Wholesale Government Destruction is a Desperate Effort to Justify Renewing Trump's Tax Cuts
This independent analysis was first published in A Different Place.
After needlessly alienating nearly every ally the United States has developed over the last half-century, Donald Trump is now in the process of launching an uncontrollable escalation of tariff wars that looks a lot like the economic equivalent of World War III.
Trump originally excused the tariffs, arguing that he wanted to pressure Mexico and Canada into stopping the traffic of fentanyl, the synthetic narcotic that, to a large extent, has replaced heroin and cocaine as the drug of choice for many Americans. The tariffs have since expanded to include just about anyone trading with the United States and Fentanyl has all but been forgotten in the process.
Corporate tax cuts to end later this year
Calling it like it is, it seems increasingly clear that Trump’s ultimate goal is to shave enough money off the national budget to justify renewing the massive tax breaks to corporations and America’s wealthiest billionaires that were introduced during Trump’s first term. Those tax cuts are due to sunset at the end of this year. If they are renewed without substantial cost-cutting elsewhere, the national debt is likely to skyrocket into the stratosphere. That makes cutting costly services essential to Trump. The rest is pretty much a smokescreen.
Even without the tax issue, tariffs have an additional advantage for Trump: they constitute a sudden influx of cash, which the president can then use pretty much as he wants.
Courtesy of Jeff Danziger Cartoons.
Jeff Danziger cartoons
Many haven't a clue what they are doing
Elon Musk’s wrecking ball approach to America’s Civil Service is similarly motivated. Musk claims that he wants to stop bureaucratic bloat and end corruption. The fact is, however, that the gaggle of computer-savvy twenty-somethings that Musk has unleashed on the civil service have little or no idea of how government actually works.
The people who do know how to cut waste have been fired in the massive wave of otherwise senseless cuts. Improving government service is pretty clearly not the goal; the real objective is to slash government spending regardless of the consequences. Again, the cost-cutting is intended to enable Trump’s tax cuts to continue.
What Trump is offering is a kind of bait and switch. The tax cuts offer only a negligible advantage to middle-income families, but if you are a major corporation or a billionaire, they mean a lot. The original idea behind the graduated income tax was that the wealthiest segment of society should spend more to keep society going than the poorer segments who barely earn enough money to survive from paycheck to paycheck.
Tariffs: A new form of sales tax
Tariffs raise the price of everything. In a sense, they constitute a sales tax on everything you buy. That includes groceries and other essentials. If you are Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, the price increases are barely noticeable. If you are in the lower income brackets and have to work two jobs to make ends meet, you are quickly priced out of the market. If you are an average American, say a public school teacher, the shift to tariffs quickly turns into pure hell.
Trump couldn’t care less. The idea that fair taxes are really an investment in society’s well-being is alien to him. He has spent most of his life trying to avoid anything resembling social responsibility.
More to the point, his last campaign was financed by billionaires who expect a return on their investment. Trump is doing everything he can to deliver, and he’s got plenty of support. An undercurrent of the MAGA belief that all government is bad was simmering among conservatives long before Trump. The original anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to brag that his dream was to drag the government into the bathroom and drown it in a bathtub.
Caring about people is considered a weakness
Musk’s wrecking crew is attempting to do just that. Slashing government services until there is nothing left may cause enormous pain, but Musk doesn’t care. In a three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk explained that while he feels that it is right to care about other people, he also considers empathy—caring for the feelings of others—to be one of Western civilization’s greatest weaknesses and a potential cause of civilizational suicide.
Musk is not the first to make that argument. The German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche argued that the Christian and Jewish religions were fundamentally weak because of their concern for others. Adolph Hitler, who admired Nietzsche, took the reasoning a few steps further and promoted man’s primal, unrestrained nature. Unfortunately, that nature often proves bestial. (See Global Geneva article from Weimar to Hitler)
Regardless of which philosophy Musk chooses to follow, Trump clearly likes the results. The fact that he is managing the tax money that has come from the pockets of ordinary Americans and that was originally intended to provide services needed to make America thrive doesn’t seem to concern him.
Apart from gambling with our money, Trump and his MAGA conservatives appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really at stake for the country as a whole.
There is hardly anything new about considering education expendable, and yet uneducated populations are less productive, less competitive, and more of a costly burden to society than those who are educated and productive. Nearly every immigrant coming to the US from a Third World country knows that. That’s why their first objective is to educate their children and move up in the world.
The poorest, least productive states in the US are the ones that spend the least on education. Poverty continues to be a problem in these mostly red states, and yet no one seems capable of putting two and two together and realizing the cause of their underdevelopment.
Poor children are left out
The decision by Elon Musk and Trump to cut the staff of the Department of Education in half and eventually eliminate the department altogether means that poor children who depend on public school lunches for nutrition will probably have to starve—that, or go out in the street and start to steal or become part of the fentanyl industry that Trump claims he wants to stop. High school graduates hoping to go to college will find it even more difficult to apply for government aid.
Eventually, the country will be in an even greater mess than it is today. While Trump feels that the pain is justified if that’s what it takes to cut the budget in order to follow through on his pledge to renew his tax breaks, Elon Musk has visions of using the extra cash to fly to Mars. Forget that Mars today resembles an empty parking lot covered with red dust. Musk is determined to escape planet Earth, and if that means destroying the planet in order to do it, well, why not?
In monetary terms, the cost to taxpayers of federal funds flowing into Musk’s companies dealing with space travel and government contracts with Tesla add up to roughly $38 billion. In human terms, the cost is likely to be considerably higher.
Courtesy of Jeff Danziger Cartoons
Jeff Danziger
Trump’s real objectives tend to be opaque because of all the other crazy things that he does. During his temper tantrum with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his mini-me, J.D. Vance, both threw undignified tantrums in front of a crowd of reporters and news photographers.
Trump and Putin: Who is working for whom?
That was bad enough, but Trump’s subsequent statements raised serious questions as to whether the president is actually representing the United States or might possibly be a Russian agent recruited by the KGB. Trump made it clear that he not only resonates emotionally with Russia’s Vladimir Putin but that he is also prepared to side with the Kremlin against NATO in the event of a showdown.
To make sure that everyone got the picture, he canceled scheduled arms shipments to Ukraine and put a stop to sharing US intelligence. The shared intelligence cost the US nothing and had given Ukraine advanced warning of Russian ballistic missile attacks against civilian areas.
The immediate reaction in Europe was to question whether the US had suddenly switched camps. Europe’s nuclear umbrella, which relies to a large extent on Britain’s nuclear submarines and US-engineered Trident missiles was suddenly called into question. Since British submarines and missiles are serviced in the US, there was immediate concern that Trump could pull the plug on Western defenses at any moment.
Macron to the rescue
If Trump were really the Kremlin’s man in the White House, a kind of Manchurian Candidate, then any reliance on the US for defense could suddenly vanish. France’s Emanuel Macron stepped in and offered France’s nuclear submarines and missiles—its famous ‘force de frappe’-- as a guarantee for Europe’s protection.
As for Trump’s erratic behavior, serious questions were raised concerning his sanity. He might really like the Russians, but why make such a public, damaging display?
In just a few missteps, Trump managed to transform the US from the leader of the Free World to its potential enemy. If Ukraine couldn’t count on the flip-flopping American president and his crazy cabinet of incompetents, could Taiwan, which produces most of the vitally necessary integrated circuits and computer chips that power US technology, continue to rely on American support in resisting increasing encroachments by Communist China?
Trump: Getting his facts wrong
Another disturbing element to come out of the Zelensky on-camera brawl was Trump’s astonishing ignorance about how much aid the US is actually giving to Ukraine. The agitated president kept insisting that the US aid amounted to an outrageous $300 billion. In fact, US aid to Ukraine only amounts to around $120 billion. In the same time frame, the European Union has given Ukraine more than $140 billion.
The fact that the president was able to go in front of national television news cameras and not have the correct figures means that his own staff is failing him. He is clearly not being informed about what is really happening.
What is even more disturbing is that his cabinet seems equally uninformed about the reality of America today. Howard Lutnick, a former senator who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, made an offhand remark on NBC television dismissing Joe Biden for having been upset about a bunch of sick chickens.
Lutnick appeared unaware that bird flu was forcing poultry companies to slaughter entire flocks of chickens in order to prevent the highly contagious flu from spreading. The mass killing of chickens is one of the main reasons that the price of eggs has skyrocketed, and the rising price of eggs symbolized to a great extent the rise in inflation that helped get Trump elected. Lutnick, who will probably be the first political sacrifice to take the fall for Trump’s errors in this term, has flip-flopped to an extraordinary degree, first declaring that the US is not facing a recession and then admitting that, yes, it probably will go into recession.
Trump, who initially claimed that he wanted to stop inflation, is now forced to admit that his policies probably will result in economic pain for an as yet undetermined period of time. Wall Street reacted with market value dropping around 10 percent since Trump’s inauguration.
An erratic behavior that questions his sanity
Trump says he doesn’t care what the stock market does; he wants to change America’s economy. Wall Street simply wants a president who is less jittery. It would be better for the economy if Trump simply sat on his hands and did nothing.
While Trump’s behavior raises obvious questions about his personal sanity, a number of false assumptions embedded in Republican thinking were steering things in a wrong direction even before Trump’s re-election.
The first wrong assumption is that poor people are unnecessarily profiting from government handouts and entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. Despite the fact that Elon Musk dismissed Social Security as a ‘ponzi scheme,’ anyone who has earned a salary knows that Social Security is anything but a handout. Each working person pays a hefty sum out of his or her paycheck to finance the program on the contractual promise that the money will eventually be there when they retire.
Medicare makes healthcare affordable to people who are retired, and Medicaid makes healthcare affordable to poor people who have no other alternative. These programs accomplish much more than providing support to the people who need them.
Killing the health programs while putting doctors out of work
Their real benefit to us all is that they sustain the enormous infrastructure of doctors, medical technicians, advanced medical equipment, pharmaceutical companies, and research teams that make America’s advances in modern medicine so impressive. Kill the programs and you put the doctors out of work, close the hospitals and basically propel the country back into the dark ages of the previous century when a slight encounter with the flu could kill you.
Close the Department of Education, and you not only create a generation that is less knowledgeable, less creative, and less able to compete, but you also find yourself forced to feed and house people who are incapable of carrying their own weight. Cut funding to universities and colleges, and you lose the competitive edge that until now has made America a world leader.
Cut off foreign aid, which, in any case, never added up to more than one percent of the US budget, and you reduce subsidies to American farmers whose produce not only helped prevent famine in other countries but also guaranteed that America could produce enough food on its own to sustain itself in the case of an emergency.
Stop educational projects and support in the Third World, and you encourage an entire generation that has no alternative but to either emigrate illegally to one of the rich countries, or failing that join a rebel militia movement, or in the worst case scenario simply engage in terrorism and/or narcotics trafficking.
The billionaire backers of Donald Trump really don’t care about any of that. They have their getaway resorts, and they want more. More importantly, they interpret the fact that they are wealthy as proof that they are superior.
Instead of “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” they’d prefer a Russian-style autocracy with selected oligarchs serving as modern-day feudal barons in order to ensure that the select few, the Nomenclatura, have the little that remains. Their objective is richest for the select few, and let the rest take the scraps that remain.
Artificial intelligence and advanced technology will concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Elon Musk is an example. The factory workers of the industrial revolution are long gone, and arguments can be made that people are less and less essential to production, or even to society itself.
The basic conundrum that most Republicans miss, however, is that if the mass of the population has no money because wealth is hoarded by a bunch of techno-robber barons, the vast mass of the population won’t be able to buy anything. If no one buys anything, there is no reason to produce anything. You face a downward spiral, and in the end, the economy stops.
That is generally what happens in most rapacious tin pot dictatorships. That’s the world being promised by Donald Trump. It promises a dismal future. The question is: how long will the rest of us continue to drink the Kool-Aid?
Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.