Trump’s Presidency thus far exhibits the most extreme example that I have ever found of a national leader who not only represents ONLY the extremely rich but who especially despises the poor — it’s a value-system that a person’s moral value is his/her net worth: a person’s value is his/her wealth, neither more nor less than that. The four main federal expenditures that Trump and Musk are investigating for “waste, fraud, and abuse” are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the poor. Whereas Social Security and Medicare are relatively safe against being cut, since those are not annually appropriated by Congress, Medicare and assistance to the poor (both of which serve ONLY the poor) ARE appropriated annually by Congress, and signed into law by the President; and, so, those two will likely be cut the most. (They are in what our Government calls “discretionary spending.” You know: they’re things such as yachts.)
The federal Department that the Trump Administration is the least seeking for cuts is the by-far costliest federal Department (at roughly $900 billion per year), which is the only federal Department that has never been audited and that consequently is the most corrupt and wasteful, the Defense Department (Pentagon), which Department is the basic or even only market for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman, etc., which firms (except for Boeing) don’t even have any significant consumer markets — their profits depend totally or almost totally on sales to the U.S. Government itself and to its allied Governments; and, so, they need to control the U.S. Government in order to control their markets, which they consequently do, by means of America’s furiously revolving-door between the public sector and the private sector, so that becoming a part of this “military-industrial complex” is the surest way to become and remain a billionaire in today’s America, regardless of whether or not the U.S. economy is doing well from the standpoint of consumers (the general public — which includes lots of ‘worthless’ people, individuals who owe more than they own).
Trump’s first major achievement as America’s President was to arrange the largest single armaments sale in all of history, which was $404 billion to the Saud family in 2017 (“Made In America” of course, by companies that are in his debt.)
All other federal Departments (the ones that serve the public instead of serve mainly the billionaires who own controlling interests in ‘defense’-related corporations) are being subjected by the Trump Administration to heavy pressure to cut all other Departments, this pressure coming from President Trump and from America’s wealthiest individual Elon Musk (Trump’s biggest-of-all campaign contibutor at over $270 million (“SpaceX”), whose fortune was built upon $38 billion in investments from the Pentagon but also from some other (‘defense’-related) federal agencies. You know, he is one of America’s ‘self-made billionaires’. (Trump, who is himself a billionaire, was born to Fred Trump, the NYC real-estate tycoon.)
As I headlined and explained on March 5, “Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut.” That is exactly the opposite of what the American people want, as I shall now document:
On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.
On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicaid, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) over the next ten years.
On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud,” and reported that “The Department of Government Efficiency is sifting through $1.6 trillion worth of Social Security payments — records that include a person’s name, birth date and how much they earn — in an anti-fraud effort that has advocates worried the Trump administration could start denying payments to vulnerable older Americans.” It reported the lies by the Trump Administration to ‘justify’ what they are doing, but the matter will be settled in court, by politically-appointed judges; and, so, mere truth and falsity won’t necessarily deterrrmine the ruling, especially not if a billionaire is worth a thousand mere millionaires (and paupers are worth nothing).
Heck, the U.S. Government spends around $1.6 trillion per year on its military ($900 billion of it paid by the Pentagon, and $700 billion of it out of other federal Departments), and yet still has only the world’s second-best military (Russia’s, costing a tenth of that, being #1); and the amount of corrution there is astronomical; so, if Trump/Musk REALLY wanted to cut what’s euphemistically called “waste, fraud, and abuse” (but is overwhelmingly corruption) ALL of the cuts would be coming from there.
What is supposed to happen when a Government represents ONLY an aristocracy? In 1776, the answer was Revolution. We are there again — or else we never will be again, and will instead continue to accept the continued systematic looting of the American people, this time by DOMESTIC (instead of English) billionaires. It’s not a conflict between Democrats versus Republicans; that’s merely the method to distract us. It is a conflict between the billionaires versus the public.
As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper won’t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic — it is. And the statement is true. But the 31 March 2019 issue of Forbes headlined “Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change,” and reported: “‘America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,’ Buffett says.” Better for himself and other billionaires, that is. But not for the bottom 90%, and it worked lousy for the bottom 50%, and still worse — economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked.”
Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays, but is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict. They do it all the time.