They’re Cutting as Fast as They Can – the MAGA Reverse Robin Hood

 

At of this writing, the aggregate federal budget deficit is just shy of $37 trillion, and as Congress is about to face a debt ceiling vote (before March 14th when government expenditures hit the current limit), with the 2017 mega-corporate tax expiring soon, Trump has promised his oligarchs not only an extension of that give-away but a whole new slew of tax cuts that are almost entirely going to benefit only the richest 5%. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit is disproportionately rising, year-after-year. If the most reliable calculations of the deficit impact of such tax reductions (add $5 trillion) put our overspending habits in the red zone.

So, if you are wondering about the Trump and DOGE slash and burn approach to federal agencies, employees, programs and expenditures – even if you eliminate “retribution” cuts – the primary focus is to cut, cut, cut, slash. And most of those cuts are focused on the middle and lower reaches of the economic ladder. Like school lunch programs aimed at providing basic nutrition to poorer students.

This DOGE focus – beyond attempting unilaterally to shut down relative smaller government operations like consumer protection, USAID and even the Department of Education, notifying the relevant federal employees to “stop working” in anticipation of shutdowns and layoffs – was to implement their belief that they should implement eliminating “waste and corruption” and agencies seemingly antithetical to both loyalty to Trump and a willingness to accept his executive orders and policies. Why waste time for Congress to act? But corruption allegations against these agencies fizzled – e.g., USAID corruption allegations were never substantiated – and courts were busy undoing these unilateral DOGE purges. DOGE was never empowered to do any of this!

But as the identities of FBI and CIA operatives were about to be communicated via unsecure channels to the Trump administration as demanded, courts intervened to stop this potential destruction of key national secrets. Chaos reigned supreme until the DOGE staff (some barely out of high school and clearly not properly vetted for high-end federal security clearance) figured out that their real target had to be that branch of government (Department of the Treasury) that wrote the checks implementing more than 90% of government expenditures, including for programs unpopular with MAGA conservatives: like Medicare and Social Security.

Despite statements from the new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, that DOGE was merely accessing “read-only” files, evidence to the contrary showed DOGE changing the underlying software and sucking out personal information about millions of Americans, much of that data extraction in clear violation of federal law. It is no wonder that the federal courts are particularly sensitive about the DOGE attempted takeover of the Treasury Department. Let me set the record straight. While Trump found a popular issue to cut government waste and overregulation, restore “free speech” (i.e., allowing rightwing conspiracy theories to be published free of fact-checking), yet censoring cultural creativity MAGA does not like and pretending to restore individual liberties (despite effectively taking away women’s control over their own bodies and crushing LGBTQ+ rights), the Billionaire’s Boys Club cares only about two priorities: tax cuts and deregulation. MONEY.

These oligarchs hate unions (NLRB), the costs of worker safety (OSHA), financial oversight and consumer protections (SEC, CRPB, CPSC, FTC, etc.), food and drug purity (FDA) and pollution/ emission restrictions (EPA). Protecting the general public from “rich-folks’ excesses” only costs the wealthy hard dollars. This corporate cabal/Billionaire’s Boys Club are very comfortable with one of their own, conflicted to the hilt and driven by self-interest, in charge of the process. They do not want to eliminate waste if it puts money in their pockets, and they like redefining the meaning of corruption to their benefit. All they care about is making sure that they do not get blamed for the massive increase in the estimated $5T federal deficit that would occur if their tax cut and deregulation effort were enacted without a massive trimming of federal expenditures first. So, leaving the Department of Defense intact, they want to cut as much of the rest as they can, even if the burden of such reductions slams middle- and lower-income Americans.

On February 6th, William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and former senior economist for President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, presented this little summary about what is at stake in a LA Times OpEd piece: “The tax cuts enacted under the first Trump administration largely expire at the end of 2025. President Trump and his fellow Republicans are eager to extend them, but doing so without concurrent spending cuts would raise deficits by more than $5 trillion through 2035.

“How might policymakers pay for extending the 2017 tax cuts? Various sources suggest that the new administration is considering broad cuts to spending programs, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps. This one-two punch would leave almost all low-income households — as well as many middle- and high-income households — worse off…

“Worse still, the distribution of the extended cuts would be quite regressive. Only 1.7% of the benefits would go to the bottom 20% of households by income, compared with nearly 65% to the top quintile and more than 23% to just the top 1%. The average tax savings for the bottom quintile would be just $130 a year, compared with $70,000 a year for the top 1%. And the super-rich, top 0.1% would enjoy an average annual tax savings of more than $275,000.

“Estimates from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s microsimulation model illustrate these effects. If an extension of the tax cuts were financed by reducing federal assistance equally across households, more than three-quarters of families would be worse off. In the bottom two income quintiles, more than 99% of households would be worse off, facing an average annual tax increase of $1,515. Even in the middle fifth, 76% of households would be worse off… Renewing the 2017 tax cuts and financing them with spending cuts is the right policy only if the ‘problem’ is that the poor are not poor enough and the rich are not rich enough.”

The MAGA GOP will call benefits, available to average citizens in virtually all of the developed countries, “creeping socialism,” “un-American,” “entitlements” and “waste.” They’ll lie, despite an ocean of evidence to the contrary, and tell you that such tax cuts incent job creation. They never do; just look at the 2017 tax cut results that didn’t move the job creation needle at all. And while they rail against the “deep state” and “the swamp,” read their plan (Project 2025). What they clearly want to do is to create their own deep state and swamp to ensure that their changes will be almost impossible to undo.

“Make American Billionaires Wealth Great Again”? At your expense! Cronyism with privileged insider billionaires kowtowing to co-emperors Trump and Musk! Why this explosive rush to decimate the federal budget right now? They’ve got until March 14th to raise the deficit ceiling… and without cuts, what they cannot otherwise explain is a deficit buster! They may shut the government down, hold their breath until they turn (well, not “blue”), yell and scream, but they are solely representatives of the rich. What? We want even wider income inequality?

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless you are in the seven-figures+/year earnings world or have a nine-figure+ net worth, there’s almost nothing in the Trump/Musk agenda that will improve your life… and a lot that will make your future a whole lot less comfortable.