The New York Times tried to write a sympathy piece for the USAID class. It accidentally wrote an indictment.

# They Can’t Even Flip Burgers

>The villain of the story was supposed to be DOGE

Regular people don’t remember this anymore, copy paste bots only bring it up because they haven’t been updated yet. This was not an actual government department it was a personal marketing campaign and it worked. Haters made this dude a trillionaire, hate and love are just different names for passion.

>The victims were supposed to be the noble public servants

>poison directions >induce vomiting >run to the induce vomiting kit >this comes out

This is my opinion as a bureaucrat.

>one former senior vice president at a USAID-funded nonprofit had been making roughly $272,000 a year, and after the gravy train jumped the tracks, she was interviewing for a $19-an-hour job at a spice store.

My denim ass envisions this spice store as being a covered bazaar full of Moors and Venetians, selling peppers for gold coins a pound that I have too much of and need to get around to throwing away again.

>That is what the coastal press still does not understand. A quarter-million-dollar salary means something in the real country. It means working years of double shifts. It means a house is paid off. It means college tuition. It means a small business surviving another year. It means a mechanic, a nurse, a trucker, a cop, a farmer, or a welder would have to grind for years to see what one USAID-world executive was pulling down annually from a system most Americans cannot even see

It’s all looting. Government inevitably devolves into mafia, and in some places faster than others. Federalism protected large swaths of the country from turning to shit at the same pace as Bay Area California and New York City. You have to toil an arm and a leg away for basic things BECAUSE your government has a virtually infinite number of people entitling themselves to effectively endless money.

>Then we are supposed to cry because the private economy looked at that résumé and said, “the best we can do is 19 bucks an hour.”

They’re not lying, private business isn’t left with much after it’s done paying taxes and bills. Why are things marked up quintuple? A share for you, a share for me, a share for the supply chain, a share for the government, and another share for another government.

There are people who save lives to get paid about that, people who wrestle giant drunks people who crawl through tunnels people who risk being attacked by wildlife people who operate tools that could unmake a human in the blink of an eye. How much is a non-sailing, non-wagoning spice merchant supposed to make? You can grow a shitload of red and black pepper in SoCal, the chilis just fart out to the point of halfway uprooting the plant and making it lean. If I can just figure out to do with a gallon of hot sauce I’m set.