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A Letter To Elon Musk - by Francis Fukuyama - Persuasion

This is not the case: there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million. This is despite the fact that the government now disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then. In fact, you can argue that the government is understaffed, due to relentless pressure over the decades to keep headcounts down. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, oversees the spending of $1.4 trillion, or one fifth of the entire federal budget, with a staff of only 6,400 full-time employees. These workers have to check for Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of health providers, and make sure that payments to tens of millions of Americans are made in a timely manner. If you cut this staff, the amount of fraud and waste in the Medicare system is likely to go up, not down. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which looks after the millions of refugees entering the country, has a staff of 150. By increasing the staff at the Internal Revenue Service, the government is expected to take in an additional $561 billion over the next decade.

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? | The New Republic

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro. Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

Trump Wins the First Influencer Election

But while both campaigns worked overtime to court influencers, their strategies were divergent. The Harris campaign prioritized shortform clips, investing in quick videos and viral remixes on TikTok and Instagram. The Trump campaign went deep and long, investing heavily in longform YouTube podcasts and building partnerships with livestreamers. Ultimately, the latter proved wildly more successful.  The Trump campaign traveled to meet with various content creators, while Harris sought to make influencers meet on her own turf. When she and Walz filmed an episode of creator Kareem Rahma’s hit series Subway Takes, for instance, which is meant to be shot on a New York City subway, the Harris campaign insisted on filming it on a bus in Pittsburgh. When Harris was invited on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the campaign responded by requesting that Rogan leave his studio in Austin, Texas and travel to them. They also wanted to cut the format to an hourlong interview, rather than his notoriously long discussions that usually last three to four hours. The interview did not happen. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.