Letters from an American - February 25, 2025

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

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February 25th, 2025. On Friday, February 21st, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted, A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone, especially Congress and the White House, to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest. Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now. How should the US raise money and how should it spend money?

Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people's ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and health care. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business, making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter, and education, maintaining roads and airports, and making sure the law treats everyone equally. Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government

can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few, if any, taxes, both of which hamper a person's ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.

But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic President Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W Bush and Donald Trump along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced massive budget deficits that in turn have added trillions to the national debt.

Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection. That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans' attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party's spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster. Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of continuing resolutions,

measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14th, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next 10 years, which the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates would add

$4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail, including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments, that deficit jumps closer to 11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump's claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers. So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats

who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now though, there's a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric, the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow. On January 21st, 2025, the US Treasury

had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it's actually Republican-dominated districts

that receive the bulk of federal monies. This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency or DOGGI that is claiming to slash federal spending although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five biggest ticket items it had touted on its wall of receipts. As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation. But they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the

project over to Musk. They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House Press Secretary, Caroline Levitt, refused to say who was in charge of Doggie, a day after Matt Bae reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency employees, Luke Faradar and Gavin Kleiger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco

Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bi reports that Faradar is a 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX. Kleiger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the deep state, attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.

This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the US digital service, the agency that Trump's executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico. In an interview with NPR, the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman,

explained that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary's democracy into a system that's designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values in what became a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class. Trump and Magus see Orbán as a model and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration or the FAA, the agency that manages civilian aviation,

and that Trump and Doggie gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk's Starlink internet system for its information technology networks. But even if Trump is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52 to 48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement, and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats in Independence, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not

to advance that resolution. Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for homeland security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending

cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place must claims, without evidence, to be cutting. Fraud, waste, and abuse. As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest. But the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them

or to get democratic votes. For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S. On Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that the top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion dollars in wealth, while the bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth. Shawnee and Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut today,

that 24% of Americans get their health care from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services say that two-thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. For what? Because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars? Murphy asked. The scope of this greed is something that we have never ever seen before in this country and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America. At a press conference House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Kaysar, a Democrat of Texas, called this billionaire budget resolution. I know

that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve," Kesar said. It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215,

with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky, voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave. So Representative Brittany Pederson, a Democrat of Colorado, flew across the country with her one-month-old son to vote no on this disastrous budget proposal. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.