The abominable budget

Short screed ahead....

As the Senate begins work on the budget in earnest, after a version of it squeaked through the House, the broad outlines are clear. In an effort to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts indefinitely, cuts which largely benefit the already wealthy, as well as to achieve Trump’s goal of goosing the Pentagon budget past the trillion dollar mark, Republicans are gunning for programs that serve ordinary Americans. These include, over the next decade, about three hundred billion dollars in reductions in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits for vulnerable families; well over half a trillion dollars in reductions in Medicaid spending, estimated to result in perhaps ten million people losing health insurance coverage; and another half a trillion dollar cut to Medicare. And because reality has a well-known liberal bias, Republicans have had to engage in a round-the-clock lie-a-thon to explain away the fiscal and social harms of their budget.

I’ve written many times before about the animating vision Republicans have pursued for decades — afflict the afflicted, comfort the comfortable — and how it reveals itself most clearly in the differences between basic life outcomes in red versus blue states. Paul Krugman recently came up with a succinct way of illustrating this. Noting a recent comment by now fully-MAGA-fied Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in which Bessent said Republicans’ goal for the country was for it “to be more like Florida and less like New York,” Krugman produced this chart, comparing basic measures of well-being in the two states:

To be sure, no one has expressed more succinctly the Republican vision for America than Iowa Senator Joni Ernst who, in response to complaints at a recent town hall about those proposed Medicaid cuts, waxed philosophical by averring that “we’re all going to die.” One thing missing, however, from the appropriate pillorying Senator Ernst has taken for her comments has been sufficient attention to the lie at the heart of her statement. Because apart from the basic truth that humans are mortal, the “we” in Ernst’s comment is itself a form of subterfuge. When this awful budget passes in some form, it will not include any cuts to the health insurance Ernst or her wealthy benefactors receive. And if you look back at the chart above, you will see clearly the only thing the Bessents, Ernsts and their ilk really care about — that top tax rate. People like them can expect to live long, healthy and comfortable lives, regardless of how degraded the social safety net becomes for everyone else. Consequently, making America more like Florida than New York makes America better in precisely the only way that matters to them — to make their own lives yet more comfortable, at everyone else’s expense.