got some blackmail or they're doing some horse trading or something. They won't be able to cut anything. Now when I say anything, you know, maybe there'll be some little around-the-edges minor thing, but basically the budget's going to be the same amount it always was. They're going to run out of time. Thomas Massie is going to do social media posts saying he's not going to vote for it because they had plenty of time to cut it but they didn't cut anything important. And we're just going to kick the can down the road until we become bankrupt. That's the plan. Because there's no other plan. There's no other system in place that could ever cut $1.5 trillion from the budget. We don't have anything that could do that. The House can't do that and it's in the House and DOGE is not in the House. So even if DOGE could do it, it's not their domain now. It's in the House and I guess the Senate was only trying to get rid of $4 billion. So you have to get both the House and the Senate to agree on the budget. The House is trying to get rid of $1.5 trillion and the Senate where they're even more corrupt is like well maybe $4 billion which would be basically a rounding. You know you could get rid of four billion just by sneezing on it.

So if I had to guess, we will have less than a $5 billion cut and we will be running as fast as we can into a debt crisis and nothing useful will happen in the House. Nothing. There will be no decrease in corruption, no decrease in ridiculous spending, no nothing because we have no system that could bring us to a better place. If you look at it as a system as opposed to a goal, the goal is to save $1.5 trillion. But there's no system to do that. None.

Now if I'm wrong, somebody tell me what exactly would be the system that would do that. And why didn't that system ever do it before? It's because it doesn't exist. We don't have a system that could possibly get us to a better place on the budget. So that's what to expect.

Gee, I wonder if there will be any diversions that happen so that we're not thinking about how bad Congress is and the budget. Oh yeah. So the House Subcommittee is going to hold a hearing on drone sightings after reports about those New Jersey skies. Now when was the last time you worried about the drones over New Jersey? I don't remember worrying about it for a long time because Trump said, oh, don't worry. It's all approved. We don't know exactly the details, but there's nothing weird going on there. It's not any foreign entity. It's not a UFO. But suddenly the House Subcommittee needs to do a deep dive into those drones. And once again, it's going to be stories about possible UFOs and UAPs and it's going to divert us again. So exactly at the right time they need a diversion. Well, there it is. I don't know if it's intentional, but it seems weirdly coincidental that the diversion happens at the same time they need it.

Here's another thing that's making me laugh. The Democrats consider themselves the resistance. Have you noticed that? So a lot of people who are Democrats, especially the political ones, consider themselves part of quote the resistance. Have we ever had that before? In the history of US politics, has anybody ever called themselves the resistance? Because that framing is dangerous because