Letters from an American - June 30, 2025

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

June 30th, 2025. This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress, said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut. We're debating a bill that's going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to massively wealthy people who don't need any more money.

There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country." Murphy continued, "...We're obviously going to continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far, not a single one of our amendments has passed, but we'll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance, over and over and over again, to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations

or to make life a little bit less miserable for hungry kids, or maybe don't throw as many people off of health care, maybe don't close so many rural hospitals. It's gonna be a long day and a long night. This bill is a farce, said Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine. Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table saying, I've got a great idea.

Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire, and we'll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower income and middle income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps? We cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people. I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate.

I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel. When I worked here in the 70s, King said, I had insurance as a junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years. And the doctors found a little mole on my back and they took it out and I didn't think much of it.

And I went in a week later and the doctor said, "'You better sit down Angus, that was malignant melanoma. "'You're gonna have to have serious surgery.' "'And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn't had insurance, I wouldn't be here. And it's always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma. He didn't have insurance, he didn't get that checkup,

and he died. That's wrong, it's immoral. Senator King continued, And he died. That's wrong. It's immoral. Senator King continued, I don't understand the obsession, and I never have, with taking health insurance away from people. I don't get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018, and now this. What's driving this?

What's the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people, knowing that it's going to cost them up to and including their lives? In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans' determination to destroy the modern government. Grover Norquist, an employee of the US Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. Government should enforce the rule of law, he said. It

should enforce contracts. It should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it's facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty. Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that, it's not any of the government's business who earns what as long as they earn it legitimately, and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed.

The unemployment rate was nearly 25%. Prices and productivity were plummeting. Wages were cratering. Factories had shut down. Farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories. Elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans. Unregulated banks gambled away people's money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished.

Within a year, the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a New Deal to the American people.

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and social security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts

to more than 40% of GDP as the United States helped the world fight fascism. That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975 federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises, spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, the spending to GDP ratio has remained at about that set point. The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted.

Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation's social safety net, while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life, FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. The other is based upon the simple moral principle. The welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need, and second, whether or not they are getting it. The Republicans budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out. This place feels to me today like a crime scene,

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the floor of the Senate. Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill, cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine.

When I first got here, this chamber filled me with all kinds of our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.