I respectfully disagree. Not with the overarching metaphor of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, which I think few people would disagree with, including Trump himself.
But the arguments here smuggle in some very partisan assumptions. Start with PEPFAR, a program that has inarguably been life-saving, humanitarian and miraculous. But is it fa…
I respectfully disagree. Not with the overarching metaphor of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, which I think few people would disagree with, including Trump himself.
But the arguments here smuggle in some very partisan assumptions. Start with PEPFAR, a program that has inarguably been life-saving, humanitarian and miraculous. But is it fair to argue those 25 million saved lives over more than two decades is reflective of what PEPFAR is doing now, or in the future as the AIDS crisis continues to diminish and drugs move to the marginal cost of generics? I don't know, but has anyone asked with honesty?
Or take the fact that the USAID takes up on 0.2% of the federal budget. Something like that claim is made for every budget cut, and has been for the decades that our deficit has been mushrooming. Some program here is "only 1% of the budget." Some program somewhere else is just a pittance at 0.5% of the budget.
All of those tiny numbers add up, and each one viewed on its own misses the point of the arithmetic of this thing. The obvious political problem has been (with almost every president and congress in my lifetime) that as long as no one can cut a lot of small anythings because someone somewhere might be hurt (which is cruelly true), we won't, can't and never will cut things dramatically, and the budget deficit will never end.
But as Stein's law says, anything that can't go on forever won't. I have no love for Donald Trump, never voted for him, and found him laughable as a public figure as long ago as the 1980s when Spy Magazine made him one of their prime punching bags. He hasn't changed.
And he does -- always -- go too far. Sometimes further than too far. I have very deep concerns about some of his truly destructive plans (the list is long), as any reasonable citizen does.
But when it comes to the federal budget, someone has to act, and any act will mean somebody doesn't get something they are used to. Again that is a cruel truth. But is it possible that every single thing USAID and the Department of Education and so on is truly justifiable in 2025, and produces the results that it has long purported to? Is the top-line rhetoric always, or even mostly in line with what that money is actually accomplishing? Maybe. But who's been asking, again honestly, lately?
Even if so (and it seems a large majority of Americans tends to agree there are serious questions) what dynamic historically, short of a fully declared war, can force us to realign our expectations, maybe, possibly, do more with less, or even a little less with less?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not lovable or even for many of us tolerable as human beings. But fiscal responsibility is one of the best parts of the mandate (such as it is) that Trump earned, and it's one I agree with. And on that I wish them well. I honestly doubt that anything short of this dramatic housecleaning would be able to do the trick. What else is there that can overcome the politics of the legions of micro-advocates, who always claim the grannies and orphans the author here invokes? If we can move the conversation in the direction that allows more political freedom in the future to realign, that is fine with me. I am confident the courts will sort out the constitutional and unconstitutional actions Trump and Musk are taking, and there will be some room to move forward with real administrative reform. And who knows, maybe even Congress will be able to do something to clear up the statutes that created all of these good things that might no longer be as good as promised.
Fiscal responsibility is a fine thing. In most cases fiscal responsibility is achieved by balancing income and outgo. What I see happening under Trump/Musk, and have seen in the Republican playbook since at least Ronald Reagan, is massive reduction in federal income via tax cuts benefiting primarly corporations and the wealthy, coupled with calls for reductions in federal outgo in areas llike health and education, in other words, programs for everyone else. And not just Republicans. I believe it was Obama, after bailing out the banks in 2008-2009, who announced piously that as a result all would have to sacrifice. Trump's first term in office brought yet another budget-busting tax cut for the usual suspects; that tax cut is about to expire, doubtless to be renewed. So how about not renewing the Trump tax cuts and thereby increasing federal income? Issues polls, rather than horserace-based polls, show that across the board American citizens favor increasing taxes on the wealthy. Cancelling the Trump tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy would add to the federal income stream and create the appearance of greater fairness in taxation. It would provide more room to evaluate federal programs on their merits. I realize this isn't going to happen now, but it changes the argument in important ways. Anders Knosper makes a moral claim. Trump's moral claim seems to be that Elon Musk deserves his $300 billion even if that means poor people around the world lack medicine or food.
As Knospe argues, it would be perfectly reasonable to review and evaluate USAID programs as part of a general review of government spending. But such a review should be careful, and consider trade-offs. Surely one should take the national security argument into account, as well as the question of reputational damage. Perhaps the US, in preserving and even increasing USAID's medical and food aid to poverty-stricken regions of the world, would get more bang for its national security buck than by continuing its current level of spending on defense procurement, procurement that, not coincidentally, Elon Musk is not exactly incentivized to evaluate.
You apparently fail to realize that the Trump tax cuts reduced taxes proportionally more for lower-income taxpayers than for higher-income payers, who pay a vastly disproportionate share of their income in taxes anyway. Our system is already very skewed towards high taxation of higher-income people. Lower income people, especially families with dependents, pay little to no income tax now. How can we reduce taxes even further when they effectively pay none now? There aren't enough rich people to make much difference in total income tax receipts, even if the rates were raised to confiscatory levels which the Democrats would never tolerate since their base now is those wealthy people. The largest source of tax revenue for the government is the middle class since that's where the vast majority of the income is.
And raising business taxes also makes no sense since business actually pays no tax, everything it pays in taxes is a loss to its employees (lower wages), investors (lower dividends and stock prices) and to society as a whole (less money to invest in and grow their business). The most efficient tax rate on business economically is 0% but since the majority don't understand this business taxation goes on. But the total take from business is low compared to other tax sources.
Trump actually understands that the social safety net is very important to ordinary people and he has consistently said that he intends to preserve it. But there is a great deal of fraud in all of the entitlement programs and I think everyone who is honest can agree that we need to be much more focused and consistent about not paying fraudulent claims. There is a large amount of money in fraud and grift, and we need to do the audits that the DOGE team is conducting to end the fraud.
Your last point is a good one, and one I'm watching closely. The defense budget does seem to be the item that (a) is most substantial; (b) is the most badly managed (so, so much in it we don't know, and no one can seem to account for); and (c) likely the most abused by contractors.
That is going to be my test case for whether Musk is acting in good faith -- which I assume until proven otherwise; I don't like rooting against the people who have such a tight grip on the nation's purse strings. Most people assume that he is acting in bad faith, and that might be true, but this would be his proving ground. If he is able to do anything close to a substantial audit of the defense budget, as he is presumed to be doing audits of other sectors; and if he can identify items in that military-industrial morass that are suspect or approach downright criminality; and if he is able to achieve cuts (however that would happen...) then my charitable assumption will have saved me a lot of speculative worry.
But if I am wrong, then I will concede that his obvious self-interest, not to mention his business conflicts did prevail over any of his assertions that he is working in the public's interest. I very much want to believe he is not the crass, predatory, unscrupulous creep he so often appears to be. But only he will be able to provide the evidence one way or the other. And I don't think he'll be able to hide from the consequences.
Social Security is the biggest, and growing, item in federal spending. Medicare/Medicaid is next, followed by _service on the national debt_. Defense spending comes after that.
Economics is not a zero -sum game. Both sides of a transaction can win. An entrepreneur cannot possibly capture all the value they create.
Profit is confirmation from external reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world. It is positively immoral to run a losing business. You destroy wealth in doing so.
I respectfully disagree. Not with the overarching metaphor of Donald Trump as a wrecking ball, which I think few people would disagree with, including Trump himself.
But the arguments here smuggle in some very partisan assumptions. Start with PEPFAR, a program that has inarguably been life-saving, humanitarian and miraculous. But is it fair to argue those 25 million saved lives over more than two decades is reflective of what PEPFAR is doing now, or in the future as the AIDS crisis continues to diminish and drugs move to the marginal cost of generics? I don't know, but has anyone asked with honesty?
Or take the fact that the USAID takes up on 0.2% of the federal budget. Something like that claim is made for every budget cut, and has been for the decades that our deficit has been mushrooming. Some program here is "only 1% of the budget." Some program somewhere else is just a pittance at 0.5% of the budget.
All of those tiny numbers add up, and each one viewed on its own misses the point of the arithmetic of this thing. The obvious political problem has been (with almost every president and congress in my lifetime) that as long as no one can cut a lot of small anythings because someone somewhere might be hurt (which is cruelly true), we won't, can't and never will cut things dramatically, and the budget deficit will never end.
But as Stein's law says, anything that can't go on forever won't. I have no love for Donald Trump, never voted for him, and found him laughable as a public figure as long ago as the 1980s when Spy Magazine made him one of their prime punching bags. He hasn't changed.
And he does -- always -- go too far. Sometimes further than too far. I have very deep concerns about some of his truly destructive plans (the list is long), as any reasonable citizen does.
But when it comes to the federal budget, someone has to act, and any act will mean somebody doesn't get something they are used to. Again that is a cruel truth. But is it possible that every single thing USAID and the Department of Education and so on is truly justifiable in 2025, and produces the results that it has long purported to? Is the top-line rhetoric always, or even mostly in line with what that money is actually accomplishing? Maybe. But who's been asking, again honestly, lately?
Even if so (and it seems a large majority of Americans tends to agree there are serious questions) what dynamic historically, short of a fully declared war, can force us to realign our expectations, maybe, possibly, do more with less, or even a little less with less?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not lovable or even for many of us tolerable as human beings. But fiscal responsibility is one of the best parts of the mandate (such as it is) that Trump earned, and it's one I agree with. And on that I wish them well. I honestly doubt that anything short of this dramatic housecleaning would be able to do the trick. What else is there that can overcome the politics of the legions of micro-advocates, who always claim the grannies and orphans the author here invokes? If we can move the conversation in the direction that allows more political freedom in the future to realign, that is fine with me. I am confident the courts will sort out the constitutional and unconstitutional actions Trump and Musk are taking, and there will be some room to move forward with real administrative reform. And who knows, maybe even Congress will be able to do something to clear up the statutes that created all of these good things that might no longer be as good as promised.
Fiscal responsibility is a fine thing. In most cases fiscal responsibility is achieved by balancing income and outgo. What I see happening under Trump/Musk, and have seen in the Republican playbook since at least Ronald Reagan, is massive reduction in federal income via tax cuts benefiting primarly corporations and the wealthy, coupled with calls for reductions in federal outgo in areas llike health and education, in other words, programs for everyone else. And not just Republicans. I believe it was Obama, after bailing out the banks in 2008-2009, who announced piously that as a result all would have to sacrifice. Trump's first term in office brought yet another budget-busting tax cut for the usual suspects; that tax cut is about to expire, doubtless to be renewed. So how about not renewing the Trump tax cuts and thereby increasing federal income? Issues polls, rather than horserace-based polls, show that across the board American citizens favor increasing taxes on the wealthy. Cancelling the Trump tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy would add to the federal income stream and create the appearance of greater fairness in taxation. It would provide more room to evaluate federal programs on their merits. I realize this isn't going to happen now, but it changes the argument in important ways. Anders Knosper makes a moral claim. Trump's moral claim seems to be that Elon Musk deserves his $300 billion even if that means poor people around the world lack medicine or food.
As Knospe argues, it would be perfectly reasonable to review and evaluate USAID programs as part of a general review of government spending. But such a review should be careful, and consider trade-offs. Surely one should take the national security argument into account, as well as the question of reputational damage. Perhaps the US, in preserving and even increasing USAID's medical and food aid to poverty-stricken regions of the world, would get more bang for its national security buck than by continuing its current level of spending on defense procurement, procurement that, not coincidentally, Elon Musk is not exactly incentivized to evaluate.
You apparently fail to realize that the Trump tax cuts reduced taxes proportionally more for lower-income taxpayers than for higher-income payers, who pay a vastly disproportionate share of their income in taxes anyway. Our system is already very skewed towards high taxation of higher-income people. Lower income people, especially families with dependents, pay little to no income tax now. How can we reduce taxes even further when they effectively pay none now? There aren't enough rich people to make much difference in total income tax receipts, even if the rates were raised to confiscatory levels which the Democrats would never tolerate since their base now is those wealthy people. The largest source of tax revenue for the government is the middle class since that's where the vast majority of the income is.
And raising business taxes also makes no sense since business actually pays no tax, everything it pays in taxes is a loss to its employees (lower wages), investors (lower dividends and stock prices) and to society as a whole (less money to invest in and grow their business). The most efficient tax rate on business economically is 0% but since the majority don't understand this business taxation goes on. But the total take from business is low compared to other tax sources.
Trump actually understands that the social safety net is very important to ordinary people and he has consistently said that he intends to preserve it. But there is a great deal of fraud in all of the entitlement programs and I think everyone who is honest can agree that we need to be much more focused and consistent about not paying fraudulent claims. There is a large amount of money in fraud and grift, and we need to do the audits that the DOGE team is conducting to end the fraud.
Your last point is a good one, and one I'm watching closely. The defense budget does seem to be the item that (a) is most substantial; (b) is the most badly managed (so, so much in it we don't know, and no one can seem to account for); and (c) likely the most abused by contractors.
That is going to be my test case for whether Musk is acting in good faith -- which I assume until proven otherwise; I don't like rooting against the people who have such a tight grip on the nation's purse strings. Most people assume that he is acting in bad faith, and that might be true, but this would be his proving ground. If he is able to do anything close to a substantial audit of the defense budget, as he is presumed to be doing audits of other sectors; and if he can identify items in that military-industrial morass that are suspect or approach downright criminality; and if he is able to achieve cuts (however that would happen...) then my charitable assumption will have saved me a lot of speculative worry.
But if I am wrong, then I will concede that his obvious self-interest, not to mention his business conflicts did prevail over any of his assertions that he is working in the public's interest. I very much want to believe he is not the crass, predatory, unscrupulous creep he so often appears to be. But only he will be able to provide the evidence one way or the other. And I don't think he'll be able to hide from the consequences.
Social Security is the biggest, and growing, item in federal spending. Medicare/Medicaid is next, followed by _service on the national debt_. Defense spending comes after that.
Economics is not a zero -sum game. Both sides of a transaction can win. An entrepreneur cannot possibly capture all the value they create.
Profit is confirmation from external reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world. It is positively immoral to run a losing business. You destroy wealth in doing so.
Agree. Take Trump seriously, but don't take him literally.
Don’t forget the puppies killed.
Where is the emoji for laughing out loud, but very, very grimly...?