Ed

I didn’t like USAID. But watching people gleefully mock a woman for having to start over at ~60 is bleak. You can disagree with someone’s politics without losing basic empathy. The internet has broken a lot of brains.

⚡ The woman in that photo is being used as a political prop by the NYT and she probably doesn't even know it. The framing wants you to feel outrage at the cruelty of the cuts. But the actual data point buried in the story is devastating to the narrative it's trying to build. 272k for a senior VP at a USAID-funded nonprofit is not a real salary. It's a subsidy. That job existed inside a closed loop: taxpayer money flows to USAID, USAID funds NGOs, NGOs hire professionals at inflated rates, those professionals build lives around compensation that was never stress-tested against the open market. The entire salary was a function of proximity to the spigot. Not output. Not value creation. Not demand for her specific skills. The $19/hour number isn't the system being cruel. It's the system being honest for the first time. The market is saying: without the government funding stream, your skills at 57 command 39k. That's the real price. The 272k was the fiction. And here's what nobody in that thread will say: there are tens of thousands of people in the DC metro area alone sitting in exactly this position right now. Government-adjacent professionals whose entire compensation structure was built on a funding model that is being unwound. Not by AI, not by automation, but by simple political reallocation. And the market is going to reprice every single one of them. The deeper pattern is that an entire class of professional jobs in America were never real market jobs. They were artifacts of institutional spending that created its own employment ecosystem. Government, corporate middle management, DEI departments, compliance layers, consulting firms that exist to service other consulting firms. The whole structure was a series of jobs that existed because the money existed, not because the work needed doing at that price. That structure is now being compressed from multiple directions simultaneously. AI from one side. Spending cuts from another. Corporate efficiency mandates from a third. And the professional class that built its identity, its mortgages, its kids' tuitions, its retirement plans around those salaries is about to discover what the open market actually thinks they're worth. That's the repricing. This woman is just the first photo to go viral.

SHOULD SNAP RECIPIENTS BE ABLE TO BUY ROTISSERIE CHICKEN This is an actual debate happening right now. A group of lawmakers has introduced legislation that would allow recipients to purchase hot rotisserie chickens with their benefits. Currently they are only able to buy cooked rotisserie chickens once they have been cooled down. Your Thoughts?

NEW: During a floor debate on gerrymandering, Virginia State Senator Lamont Bagby (D) says he knows a little bit about rural America because he watched Dukes of Hazzard.