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A reclusive billionaire, anti-tax crusader and major financial backer of Donald Trump has been named as the anonymous private donor who gave $130m to the government to help pay US troops during the federal shutdown that is now in its fourth week, according to the New York Times.

The donation, which equates to about $100 per service member, appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds in advance or in excess of congressional appropriations – and from accepting voluntary services “except in the case of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”.

Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment.

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[-] betanumerus@lemmy.ca 17 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Sounds like these "troops" are not federal at all, but private mercenaries.

[-] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 13 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

His wikipedia page is something else.

Mellon is a Republican, though in the past was a supporter of and donator to liberal causes.[11] He voted for President Lyndon B. Johnson, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter, before becoming a Republican under Ronald Reagan's presidency.[7][11]

He is a supporter of President Donald Trump.[6][11] He is anti-tax and anti-union.[13][2] He has criticized teacher unions and the introduction of women studies, LGBT studies, and African American studies into higher education.[22] He was a listener of Rush Limbaugh before his death.[6]

He faced media attention after comments describing his political views in his 2015 self-published autobiography "panam.captain" came to light.[23][22] Mellon calls social safety net programs "slavery Redux" and refers to those receiving benefits as "slaves of a new master, Uncle Sam."[6] He also stated Black people became "even more belligerent" following the expansion of social programs in the 1960s and 70s.[23][22] Mellon defended his comments in the book and did not apologize.[11]

Also, according to the Daily Mail (I know, but they give his foundation as credit), this is what he currently looks like. He's 80, so there's probably a lot of touching up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13976559/megadonors-election-five-biggest-2024-Donald-Trump.html?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Mellon

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 14 points 23 hours ago

Arrest the billionaire, and confiscate his wealth. That should give the other Sociopathic Oligarchs something to think about when they see Trump is calling.

[-] Chill_Dan@lemmy.world 6 points 19 hours ago

Where does he live?

[-] Gates9@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 day ago

Ancient Rome shit, Patricians buying the loyalty of the legions. Next they’ll send their Cincinnatus out to crush the plebs when they revolt.

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

Cincinnatus was actually cool. Rome's neighbors violated a peace treaty and tried to invade them. They called up Cincinnatus, a retired general, and gave him full dictatorial power. He resolved the situation in two weeks, abdicated all of his powers on day fifteen, and went back to his farm. Then he did it a second time when someone tried to end the republic and make themself a king.

Someone like Crassus would be a more appropriate Roman to reference.

[-] Gates9@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago

Cincinnatus was an elitist prick, but it appears I confused him with his son, who took more direct and brutal actions against the Plebs:

Cincinnatus was opposed to attempts to raise the legal position of plebeians in Roman society. His son Caeso Quinctius, like his father, was an opponent of the commoners and tried to limit their rights. He often tried to depreciate the role of this stratum in the political life of the country, often against the legal order. In 461 BCE his actions, preventing plebeian tribunes from speaking at the Forum, were accused of breaking the Roman order. Caeso was released on bail and then fled to the Etruscans. He was then sentenced to death, and his father had to sell large tracts of land and concentrate on working on his small farm. Through their hard and arduous work, Cincinnatus and his family managed to feed themselves and survive the time of discomfort.

https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/biographies/lucius-quinctius-cincinnatus/amp/

[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 day ago

Trump is almost done when the elite are desperate enough to show their face.

[-] Fedizen@lemmy.world 4 points 22 hours ago
[-] NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social 40 points 1 day ago

Waaah I don't want to pay taxes, but I shall give the ruling government more money than most people ever see in their lives in order to help oppress the poors.

[-] plz1@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago

This wasn't a gift, don't be delusional. He's buying something or someone, we just don't know what.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

"Okay, TommyBoy - you don't mind if I call you TommyBoy do you? Of course you don't - so TommyBoy, here's what we're going to do. You're going to pay $130 million to pay our troops enough to buy some ramen soup for a month, and I'm going to give you ANYTHING you want. Hell, I just gave Argentina $40 billion, instead of health care for Americans, just so the SecTreas' friends wouldn't go belly up in their irresponsibly risky investment with a country that goes bankrupt every 3.5 years."

"My name is Timothy."

"What? No, it's TommyBoy now. So whaddaya say, TommyBoy, you in?"

"Sure, whatever you say, Your Excellency."

[-] NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

I don't know how we could ever find out, there are no clues anywhere.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The US debt just hit $38,000,000,000,000. The 0.001% of the US has stolen $76,000,000,000,000 from the working class over the last 45 years.

We could easily pay off all but 5-8 trillion dollars of our debt, which would all be held by US bond holders so that the rest of the countries can trade with each other, and give every single US citizen a $250,000-$500,000 trust fund that would pay them UBI if we reclaimed the dragon hordes held by 400 people.

Edit: currently, paying off our national debt in full would create a worse depression than the one that Jackson created by paying off the US national debt while he was president. Just to clarify, that particular depression was actually worse than The Great Depression, as it affected almost 60% of the monetary value and supply, while TGD only affected about 30% of the monetary value and about 40% of the monetary supply. Basically Jackson caused the worst, by percentages not monetary value, deepest and longest depression in US history. If we were to pay off all of our debt currently, Jackson and The Great Depression would be footnotes in the history of economic crashes.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

TRUTH!

In 2020, The Rand Corp issued a report on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think.

In 1974, they re-wrote the tax code, baking Trickle Down Economics into the system.

Since then, the median salary of $43K in 1975 has increased to only $50K today, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn't been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.

In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.

That's a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. Imagine how different your life would be if the average income was $92K, instead of almost half that?

This study was released in 2020, before the Covid Pandemic. It has only gotten worse, and is accelerating under MAGA. A few are getting richer than ever, while everybody else declines.

Read more about it :

New York Magazine:

Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year

Fast Money:

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%

Reading these articles radicalized me.

[-] NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago

That's interesting and all, but there's quite a bit of middle ground between "make the billionaire pay tax" and "entirely pay off the national debt".

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[-] prole 4 points 1 day ago

There is no actual real reason to ever pay back that debt, at least as long as the USD remains the world's reserve currency.

Which, of course, may not be the case in upcoming years.

[-] PolarPirate@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

Can you explain to me like I'm a five year old how paying off debt ruins the economy? I've heard it before but was never able to wrap my head around it

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Let's say China wants to buy some Russian tanks. What do they pay Russia? Russia wants Rubels which were illegal to take out of Russia for several hundred years, and China has Yuan which Russia doesn't want.

However China has US debt bonds which are equivalent to US dollars. So China hands Russia some US bonds and Russia gives China their tanks.

Now expand that to include every single developed country and you can start to see the issue.

The other issue back in Andrew Jackson's day was that the US dollar was such a new currency that no one wanted dollars so we couldn't trade with anyone else, kneecapping our own economy that was based on trade.

[-] PolarPirate@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago

Ah so other people are trading our debt around. But if we paid that off couldn't they just trade with the USD that they received?

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

I suppose that would work in modern times, they didn't want dollars historically, so that would remove those dollars from circulation in the past, and possibly again somewhat soon.

[-] djsp@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

Paying off the US debt would mean paying back existing bondholders without issuing new bonds. After all existing bonds have been paid back, there would not be any US bonds in circulation, and the US bond market would be no more.

US bonds are the backbone of the global financial system. If they were to disappear overnight, it would be a financial apocalypse. On a larger timeframe, I suppose the global financial system could readjust, but I can only speculate as to how it would do so and what consequences would follow.

In any case, paying off its debt would be detrimental to the US, because global demand for its bonds results in higher bond prices and thus lower bond yields. In other words, the US pays less interest than it otherwise would because its bonds are so sought after. By paying off its debt, the US would not pay any interest whatsoever, but it would lose a great deal of power abroad.

[-] BlindFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

As far as I understand, all the money/asset value that goes into funding an organization is owed back to the investors, whether it's as services bck to taxpayers, or dividends back to stock investors. Any start to an organization involves people/ other organizations seeding it with money

Taking on a loan gives you both money (pretty liquid assets) and debt (liabilities). If you just use that money to pay back the debt, you're back to no liquidity - no leverage to do the things that cost money to get kickstarted or keep maintaining.

So the idea is that, if an organization uses too much in funds/all the assets to pay back the debt, they may not have enough left over to maintain/grow operations.

Source: I'm taking accounting, am struggling, and hate how evrything seems absolutely bonkers at first. But also, it all makes sense. Because real accounting accounts for goddamn evrything.

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[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day ago

100 whole dollars, while it cost billions a month.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 8 points 23 hours ago

$100? That should keep them going for a good month or two, right?

Billionaires think that somehow we live on wages like that. They couldn't imagine having to live on less than $100K per year, but somehow all the rest of us figure out how to do it, so we obviously got this, and don't need any help from them or their money.

[-] m0darn@lemmy.ca 2 points 22 hours ago

But do they have to pay every troop, or just the traitors?

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 9 hours ago

130mil just get favors from trump.

[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 140 points 1 day ago

Anti-tax advocate gives government $130 million to not pay taxes.

These are the smartest people.

[-] dhork@lemmy.world 96 points 1 day ago

His family's net worth is estimated at $14B. It's a down-payment on a tax cut that will save him much more.

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[-] ProIsh@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

This'll make him billions. It was smart

[-] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 42 points 1 day ago

He already has billions more than he could spend in a lifetime. It isn't smart it's deranged.

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[-] prole 2 points 1 day ago

"Smart."

More money than anyone could ever need in 500,000 lifetimes already, and this is the "smart" move?

How about just shut the fuck up and enjoy the life of a goddamn king

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Imagine paying $130M and enabling the destruction of democracy simply to avoid ever having to pay your fair share of taxes.

You can throw millions at an army, but you fight tooth and nail to avoid paying for any public services those soldiers might otherwise benefit from. Typical conservative bullshit. Humans are basically cattle to them.

Force them to be born. Completely hands off for 18 years. Ignore any and all obligations to help make sure that have access to affordable education or healthcare. Stack the deck against the ones that actually survive to adulthood, so that the military is the only option most people have. Then, once they're old enough to fight to help keep you rich, (this time on the streets of their own country), suddenly they're worthy of your investment.

[-] fonix232@fedia.io 29 points 1 day ago

See this is something I don't get about billionaires.

You already have enough money to literally buy ANYTHING you want. You might not be able to buy slaves but you can pay people to do shit for you, there's even people out there who'd be down for a whipping for a few thousand dollars... You're literally king of the world, without moving a pinkie.

And instead of using all that money, all that wealth to get new experiences, learn new things, discover new places, literally do things no-one has ever done before... what do you ask for?

More money.

It's not even greed anymore at that point, it's a psychological issue, akin to hoarding, except your hoarding ruins the entire planet.

Billionaires shouldn't exist, period.

[-] AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It’s not even greed anymore at that point, it’s a psychological issue, akin to hoarding, except your hoarding ruins the entire planet.

100% this is it. Hoarding usually boils down to OCD and needing to feel a false sense of control.

You never know when you might need to possess all that money you will never be able to spend (even if you do somehow achieve immortality) just like you don't know when you might need that collection of old newspapers. But when that day comes, you're convinced you'll be ready. Then they'll see. They'll finally all see. Unless somebody steals or misplaces your "treasures."

This is literally from a recent article about Thiel and his Antichrist lectures:

The world's richest, in his view, think too little about their identities as billionaires and what will become of their treasures after death.

Your fucking identity? Bro, you'll be worm food like the rest of us. That's why they call it the great equalizer. (And that is also probably exactly why you fear it more than anything else.)

[-] prole 2 points 1 day ago

They are sick. Literally.

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[-] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 76 points 1 day ago

appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act,

If we'd had this calibur of journalism about a century ago they would have said the Hindenburg appeared to be experiencing a potential flight delay, I swear

Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment

I mean, this is the sound of a journalist screaming internally "SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING", but the time to start screaming externally was a while ago

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[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Meanwhile I'm pretty sure that Germany has set aside a similar amount of funds to ensure that all of the military personnel in Rammstein Base are paid, and are sending the US government an invoice for the funds they are giving US military so they don't have a pay gap. Something like €100,000,000 were set aside so that our troops in Germany do not suffer any pay delays.

[-] Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Interesting, I hadn't heard about that elsewhere. It looks like it's not for US military personnel, only the civilian local employees at the base. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2025-10-22/germany-covers-federal-worker-paychecks-19507712.html

State officials said they had urged the German finance ministry to step in and ensure payment of the wages owed to Germans employed at the assorted U.S. military bases within its territory...

The ministry is preparing approximately $50 million in emergency funding to ensure workers are paid on time, German news outlet Tagesschau reported Wednesday.

...A union statement Monday said that the current shutdown, which began Oct. 1, differs from previous ones, when German staffers employed by the U.S. received pay in accordance with German labor law and the NATO Status of Forces Agreement.

“What is new is that the current U.S. administration is apparently unwilling to comply with German laws,” the Ver.di statement said. Rheinland-Pfalz officials said Germany expects to be reimbursed once the U.S. government reopens.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

I guess that's slightly better?

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[-] negativenull@piefed.world 59 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] credo@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago

His wiki bio indicates this guy has given exactly nothing to society. Yet here he is, using his unearned wealth to purchase the military.

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[-] brianary@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 day ago

Are you fucking kidding me‽

The Mellon fortune again? After Cordelia Scaife May used it to help establish our racist immigration system?

https://web.archive.org/web/20190815020220/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html

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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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