Budget busted

I'm on the road at the far end of a skinny internet pipe, so will be quieter and more sporadic than normal for a bit. I want to lay down this marker, though.

The Republican "Big Beautiful Bill" is taking final form. Tax cuts for plutocrats will certainly be extended, even increased. Programs that support ordinary folks will be slashed, Medicaid and SNAP in particular. In fact, the sole remaining issue among House Republicans is how much more brutal those cuts ought to be.

It's a bad time to be a poor kid in America, because the rich so badly need the money that would have fed them.

The result will be a gaping new budget hole – a bigger deficit leading to a more onerous debt. Rating agencies have downgraded America's credit, driving interest rates up and equities, including middle class retirement accounts, down.

Democrats are, of course, up in arms. Chuck Schumer is particularly pained. You may wonder why he voted for the procedural advance that allowed exactly this budget to come to the floor with no need for any Democratic votes. I'm no genius political strategist, but hear me out: maybe Schumer is an ass, unqualified for leadership.

Since Ronald Reagan was in office, top marginal tax rates on high salaries and large estates have dropped precipitously. That's funneled enormous sums from the population at large to the richest Americans, creating enormous disparities in wealth. We're not deeply in debt, with a middle class struggling and poorer folks failing to make ends meet, because too many layabouts are living easy on welfare. We're here because the wealthiest among us don't pay their fair share.

There's a particularly bitter irony to those tax cuts. The wealthy disproportionately own Treasury bills compared to the rest of the population. They buy them with the money they no longer need to pay in taxes. We pay them interest on that money. We're literally paying them not to pay taxes!

We could retire the debt and fund our economy simply by restoring the tax rates and brackets that the Greatest Generation paid in the 1950s and 1960s.

I've said it before: We should tax the rich.

We won't do that, of course. Republicans don't care about the debt and moneyed interests own too much of Congress. But the answer is simple and obvious.