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The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History

I have long said that today's Republican Party seeks to create a new Gilded Age and has pursued a relentless reverse Robin Hood agenda to take from the poor and give to the very wealthy.  This effort is combined with an agenda of slashing safety regulations to allow corporations to further enrich themselves at the expense of the health and lives of everyday Americans.  Now, with an occupant of the White House who views himself as a monarch, the many of the super wealthy are displaying an attitude akin to that of the French and Russian nobility prior to their nation's respective revolutions. All of this is wrapped up in the GOP bill that just cleared the House - it would explode the federal deficit while causing millions to lose heath care coverage  and food assistance - that now moves to the Senate where it hopefully can be stopped. Should it pass the Senate, the big question is whether the devastation visited on many red states and red regions in states like Virginia (and rural hospitals) will be enough to belatedly  make working class Republican voters to stop being blinded by GOP appeals to racism and "god, guns and gays" and realize the GOP is their enemy.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the situation:

House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The “big, beautiful bill” would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, warned that the bill’s passage, by a 215–214 margin, would mark the moment the Republicans ensured the loss of their majority in the midterm elections. That may be so. But the Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact.

The House cemented the bill’s majority support with a series of last-minute changes whose effects have not been digested. The Congressional Budget Office has not even had time to calculate how many millions of Americans would lose health insurance, nor by how many trillions of dollars the deficit would increase.

The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.

House Republicans are fully aware of the political and economic risks of this endeavor. Cutting taxes for the affluent is unpopular, and cutting Medicaid is even more so. That is why, instead of proudly proclaiming what the bill will accomplish, they are pretending it will do neither. House Republicans spent months warning of the political dangers of cutting Medicaid, a program that many of their own constituents rely on. The party’s response is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program—when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings.

The bill spikes the deficit, largely because it devotes more money to lining the pockets of lawyers and CEOs than it saves by immiserating fast-food employees and ride-share drivers. Massive deficit spending is not always bad, and in some circumstances (emergencies, or recessions) it can be smart and responsible. In the middle of an economic expansion, with a large structural deficit already built into the budget, it is deeply irresponsible.

Higher deficits oblige Washington to borrow more money, which can force it to pay investors higher interest rates to take on its debt, which in turn increases the deficit even more, as interest payments (now approaching $1 trillion a year) swell.

House Republicans have made clear they are aware of both the political and the economic dangers of their plan, because in the recent past, they have repeatedly warned about both. Their willingness to take them on is a measure of their profound commitment.

And while the content of their beliefs can be questioned, the seriousness of their purpose cannot. Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.

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MAGA Is Waging War on the Future

At times people wonder how the advances and knowledge of the Roman Empire were lost and Europe descended into the Dark Ages.  True Roman was invaded by hostile "barbarian" tribes but much of the destruction came from internal forces ranging from growing wealth disparities and the pauperization of the masses and the erasure of knowledge that conflicted with the dogma of the increasingly powerful Christian Church.  All of this was a war on what could have been a very different future.   Fast forward to 2025 and we see an in some ways similar war against the future by the Felon and MAGA supporters that will ultimately leave America poorer, sicker, less democratic, less educated and more backward that what otherwise be the case.  If one looks at Project 2025, the blueprint for much of what is being done it is a white "Christian" nationalist/supremacy agenda that puts the rights of the minority over the wellbeing of the many.  Social programs and benefits for the many are targeted for draconian funding cuts while ever more tax cuts are showered on the super wealthy.  One has to wonder how bad things will need to get before the MAGA working class base realizes their bigotry and prejudice has cost them and their children dearly. A column in the New York Times looks at this war on the future:

It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.

This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.

In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. . . . . “This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.

. . . [T]he White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.  In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. . . . Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost.

The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species, and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”

The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.

Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts, disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.

In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to “shrink” the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology?

Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration either decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too “woke.” But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures, or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and in particular on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.

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Tornado Devastation Is a Warning Against NOAA and NWS Cuts

As I write this post, millions of Americans are under the threat of severe weather.  This after tornados have ravaged a number of states, including Missouri and Kentucky. The significant number of deaths from these storms in the last week have caused many to worry that the chainsaw taken to the National Weather Service and NOAA by Elon Musk and the Felon are needlessly endangering lives.  One must not forget that the real reasons for the devastation done to numerous federal agencies is NOT rooting out fraud and abuse as claimed, but rather first and foremost to fund huge tax cuts for the super wealthy. Average Americans are also being endangered by severe cut backs - or total cessation - of safety regulations surrounding food inspections, funding for cancer and other medical research, and the repealing clean air and water regulations.  All so that those who already have more money than they can ever spend can have even more money even as the national debt surges. A piece at The Atlantic looks at the warning the recent spat of tornados is sending.  Here are highlights:

The tornadoes that swept through Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia resulted in a horrifying total of 42 deaths this weekend. Unlike hurricanes, which form steadily and are relatively easy to track, tornadoes are generally hard to predict. Because they appear very quickly, giving populations and emergency services little time to prepare, tornadoes can be particularly deadly.

This is why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) are so crucial for the nation’s emergency-response system. . . . . If we didn’t have that capacity, then we wouldn’t get the warning, and we wouldn’t have time to prepare.

Providing tornado notifications is one of these agencies’ most important tasks. The hierarchy of these alerts—watch, warning, emergency—is not an advisory about a tornado’s intensity but one about its likelihood and imminence. It’s all about time: A tornado watch means, in effect, that you may want to start to get ready if something bad happens; a warning means prepare for imminent danger because tornadoes have been identified in your area; the emergency declaration, though rare, means that you have no more time, and should take cover immediately.

Preparing for emergencies is always difficult; extreme climate events can overwhelm even the best-laid plans. But this challenge has been exacerbated by major staffing cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s and President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Today, about 40 percent of the 122 local forecasting offices of the NWS have significant staffing gaps. More than 10 percent of its 4,800 employees have left in recent months—either dismissed, retired, or bought out. Some of the usual predictive measures, such as the deployment of weather balloons and Doppler radar, many of whose experts and technicians have been fired or laid off, are now not available.

DOGE’s full impact on the nation’s disaster preparedness remains to be seen, but with hurricane season beginning on June 1, many observers are warning of fallout from serious staff shortages. . . .  Problems of staffing, capacity, and cuts demand more study as we enter another season of extreme weather. But what we already know is this: When we face the risk of a mass-casualty disaster, time is our most precious commodity. In this age, unfortunately, we can expect mayhem from all sorts of sources: cyberattacks, terrorism, active shooters, weather events, overburdened aviation systems, deadly viruses. A nation best prepares for a crisis not by ignoring it and hoping it never happens, but by anticipating it and planning for it.

The scientists at NWS and NOAA are in this time-management business. Their job is to measure how changes in the temperature of the air or the ocean interact with wind speed, and to recognize the patterns that signal potential danger—all to give first responders and communities more time to get ready for powerful storms, possible flash floods, damaging winds. That not only gives first responders the ability to know how and where to deploy resources; it also enables citizens to protect themselves, their family, and their property. This is where the precision of the alert matters . . . . Some of the most consequential recent changes to emergency management have been in this crucial capacity to buy more time.

These tech innovations and the NOAA project point to an essential fact: The private sector always has a part to play, but it cannot pick up the slack created by DOGE’s indiscriminate cuts, because these new developments still depend on data from government climate, seismic, and atmospheric programs. The dismantling of our nation’s early-alert and notification system is a dangerous gamble that is already affecting America’s citizens. Ultimately, this loss of capacity deprives us of vital time to seek safety from a catastrophic weather event that may be only seconds away.

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