President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he will select former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A member of Trump’s transition team previously said that Kennedy would not be offered the position.
“I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS),” Trump stated on both X and Truth Social. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.”
Trump added that his Department of Health and Human Services would play an active role in addressing “harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country,” noting that Kennedy would focus on a return to “Gold Standard Scientific Research” and address the chronic disease epidemic.
Notably, Trump’s announcement contradicts previous statements made by a member of his transition team a week before the election. In an interview on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick told Collins that Kennedy would not be offered a role in Health and Human Services, saying “that’s not what [Kennedy] wants to do” and that his interests aligned more with accessing data on vaccine safety.
Since last week’s election, Kennedy and his former campaign team have also been working with Trump to identify potential future government appointees. Initially, Kennedy’s team created a crowdsourcing web forum allowing people to nominate individuals they believed were best suited for various roles in the administration. As of this week, the site is no longer accepting nominations.
Jim, you’re free to read or not read whatever you want, of course. I answered your points, and I didn’t feel like scrolling up and down a bunch of times to do it in one comment, so it came out as multiple comments. The length wasn’t changed by that. Your mischaracterization of my replies which you didn’t read doesn’t change that your points have been addressed for the time being.
“I haven’t read your comments in months.”
Given that you have repeatedly responded – or rather attempted and failed to respond – to me in recent weeks, that’s very obviously a lie.
Take for example answering my question about what Libertarians achieved in Big Water and Leadville: https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2024/11/libertarian-party-names-candidate-support-committee-members-to-implement-new-run-locally-initiative/
Or picking up on my statement that “etymological fallacy” is not a fallacy, then trying (and failing) to imply that somehow means I am or agree with “left anarchists” (oxymoron): https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2024/11/green-party-of-colorado-demands-clarification-from-gov-jared-polis-on-rfk-jr-support/
And that’s only in the last couple days. Before that, also in the last couple of months, you responded to me pointing out that Dugin is not a fascist with a pathetic attempt to argue that Dugin identifies himself as a fascist; and tried (and failed) to make a case for national socialism and Italian socialism not being socialism and therefore not far-left extremism.
But if you want to pretend you don’t read my comments, be my guest. It just gives me a free pass to say pretty much anything, without you being able to react without proving yourself a liar yet again. But at least put in some effort to try and make it appear as if you haven’t read them, otherwise you prove yourself a liar anyway.
Meanwhile, Ace gave his thoughts about your brazen “illegals help keep social security solvent” lie: https://ace.mu.nu/archives/412513.php
“Newsom looked at the huge federal loan intended to help citizens of California stay alive while in forced unemployment due to state-mandated lockdowns, and said, say, I’ll just embezzle this money for my illegal alien voter friends!”
‘Instead of using the Fed loan for what it was for (unemployment benefits during COVID), Newsom instead misappropriated it to cover fully cover illegal immigrant health care. And now that they have to pay it back, California is bilking business owners with massive increases in payroll taxes’
“BTW, it’s hard to google this connection, because the Google algorithm hides every article talking about the expenses caused by illegal immigration, and instead spams dozens of propaganda articles posted by the state of California telling you how much money illegal aliens pay in taxes. Try it yourself. Google has decided you’re not allowed to know about the costs of illegal immigration, only the sweet, sweet benefits.”
Which begs the question, are your dishonest ilk so retarded because you just mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda you see on Google, or is Google so retarded because it is created by your dishonest ilk? What came first, the chicken or the egg? You don’t happen to work for Google, by any chance, do you?
“I haven’t read your comments in months.”
That’s obviously a lie as you have replied – or rather attempted and failed to do so – to me repeatedly over recent weeks. But if you wish to give me a free pass to say practically anything about you, while you are unable to respond without admitting you lied, then that’s fine by me.
Meanwhile Ace shared his thoughts about your laughable lie that illegals keep social security solvent: https://ace.mu.nu/archives/412513.php
“Newsom looked at the huge federal loan intended to help citizens of California stay alive while in forced unemployment due to state-mandated lockdowns, and said, say, I’ll just embezzle this money for my illegal alien voter friends!”
‘Instead of using the Fed loan for what it was for (unemployment benefits during COVID), Newsom instead misappropriated it to cover fully cover illegal immigrant health care. And now that they have to pay it back, California is bilking business owners with massive increases in payroll taxes’
“BTW, it’s hard to google this connection, because the Google algorithm hides every article talking about the expenses caused by illegal immigration, and instead spams dozens of propaganda articles posted by the state of California telling you how much money illegal aliens pay in taxes. Try it yourself. Google has decided you’re not allowed to know about the costs of illegal immigration, only the sweet, sweet benefits. We’re all living on easy street now, cuz!”
So the question occurs, are your dishonest ilk so retarded because you mindlessly absorb and regurgitate google, or is google so worthless because your foul ilk ensures it is so dishonest?
Actually – I’m not reading all of that. What I did read was a disjointed, irrational, and unsubstantiated regurgitation of MAGA propaganda. Your understanding of both economics and American history is poor. Example: Welfare did exist back in those days, it just did not exist to any extent at the federal level. Property taxes in the US go as far back as the 1600s and in some colonies those were used to pay for the education of indigent children. Almshouses have existed for a thousand years, generally funded through churches, but in the US they began to be taxpayer financed (again the property tax) in the 1820s.
The early US did not thrive because of tariffs, it thrived despite tariffs and because the total tax burden was very low. The total tax burden as a percent of GDP – federal, state, and local combined – was generally single digits prior to 1919. Adam Smith was right about tariffs.
Nuna – I haven’t read your comments in months. I just happened to have caught my name at the top in that one.
@Jim
“You actually believe that pet-eating nonsense?”
Do you, in spite of all evidence, still not?
“The one person that was found eating a pet was an American born woman.”
This isn’t true at all. Have you even seen the videos from several years ago, before all the political utilization, of Haitians in Ohio killing and barbecuing cats? Not to mention hundreds of eye-witness accounts and confessions.
“Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime because that invites attention from law enforcement”
Neither of that is true: illegal immigrant DO commit more crime (not even counting the crime of being here illegally), and law enforcement is far less interested in prosecuting crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants.
“crime in general is far below the levels it was between 1970 and 1990”
That clearly is not true. They’ve just stopped registering most incidents of crime, just like they’ve stopped counting most unemployed as such. It’s just a game they play with falsifying the statistics to make it appear as if things aren’t getting exponentially worse.
“Someone might be in college, retired, in prison, have won an inheritance or the lottery, or have any number of reasons for not being employed or looking for work.”
College and prison are unemployed on steroid. Inheritence and lottery are taxed so extremely that nobody can afford to live off of just that.
“Fine, but there are now fewer people in the US which means consumption is lower, which means the total amount necessary for production to satisfy US demand has declined. […] which will cause unemployment and a recession.”
The exact opposite will happen. Over-production increases competition, which leads to higher quality and/or lower prices. As an added bonus our export position grows stronger.
After an initial period of stabilization, a new equilibrium will be reached between production and consumption. After that, employment will not be a problem, because those who cannot produce at high quality and/or low price, will find other ways of generating value. Hopefully we will even see a massive return of self-sufficient sustenance farmers. And those relatively few who cannot generate value, can be taken care of by good, old-fashioned neighborly voluntary charity.
This isn’t untrod territory, it is a return to the natural order of things. The US has more than its geographic share of arable land; and agriculture has advanced, so that even without resorting to genetic modification, carcinogenic pesticides, battery cages, etc. higher yields are possible. If it wasn’t for the total western societal, cultural, moral degeneration, we could have been poised for an agrarian golden age.
“Trump wants to escalate his tariff war, which will invite retaliatory tariffs, which will lower demand for US goods from other countries.”
Yeah, using tariffs as sanctions is bad. But using tariffs for protectionism is not, that is peak libertarianism. And you know what is much worse than any tariff? Taxes. If we reduced government to its constitutional minimum, we could abolish all taxes and fund it completely through tariffs; and we could still reduce most tariffs from what they are currently. We really don’t need a lot of government expenditure.
“The same thing happened with gay marriage and is happening with marijuana – the laws changed as soon as enough old people died off.”
That isn’t what happened though, and we all know it. There has been a concerted effort for generations to increasingly erode the moral and ethical fabric of western civilization. The current state of degeneracy didn’t just come about naturally by successive generations having increasingly lax morals, each was carefully indoctrinated and brainwashed every step of the way. Socialism won the cold war and it was evident long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“the US was deliberately founded as an open-borders country”
Not really, no. In practice, borders were much more locally and overall less strictly enforced, but that was incidental not deliberate, and it also wasn’t such a problem because there was no mass migration yet. The US-Canadian border was already being enforced before the outbreak of the War of 1812. And the US-Mexican border saw enforcement increase with mutual agreement from the Mexican War of Independence onward, ramping up from the Texas Revolution through the Mexican-American War and being firmly in place at the time of the American Civil War.
“who thought non-white (which meant everyone who wasn’t from the UK, Germany, or Ireland), was genetically predisposed to stupidity and crime”
So not only are you ignoring all the abolitionists and civil rights proponents by pretending they were for open-borders, but you are also ignoring the discrimination faced by Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy.
“That is the ‘inheritance’ you are attempting to defend – economic illiterates and explicit racists.”
No, not all of us are Democrats or their descendants. You are being so insultingly dishonest at every turn, is there any point in trying to hold a conversation with you? You prefer to regurgitate the most blatantly false socialist lies, to the detriment of all observation and reason.
—
@Actually
“With a law and order crackdown on crime”
Law and order are easily corrupted, just look at the state of law enforcement in the US over the past century and more. Much better to return to frontier justice and vigilantism, feuds and vendettas.
No cash bail catch and release policies are another reason why crimes are often not reported, as is decriminalization (actual or de facto) of retail theft in some places. And, as previously mentioned, illegals are not just the perpetrators of crime but often the victims of crime by other illegals, which they are less likely to report given that they are illegals.
National crime statistics also often are incomplete, excluding some of the highest crime areas.
“The odd thing about your comment is that the US was deliberately founded as an open-borders country, and remained so for its first century.”
The welfare state didn’t exist and immigration took months by ship. The immigrants were overwhelmingly European and Christian. For most of that time the US had a frontier. Many things have changed since then.
If you’re a proponent of 19th century policies, wouldn’t that include tariffs, which were the primary means of federal government financing in those days?
“You say you want to pass on the country you inherited, but young people do not want the country to go in the same direction. ”
They do, increasingly – support for Trump rose most among young people and racial minorities from 2020 to 2024.
“Suppose an employed illegal is deported and is replaced by a current retiree. Fine, but there are now fewer people in the US which means consumption is lower, which means the total amount necessary for production to satisfy US demand has declined. That means fewer people will need to be employed”
…which would solve the supposed problem of not having an adequate labor force, if true. On the other hand, tariffs could cause a greater preference for domestically produced goods, and or consumption/demand might rise due to more money in American hands.
“Someone might be in college, retired, in prison, have won an inheritance or the lottery, or have any number of reasons for not being employed or looking for work. ”
Or they may be welfare leeches and or criminals. Yes, there are many of both that are illegals, but there are also plenty that aren’t. With a law and order crackdown on crime, mass deportation of illegals, and curtailed welfare socialism redistribution, these able bodied adults will have the incentives they need to take the jobs formerly held by illegals, quite likely without any wage hikes.
Regardless of your opinion about whether illegals are eating pets:
How about swindling, scamming, theft, robbery, murder, rape, assault, child buggery? How do those impact the moronic GDP measure?
The problem with crime statistics is that many crimes are never reported, particularly by illegals and or when police are defunded. When crimes are reported, the culprits are often not identified, especially when hiding among populations of illegals not prone to cooperate with law enforcement. But even if crime was lower among illegals, which is far from actually being the case, that’s still crimes which people here legally don’t need to endure. Tell the families of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and many, many others that your skewed statistics show that illegals commit fewer crimes – how would it help them even if it were true?
Actually – You actually believe that pet-eating nonsense? Wow. You really did fall hard for the Republican propaganda. The one person that was found eating a pet was an American born woman. Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime because that invites attention from law enforcement, which would get them shipped home. It is another Republican propaganda piece that immigrants commit more crime.
Crime did spike during Covid because criminals had an excuse to wear masks, but crime in general is far below the levels it was between 1970 and 1990. See: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xGsw8/full.png
Note while looking at that chart that illegal immigration is higher now than it was in the 1970 – 1990 era. Illegal immigration went up, the rate of crime went down.
Why would unemployment count people who aren’t looking for work? Someone might be in college, retired, in prison, have won an inheritance or the lottery, or have any number of reasons for not being employed or looking for work. That doesn’t change with the number of job openings.
Suppose an employed illegal is deported and is replaced by a current retiree. Fine, but there are now fewer people in the US which means consumption is lower, which means the total amount necessary for production to satisfy US demand has declined. That means fewer people will need to be employed, unless that surplus production can be exported to whichever country the illegal immigrant was shipped. Except that isn’t going to happen because Trump wants to escalate his tariff war, which will invite retaliatory tariffs, which will lower demand for US goods from other countries. Net, fewer people will need to be employed in the US. Wages will rise initially to attract workers, that will cause prices to rise, but the demand will fall because there are fewer people to consume and some people will not get wage increases, which will cause unemployment and a recession.
You say you want to pass on the country you inherited, but young people do not want the country to go in the same direction. You aren’t helping young people, you are frustrating them. The same thing happened with gay marriage and is happening with marijuana – the laws changed as soon as enough old people died off. It is an inevitability.
The odd thing about your comment is that the US was deliberately founded as an open-borders country, and remained so for its first century. The serious anti-immigrant laws came about in the early 1900s as an alliance between progressives (who thought immigrants were taking “their” jobs and driving down wages) and nationalists, who thought non-white (which meant everyone who wasn’t from the UK, Germany, or Ireland), was genetically predisposed to stupidity and crime, and could never fit in culturally. That is the “inheritance” you are attempting to defend – economic illiterates and explicit racists.
Actually beat me to it, but I’ll still post my analogous reply to Jim.
“Criminality doesn’t change GDP. Whether, for example, prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and gambling are legal or illegal, the output is counted toward GDP.”
It certainly changes estimates of the GDP, and thus our measures for tracking it, as many (most?) calculations do not include so-called “black money”.
“Transfer payments are not included in GDP because nothing is produced.”
“Transfer payments” – i.e. stealing people’s wealth and redistributing it – have a profound effect on the GDP, because money is taken from people who generated its value and could have invested it in generating more value, and then given to those who generate no value and spend it to prop up either their criminal endeavors, leftist organizations and corporations or foreign economies.
“If the transfer payments upset you, the correct answer is to stop the transfer payments, not to deport anyone.”
Obviously stealing and redistributing of other people’s property should be abolished entirely, but that doesn’t mean that those in the country illegally must not also be deported and forfeit any possibility of ever entering the country again legally.
“Not even Trump’s own staff believes that no illegals are employed.”
Trump and his staff are far-left statists. What is your point?
“When those people are removed, GDP will decline, and so will American’s living standards because there aren’t enough unemployed to replace that lost supply of labor.”
There is not evidence to support that, so let’s put it to the test by deporting all the illegals and seeing what happens. Because the facts of the matter are that the overwhelming majority of illegals are not employed, much less legally so; and there are more than enough unemployed Americans to replace the minority that are, if they wanted to.
Many Americans – especially those protected and privileged by our nanny state, e.g. leftist/progressive non-whites and women, single mothers, LGBTQ+, etc. – currently do not want to do what they consider “menial” jobs because, like the overwhelming majority of illegals, they are getting a nice juicy welfare checks, social security, food stamps, etc. for either sitting on their lazy, fat asses all day or else going out and committing crimes.
“In an attempt to attract people into the labor force, employers will be forced to offer higher wages, which will immediately be passed on to the consumer, leaving the average American in a worse financial position.”
Not at all. Abolish all “transfer payments” and see how fast unemployed Americans will suddenly be willing to do those jobs without wage hike. Voluntary charity will take care of those who genuinely cannot produce any value.
“Social Security is taxed, but they are never able to collect because collecting requires additional documentation. They pay into the system, but very rarely are able draw from it.”
Unfortunately, in practice that does not hold true. Thanks to crooked leftist bureaucrats, it has become very easy for illegals to parasitically withdraw tax funds. The only notable exception are the small number of genuine refugees – e.g. Christians from the NATO occupied areas of Syria and Libya, or from Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, who are only here illegally because the US, while welcoming communists, insincere muslims and other terrorist persecutors, does not wish to help the persecuted to escape death – who are too civilized for western society and are therefore carefully prevented from having any access to the benefits meant only for the “economic immigrants”, i.e. welfare parasites.
“Which makes it kind of ironic that senior citizens, having become terrified of people from south of the border by Trump’s propaganda, were some of the people most likely to vote for Trump to deport them.”
Terrified of illegal aliens by the reality that they are being preyed upon by criminals who were funded using their own money stolen by the government, and that increasingly many of those criminals are illegal aliens.
And while Gen X and Gen Z tended more towards Trump, Boomers and Gen Y tended more towards Harris. So no, senior citizens were not more likely to vote for Trump.
Passing on the country we inherited from our grandparents and their grandparents to our grandchildren and their grandchildren is another big reason for older Americans to support mass deportation.
How about swindling, scamming, theft, robbery, murder, rape, assault, child buggery, and eating pets? How do those impact the moronic GDP measure?
Unemployment only measures the number of people registered with the government as looking for work. There are far more able bodied adults who are not in the labor force at all or underemployed etc. Then there are all the people employed in jobs that only exist due to government red tape. We have plenty of people to take the jobs of illegals.
Even if wages rise, that will put more money in the hands of consumers who will spend it here rather than sending it as remittances to other countries to be spent there.
Older people are right to want illegals deported since older people are often the targets of crime. But that’s true of people of all ages, and support for Trump went up a lot among young people since 2020, due in no small part to the tidal wave of Biden Harris migrant crime.
Criminality doesn’t change GDP. Whether, for example, prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and gambling are legal or illegal, the output is counted toward GDP. Transfer payments are not included in GDP because nothing is produced.
If the transfer payments upset you, the correct answer is to stop the transfer payments, not to deport anyone.
Not even Trump’s own staff believes that no illegals are employed. It is known, for certain, that large numbers of them are employed in produce sorting and food production, in construction, as housekeepers, as janitors, as cooks, and as hair stylists, to name just a few industries. When those people are removed, GDP will decline, and so will American’s living standards because there aren’t enough unemployed to replace that lost supply of labor. In an attempt to attract people into the labor force, employers will be forced to offer higher wages, which will immediately be passed on to the consumer, leaving the average American in a worse financial position.
The other thing to consider is that many of those employed illegals were able to get their jobs by submitting a fake Social Security number. Social Security is taxed, but they are never able to collect because collecting requires additional documentation. They pay into the system, but very rarely are able draw from it. The result is that employed illegals are helping to keep Social Security solvent. Which makes it kind of ironic that senior citizens, having become terrified of people from south of the border by Trump’s propaganda, were some of the people most likely to vote for Trump to deport them. Unless they plan on leaving this plane of existence in the next couple of years, they are voting against their own interest without even realizing it.
What’s intuitively obvious about a faulty economic measure going down if criminals and welfare leeches are removed? Is that like saying that gross cellular product goes down if intestinal parasites, brain worms, malignant cancers etc get removed?
“If millions of people are removed then the number of hours worked is going to go down, which means GDP is going to go down.”
This is predicated on those being deported working in the first place, rather than being paid tax funds not to do so.
—
As for genetic fallacy – while it is technically a fallacy, it is one that can and often does hold merit, much like appeal to tradition (as opposed to “etymological fallacy” which is not a fallacy at all, but an excuse by people trying to hijack language – cf. the much maligned innocent English words “queer”, “gay”, “fag”, “faggot”, “niggard”, “blaggard” [actually a contraction of “blackheart”, not of “blackguard” as racist frauds on the left pretend nowadays]).
If nothing else, it ought to be intuitively obvious. GDP is the number of hours worked times the productivity per hour. If millions of people are removed then the number of hours worked is going to go down, which means GDP is going to go down.
Does genetic fallacy apply to predictions based on the study of chicken entrails?
Garbage in, garbage out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
Bloomberg economics is to economics as the onion news (or worse yet msnbc) is to news.
“A study by Bloomberg Economics found that Trump’s plan for mass deportations and large-scale tariffs would reduce the gross domestic product by 8.9%. To put that in perspective, during the financial crisis, GDP fell by 4% from peak to trough. ”
https://stevenrattner.com/2024/10/steve-rattners-morning-joe-charts-the-economists-vote/
“He’s shaking things up. I like that.” – Rick
Trump is far more sane than Harris and Oliver.
He’s shaking things up. I like that.
Kennedy is a sellout. He was never running for president, and he was never a true independent.
The level of delusion about the influence of the chair of the libertarian party is amazing. Trump and Kennedy have known each other for years. Certainly longer than the chair of the LP has been alive.
Crazy people are like magnets. They attract each other: Trump, Kennedy, Gaetz…
Angela picked this guy and they let Tom Woods pick the AG. Win-win for libertarians.
“As I noted elsewhere prior to this article being published, he picked Kennedy. I believe someone told me I was incorrect.”
Then you believe incorrectly. W R O N G L Y even. What I in fact said, was that it is doubtful that Kennedy is “the one promised libertarian on Trump’s cabinet”. More doubtful than that Massie will be.
“That person, who constantly comments under a fake name”
Are you jealous? Nobody is forcing you to use your real name – if you are even doing so – and I for one would strongly recommend against it.
“And whether this counts as the ‘libertarian appointment’ does not really matter.”
Begging your pardon, but it matters a great deal. To both libertarians and Libertarians, first and foremost. But also to anyone comparing Trump’s pre-election words to his post-election deeds.
Going back on his promise to put a libertarian in his cabinet, could have some serious consequences for any “MAGA” candidates running in 2028, and perhaps the 2026 midterms as well – though that will also depends on how much worse the Democrats manage to get in the meantime.
“Trump has already forgotten about the LP.”
You don’t know that. You can’t know that. Unless you are involved in negotiating Trump’s cabinet picks, we can only wait and see.
Remember also that libertarians and the LP are two different – and for all but the most naive or hardcore, mutually exclusive – things.
“His people have already been reported in the news saying they are going to keep the clown car away from him.”
“His people” say a lot of things. E.g. Howard Lutnick’s statement referenced in the article above. Besides, McArdle has aptly used the term “clown car” to refer to the anti-libertarian statists and LINOs with TDS in the LP. There’s no reason to assume they are referring to libertarians, or even to the LP, more broadly than she did.
As I noted elsewhere prior to this article being published, he picked Kennedy. I believe someone told me I was incorrect. That person, who constantly comments under a fake name, was wrong. W R O N G
My comment about him picking Kennedy was made after the news reports. It was not a guess or prediction.
And whether this counts as the “libertarian appointment“ does not really matter. Trump has already forgotten about the LP. His people have already been reported in the news saying they are going to keep the clown car away from him.
Not surprising, and probably the best position for him – other than perhaps as Middle Eastern-policy advisor – certainly better than Head of the EPA.
“As of this week, the site is no longer accepting nominations.”
Pity. What could they ever hope to accomplish without my illimitable wisdom guiding them? U+1F92A (That’s only 99% sarcasm.)