It Could Happen Here - The Genocide Budget (And How to Stop It)

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Mia and Gare discuss the contents of the recently passed budget bill and how its worst provisions can be defeated. Sources: Trans Income Project: https://www.transincomeproject.org/donate https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/07/planned-parenthood-trump-lawsuit https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/one-big-beautiful-bill-medicaid-work-requirements-affordable-care-act-immigrants/#:~:text=The%20bill%20would%20require%20states%20that%20have,individual)%20and%20138%25%20of%20that%20amount%20($21%2C597).&text=The%20Senate%20bill%20would%20allow%20states%20to,who%20seek%20emergency%20room%20care%20for%20nonemergencies. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/05/16/school-choice-expansion-in-budget-bill-puts-federal-stamp-on-gop-priority/ https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/trumps-budget-bill-attack-public-schools-working-families-and-immigrants https://www.americanprogress.org/article/10-egregious-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-one-big-beautiful-bill-act/ https://time.com/7299514/bill-will-devastate-public-schools https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/the-senate-passed-a-federal-voucher-program-whats-in-it/2025/07 https://www.au.org/the-latest/articles/not-beautiful-trumps-budget-forces-a-national-voucher-plan-on-america/ https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/nx-s1-5397175/trump-federal-voucher-private-school https://itep.org/trump-megabill-expensive-private-school-vouchers/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/how-trump-s-big-spending-bill-will-overhaul-repayment-for-millions-of-student-loan-borrowers/ar-AA1HXbVa?cvid=7271B17CDE424D63B5C23D6A3D1E71B7&ocid=msnHomepage https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-signs-big-tax-cut-spending-bill-law-july-fourth-ceremony-rcna216753 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/05/trump-budget-bill-states-border-security/84463777007/ https://newrepublic.com/post/197412/donald-trump-big-beautiful-budget-bill-devastating-poll https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/allocating-cbos-estimates-of-federal-medicaid-spending-reductions-across-the-states-senate-reconciliation-bill/ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-might-federal-medicaid-cuts-in-the-senate-passed-reconciliation-bill-affect-rural-areas/ https://www.cbpp.org/research/medicaid-and-chip/senate-reconciliation-amendment-would-cut-hundreds-of-billions-more-from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-in-trump-big-beautiful-bill-senate-version/ https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/house-reconciliation-bill-immigration-border-security/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-whats-in-the-big-bill-that-just-passed-the-senateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I am your host, B.O. Wong, and with me is Karrison Davis. Hello, happy big, B.O. Wong, and with me is Karrison Davis. Hello! Happy big beautiful bill day. So today we are here to talk about the genocide budget. I am calling it the genocide budget because that is what this budget is designed to do. It is designed to create the apparatus that will allow the Republican party to carry out mass deportations on a scale that be unlike anything else in American history.

But, comma, and I want to be very clear about this, there has been a lot of talk about the new budgets deportation procedures and the funding of it. And it's important to note a few things from the get go. Right? You have been hearing a lot of numbers and I have been saying this too, because it's true that the total amount of funding for border provisions is $170 billion, which is larger, like a third larger than the military budget of Russia. This is true. However, comma, that money is not all going to one agency. I see a lot of people who think that all of that money is going to ICE. That is not true. It is dispersed among a bunch of different kinds of things. I'm going to do a little bit of a breakdown of where that money's

going because it's not all just going to like, here is the deportation thing. I'm again going to be relying on the American Immigration Council's figures because they are very good. So of this 170 billion, about 51 billion, almost 52 billion is going to quote construction and maintenance of border wall CPD checkpoints and CPD facilities. About 7.8 billion is going to this, so this is the part that is one of the parts that's really fucking scary is going towards hiring more border patrol agents and doing like training for law enforcement and doing training center improvements. There's about 45 billion that's going into making more detention centers and putting

more beds in detention centers. That's fucking terrifying. There is about 30 billion going into hiring ICE agents and that's just like directly this is the part that's removing people hiring ICE agents, deporting people. There's about a billion for the Department of Defense to like help with all of this. There's 13 and a half billion for state immigration and border enforcements like cost reimbursement stuff. So state programs can do things. And there's money for the federal government to reimburse the states for doing their own programs, a lot of which will be used. But this is not all going to one department, a lot of it's going to a bunch of different places, and a lot of it's going

towards border wall construction, which is very bad, but it's also like a third of the, well, it's like a quarter roughly of the budget is going to that. It's also worth noting that these numbers are all over the course of a decade, right? This stuff doesn't just like instantly appear, are all over the course of a decade, right? This stuff doesn't just like instantly appear. They have to build all of this apparatus up. And that means they can be stopped now, right? Because it's going to take a fucking decade for them to get all of this up and running. And that means on the one hand, the longer we wait to resist them and to basically neutralize

ISIS and Border Patrol's capacity to do this stuff, the worse it gets. But also they have to be in power for a fucking decade for all of this shit to kick in. And if they're still in power in a decade, we have quite frankly larger problems here. So that's just the initial stuff that I want to make sure people understand about this because there's a lot of not good reporting happening about it that doesn't break this stuff down. So the downside again as I said $170 billion just directly to the deportation engine in various forms and to the border wall. ISIS total detention budget goes to and this is again from the American immigration council. ISIS total detention budget goes at minimum to $14 billion a year.

This is, and I quote, this amount would represent a 308% increase on an annual basis over ISIS 2024 detention budget. By comparison, the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons budget was $8.6 billion. So they're trying to do a yearly detention budget that is significantly larger than the entire detention budget of the federal prison system I mean, they're just creating a whole separate prison system Yeah A lot of the extra funding for DHS is essentially creating a second army that is allowed to operate on domestic soil With way less strings attached. Yep. Yep. And that's like the primary 10-year plan

You can see what they tried to do in Los Angeles and what they did do in Los Angeles, like a few weeks ago. They're going to want to do that everywhere, but with their own DHS military, with their own DHS prisons, completely siloed away from the rest of the government. Yep. And there's also, and this is something that goes for most of this bill. There is very, very little constraints on how this money can be spent. These groups have a lot of latitude on it. Now, it is also worth noting a lot of this is going to be spent on absolutely just incredibly

stupid bullshit. Like, they're going to spend a bunch of money on border wall shit that's going to go to a bunch of like contract griffs. They're going to spend like, unbelievable portion of this money somehow is going to go to like extremely stupid AI startups. But yeah, it's very, very fucking bad. There is also again, a lot of money for state and local governments to spend working with ICE. They estimate that this could lead to 125,000 beds for holding people, which is again, only slightly less than the entire federal prison system. So yeah, they want to make a second prison system specifically

to do these these fucking this deportation, the ethnic cleansing genocide. And just directly under the control of Stephen Miller, like, yeah, Stephen Miller gets his own military and his own prisons. And Trump is on the record saying that Stephen Miller, if Stephen Miller had his way, there would be a hundred million people in the US and they would all look like Stephen Miller. Right? Like they want to get rid of like every nonwhite person in the US. That is like the end goal of someone like Stephen Miller.

Billions must ball. But the exception, and this is also something that's worth noting, is that recently Trump has been talking about like this like system where you'd have farm workers who were like quote unquote the responsibility of the farm owners. So they're talking about slavery, right? And people like Curtis Yarvin are like very explicitly being like, I wonder if there's another domestic population that could do agricultural labor. So like, yeah, they want the non-white population in the US to do slavery.

Right? This is just explicitly what they're talking about. They want the non-white population in the US to do slavery. Right. This is just explicitly what they're talking about. Also they want to hire 10,000 more ICE agents, but it's also worth noting, and I think this is very important, even 10,000 more ICE agents is not enough to do the thing they're trying to do. Like it's just not. Right. There's 300 million people in this country, like 350 million people in this country, like

10,000 more ICE agents can't do this right, and they especially can't do this if they're being resisted at every turn and you can look at what they've been forced to do in LA and How they've been forced to change tactics as a sign of this right? We're like at the very beginning they were rolling up with like these giant giant fucking convoys, and everyone's in fucking... A bunch of guys carrying rifles, and they were doing these giant raids. And they had to stop, because when they were assembling en masse in places, people would just fucking show up and throw shit at them.

And so they had to stop doing that, because it was hindering their ability to do this shit. And this is a mirror, interestingly, of what's been happening to protesters, right? Where like protesters also have been in LA have not been just gathering in one spot because then like the force of the police can just come down and hammer you. We've done the same thing to ICE. Like they can't do these like giant gatherings in one place because like the community will descend on them. So what they've been forced to do is like, you know, they've become incredibly mobile.

They're deploying in just like a parking lot for a small amount of time doing hidden run strikes on civilians. And this is also partially why they're not in uniform, because if they show up in uniform, everyone can just immediately fucking show up and fight them, right? And so this is something that I don't think is understood very well, which is that their tactics have been forced to evolve based on what we're doing to them. And even the increases in budget they're doing, yeah, the detention facility stuff is extremely bad. Even with 10,000 more agents, they don't have enough people to like fundamentally change the numbers game here, right?

This is all very bad. It is just straight up evil. It is like hideously destructive and painful. That is the point of this is to be hideously destructive and painful. But every single day, every single day in places like Los Angeles, there are a bunch of ordinary people who every time fucking ice shows up, a whole bunch of like messages go out and people start putting up fucking wheat posts of shit on telephone polls. And suddenly a bunch of people show up to try to resist these people. And if we keep doing that and if we intensify that, none of the worst case scenario shit from this budget has to happen.

I want to make that very clear. Before we go to break, I want to get through a little bit more of the just like straight cruelty stuff because there's just stuff in here that's just like, they just hate immigrants, like they want everyone to suffer and they also want you to Just suffer in bureaucratic hell So one of the things that they're doing is they're setting a cap This bill sets a cap on the number of immigration judges in the country at 800 So there's only 700 right now, right?

700 immigration judges is not enough immigration judges to like process everyone They want people to go unprocessed and they want to be able to just fucking grab those people and kick them out. They want people stuck in this process forever. They are trying to create a backlog. They are also massively increasing the application fees for every single stage of the immigration process. AIC calculates it would quote, result in at least $1,500 in filing fees during the five

year wait. And like, these people have no fucking money. Right? Like, that's why they're coming here. We talked about this, James talked about this in the Darien series. Most of these people have used all of their money just getting to the US because it's incredibly expensive and dangerous. And these policies don't generate a significant amount of revenue. It's just inflicting hardship and suffering on people who want to live in this place.

Yeah. Do you know who else wants to live in this place? I don't like that. I couldn't come up with the transition there. It's too bleak. I don't know. Products and services go. For My Heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road. I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant. In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.

Why did I think that way? Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him that would be the greatest honor. But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt. For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey. And then he became the prey. Listen to The Turning, River Road, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry.

Where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley,

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Inc. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts.

Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all,

childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal.

He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We are back. Speaking of things being terrible, let's talk Medicaid. So Medicaid is getting a trillion dollars of cuts over

the next 10 years. They are imposing an 80 hour a month work requirement for Medicaid and food stamps. This is going to kick off unbelievable numbers of people. The Congressional Budget Office estimates in the next nine years it will kick off 18.3 million people. This is particularly devastating to people with disabilities because again there are lots of people who can't work that number of hours and again it's devastating people who can't find jobs is a fucking horrific horrific thing. This is also particularly bad for trans people because that work requirement is also now applied to food stamps.

So like if you just fucking can't find a job, like fucking eat shit, they're kicking you off of Medicaid and food stamps. They're estimating that about 3 million people get kicked off of SNAP. And again, trans people use Medicaid and SNAP at enormous rates, significantly higher than the general population because their poverty rates are much much higher. And this is something we talked about in the last executive disorder, but like this is going to just destroy vast swaths of the rural hospital system. Because again, one in four people in rural areas get their health care paid for by Medicaid. Kaiser Family Foundation is estimating that it's going to be a hundred and fifty five billion dollar decrease in rural regions over the next decade. These hospitals have already been closing.

My estimates on this is I think it's actually the actual damage to health care in these communities is going to be significantly worse than what's being projected right now because hospital margins are absolutely terrible and they're just built to be increasingly more profit extractive. You know, this is creating a system where if you are rich and in urban areas, you can get health care. But if you're fucking poor in urban areas, eat shit. And if you're in rural areas and you don't have the money to like fucking take a private jet or some shit, or you can't pay for like very expensive private medical care, they're leaving you to die. or some shit, or you can't pay for like very expensive private medical care, they're leaving

you to die. This is going to just absolutely devastate the world economy. And also, that's not even the only sort of like devastating healthcare thing. Center for American Progress wrote a good article about this. This bill also is very, very laser targeted at defunding Planned Parenthood. It has a ban on using Medicaid at any clinic that provides abortions. So that money already can't go to abortions, right? That's the Hyde Amendment.

It fucking sucks. We hate it. It's terrible. But this is just a ban on any clinic that provides abortions taking Medicaid, which is just like, you know, just annihilates Planned Parenthood. It makes it really, really fucking hard to do abortions. Planned Parenthood is estimating that they're going to have to close 200 clinics, largely in in blue states in urban areas.

There are a lot of people, and this is also again trans people, who get their coverage from Planned Parenthood. It's really, really, really fucking bad. And it's, yeah, I mean, Planned Parenthood is calling it like a crypto-abortion ban, which it kind of is in a lot of ways, because they're just going after the ability to actually like fund clinics. The run of functioning clinic. Yeah. And this is this is again, you know, like the strategies they use against trans health care, the strategies they use against abortion care. Yeah. And so, you know, we're

seeing all of these things combined together as like this budget bill and like a lot of what this budget bill is. I mean, there's obviously always policy shit in budget bills, but this is a budget bill full of just shit that like could never get passed normally. Like it was just impossible to pass through Congress, but they're just sort of like ramming through these a bunch of like hideously unpopular procedures like in this in this fucking bill. Because it's reconciliation you can't filibuster it. They're just like putting all of this shit in They've also eliminated programs that made it easier to enroll in Medicaid because they want you to be stuck in bureaucracy forever Both on just the level of like if you're stuck in bureaucracy forever

You can't actually access Medicaid and then also the more stuck in bureaucracy you are, the easier it is to sell these like conservative, like anti-bureaucracy budget cut things. So it's this like spiraling thing of like everyone in the world is increasingly trapped in these bureaucratic hellholes, trying to get literally anything out of the state, which is that, and the only critique of this is from the right. And because the only critique of this is from the right, they use it to build their power while making everyone else's fucking lives miserable there's also a provision in this that says that if you make

The federal poverty line to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. So that's like fifteen thousand six hundred a year Or fifteen thousand six fifty a year to like eighteen thousand for a single person There's like a mandatory copay increase for each time you like visit a doctor, like up to $35, which is fucking hideous because like, again, the people on Medicaid, like in a lot of places, it's impossible to use Medicaid without paying any money for a visit, right? And that makes people go to the doctor. But if you have to pay any money, because the people who are this fucking poor, like, you don't have $35. Like fucking laying around to go to the hospital, you fucking defer.

And you defer, and you defer, and you defer in your healthcare until it becomes... Until you hit something that either kills you or is so devastating, you have to go to the hospital. And that's the situation that the GOP wants here. Like these cuts are not about saving money. They're about just inflicting incredible cruelty on people. And yeah, this is just another absolutely devastating sort of outcome of this bill. So there's also a whole bunch of rollbacks of like all of the existing climate policy we've had which has never been like super good but was like something but they've eliminated the tax credit for electric cars there's now

tax credits for like auto loans and shit in very like you can like write off auto loans in very weird ways. Wait are you serious? To some extent yeah it's fucking weird. Finally finally I'm gonna get that Mazda Miata. It's finally happening. Oh, thank goodness. Thank you. Thank you, Trump. Sorry, Elon. Thank you, Trump. It's interesting because there's like one or two things that are like kind of okay. Like, okay, but my favorite one is one of the things I guess a lot of press is like, oh, there's no taxes on tips, but that's only a temporary thing that goes for like the next what four years?

Yeah. Yeah. But then it just expires. Yeah. So it's just like literally a payoff, you know, based actually, I think tips should be tax blokey. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Does petite bourgeois garrison. That's right. Yeah. So one of the provisions of this is that like the Medicaid cuts like only go into effect in 2027 which is very curious because if you think about it So much of this bill is just trying to like midterms proof the GOP. Mm-hmm So as soon as the midterms happen, and they expect the Democrats to do very well

Despite the broken state of the Democratic Party currently, but that's probably still what they're forecasting. But this bill is built so that the Medicaid cuts only go into effect after the midterms. They're trying to make sure it won't hurt them during the midterms, but also if Democrats do take power, then they can use the fact that Medicaid is doing really bad to help Republicans in the next general, which is insane because they're the ones fact that Medicaid is doing really bad to help Republicans in the next general, which is insane because they're the ones that ruined Medicaid. Yep, yep.

So there's a lot of stuff like that in the bill where they're trying to make certain things go into effect specifically to help them in future elections and hurt Democrats in future elections. Yeah. Including the tax on tips thing. Yep, yep, yep. I will say it does give us a little bit of room to maneuver. Yeah, because this entire bill is a threat.

Yeah, yeah, and they have to actualize it. And unless they follow through on the threat, then that's all it is. So people have to keep challenging them on this and defang their ability to implement this. And we do have a year and a half to nullify at least some of the worst aspects of this bill. Yeah. And that includes strengthening local health care systems, food stamps, but also continuing to mobilize popular resistance to ICE and Border Patrol. We cannot afford to surrender here. No, no. And you know, back at the beginning of the administration, the

phrase I was using to talk about what this is going to do, I think we were all sort of using this was like, the state is going to retreat and become more hostile. And this is like the 10 times mega like acceleration of this, right? Yeah, yes. Like the state is becoming a thing with that it exists only to like kill you. Right. But the thing is, it is also worth noting these programs are not just there because like they're good for people they weren't there to buy

people off right like the carrot and the stick are both parts of maintaining each other right the reason you can have the stick is because you have the carrot to pacify enough people to be able to deploy the stick. They seem to believe that they can only fucking use the stick now. And they can give you the tiniest fucking carrots that have ever existed. And we are going to get to see whether they can do that and whether our ability to like fucking produce our own carrots allows us to generate a situation where they fucking can't keep control anymore. The other thing that they demonstrated the past few months is the unilateral ability

to shut down government agencies. Oh, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. And this is something that a smart future candidate could weaponize because ICE is younger than most people listening to this podcast. It's younger than me. Abolishing ICE is now the conservative position. If you are a moderate conservative,

you are you now must be in favor of abolishing ICE. That's that's that's simply where we are now. I was at this somewhat cursed 4th of July party, I guess, full of some of Mia's old Twitter enemies. Oh no. I will not name names, but multiple multiple people Oh, no, I will not name names but multiple multiple people apologize to me For making fun of ice must be destroyed in the past I'm so fucking vindicated. I am the most vindicated of all time

They wanted me to pass off the message to you that they are sorry and that you were right the whole time I was fucking right. I I so I'm realizing there's a lot of people who actually don't know this. I am the person who, until I deleted my Twitter account last year, ended every post with that, moreover, I must be destroyed. I also do this on Blue Sky now. And I want to specifically, if you want to apologize to me, ha, specifically, send that apology in the form of money to the Trans Income Project. We will link the Trans Income Project's fundraiser below here. They give money directly to trans people. They do a whole bunch of unbelievably cool shit. It rules. We're going to have episodes talking about them at some point in the next couple of months. They are fucking awesome. So direct your apologies to the Trans Income Project.

Give trans people money. I will inform the people at the next cursed 4th of July party. All right. You know who else wants your money? These products and services that support this podcast. Yep. For My Heart Podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road. I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life

what that meant. In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse. Why did I think that way? Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and in thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor? But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt. For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey. And then he became the prey. Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts. in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened

when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at

Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side.

My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on the street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines

into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We are back. So there's another part of this bill that has been getting very, very little coverage that really sucks shit, which is a national voucher tax credit program for private schools. So the way this works is really convoluted.

You can get tax credits by giving money to organizations that support private and religious schools and give out school vouchers. So the reason it's set up like this is this is a way to get around the ban on like giving money to religious schools, by just giving money to organizations that give money to religious schools. But what this does, right, so these vouchers let you pull your kid out of public school and send them to a private school. And what this does is allows you to spend $1700 like to these organizations and get a 100% tax credit. Literally nothing works like this charitable donations don't work like this nothing else like that We have ever had works on a 100% like tax credit like this like no donation fucking happens at all

This is a massive tax cut for for money that goes to fucking rich family whose kids already go to private schools It is a massive attack on the public education system These voucher programs are hideously unpopular. Fucking they keep failing in red states. Everyone hates them. They fail in blue states. There is literally zero chance they could ever get this passed through Congress normally, but they stuck it into the budget bill

and forced everyone to vote for it. Now, it's worth noting that this is, again, this is a fulfillment of the ancient dream of the right, which is to destroy the public education system and replace it with private a private education System that is resegregated they have been trying to do this for as long as the like the modern right has been around This has been their thing We have talked endlessly on the show about the ways in which the ways in which the modern right is Built specifically on the opposition to desegregation and how this has been their plan.

So this also starts in 20 in 2027. It is important to note the states have to opt into this program. So this can still be killed in most places on the state level, but it fucking sucks. It is an attempt to destroy the public education system and a max of tax cut to rich assholes. There's also and this is fun, potentially increases the student loan payments. So SAVE was the Biden administration's like loan repayment plan. Lots of this stuff never took effect because it was held up by the courts. But this gets rid of SAVE and other like a lot of other like loan repayment programs

and combines them into this thing that's called the repayment assistance plan. And this, this is quoted from MSN, would set borrowers' payments to 1 to 10% of their income depending on their income level with a monthly minimum payment of $10. Unpaid interest is waived under this plan and any remaining balance is forgiven after 30 years. So this is, like, compared to, say, this is a pretty massive increase in how much you'd have to pay for your student loans. You also can't defer payments if you're unemployed or dealing with economic problems

Which is a complete shit show It's also it also is we're noting that like mass non-payments of student loans is already pretty normal If you go back to like the Occupy era and you read stuff from the debt collective there was a lot of talk then about organizing student loan debt strikes, and they just found out that like, huge numbers of people already weren't paying. So, you know, there's potential for resistance here. There's been a lot of work done on this front over the past 15 years. It also gets rid of the Graduate plus program for people without kids.

So there's just like a bunch of fucking horrible shit happening. There's also in this in this thing $100 million for the Office of Management and Budget to do more Doge shit. And again, OMB right now is as as Senator Parker Parker's points out, literally ran by the director and author and co-author of project 2025 and They're giving him a hundred and twenty five million dollars to figure out how to cut more government agencies We're sorry a hundred million. Sorry a hundred million a hundred million dollars. Yeah. Oh That that 25 will make such a big difference. Yeah, I have some ideas for some future Yeah, if we want to save approximately 40 billion dollars a year

Just at Democrats. Mm-hmm on Democrats on Twitter and Blue Sky and threads. Let me know. I can give you some ideas. Ice, Border Patrol. It's possibly billions of dollars in savings. Department of Homeland Security. So let me know at DNC on all platforms. I can advise for a very a very fair pay rate

Review of all DOD military contracts competitive consulting rate. I can let you know What what things you too can doge in the future? Mm-hmm. No more postal cops. It's about time a cab It does it does motherfucker suck ass All right. There's also four point five trillion dollars in cuts tax cuts mostly for rich people There's a bunch of extremely stupid shit in here this Just it's just a giant wealth transfer from poor people to rich people Which is very bad

it's also notable that it puts like over the next decade, like another, a $3 trillion hole in the deficit. And this is worth noting because this has pissed off a lot of Silicon Valley fascists, because a lot of the Silicon Valley people, and this is something I've talked about this before, but it's very important to understand. A lot of these people are completely obsessed with the deficit, right?

Because they want the government to run like a business. Well, yeah, but there's a second thing going on here too, which is like, they think that like that US deficit payments are going to like, basically overwhelm the US budget and they're just become increasingly large percentages of the GDP, which will cause the US to just like be destroyed. And those people are genuinely very pissed at this about this budget and Elon Musk is kind of like one of the avatars of this, right? Yeah, I think I think I think you mean elongated muskrat, you should call him by his real name.

Fucking God. But yeah, you know, he is the kind of like rallying point of the people who are genuinely ideologically committed to just like doing all of these budget cuts because they're like weird actual like true believer deficit hawks, unlike the people who want to do it. Because they are they also want to do it because they hate poor people. But like they hate poor people differently. They have a different type of hate. Yeah, they have different. Yeah. Well, and it's also like it the question basically is

are you willing to like massively increase the deficit to give corporations spending cuts or do you think that if you do that, you also need to do even more cuts? And that's that's the camp that Elon's in. It's worth noting before we get to the Elon angle of this. I'm just going to read this from the New Republic. A survey by the Washington Post found that 42% of Americans opposed the bill while only 23% supported it, leaving the legislation with a net favorable rating of minus 19. And that was the most positive that the results got. A Pew Research Center poll found the bill had a net favorability rating of minus 20. Fox News found a net favorability rating of minus 21. I mean... Quinnipac found a net

favorability of minus 26 and KFF found a net favorability rating of minus 29. Those do sound low but on the other hand that's a very high number for Matt Gates so for the GOP you know it's not it's not that low. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 19 is like the top of his range. Thank you for that cutting edge Matt Gaetz pedophile joke. Right on the cusp of culture. We're just really riding the zeitgeist. So everyone fucking hates this bill, is the thing. Right.

And in this kind of climate, Elon Musk has decided to create a new political party called the America Party to run against the GOP Many such cases many such cases times just time is a flat circle once again This is this is like the farce is farce version of the Reform Party Like who fucking knows what this is going to do in the end? Like, we just don't know. Probably nothing. Nothing is what it's actually going to do. Nothing. Maybe slightly put a tiny dent in the GOP.

Yeah. I mean, I will say this. The actual important thing about Elon opposing Trump is that it gives a wedge to pry away different sections of Trump's base, like of Trump's elite base from him. Like again, like as you talked about, like the one moment where it's ever been possible to talk about like the Trump Epstein shit was when that happened. So I don't know, I think there's potential for the future where like stuff can, you know,

it's possible for there to be larger rifts and that sort of league coalition and That can possibly be exploited Yeah, there's also just like a bunch of unhinged shit that I think I'm not sure if people Understand didn't get in the bill all of the like government land transfer stuff got cut They wanted to put a proposal in to make it so that you had to like pay a bond if you sued the Governments and that didn't make it in thankfully We stopped them from doing the trans Medicaid's of bullshit. I Episode forthcoming

But yeah this bill Really fucking sucks. There's a lot of just unbelievably terrible provisions in it, but, everyone hates it and it can be stopped. That's all I got on genocide bill. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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