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You Load Sixteen Tons And What Do You Get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a huge disappointment to those Republicans who want smaller government, less spending, and shrinking debt. But apparently fiscal conservatism is dead. Debt doesn’t matter. From a fiscal perspective, Republicans are now just Democrats with different spending priorities. Both now believe in big government. The public Treasury is the black bag, spewing bribes to voters; maximizing chances of reelection. It’s a sad commentary on the contemporary Republican Party that one has to look to Bill Clinton for the most recent example of fiscal sanity.
To paraphrase from 1966 and The Bobby Fuller Four…
I fought the Swamp and
The Swamp won
Published in General
I don’t think so, although I’m not likely to be around long enough to see any real turnaround, I think the effort to reduce the size and impact of big government will continue.
I never saw Donald Trump’s election as POTUS as a big boon towards reduced federal spending but rather as a way to deal with the shifts towards globalization that were gaining momentum. I think we are getting what I was hoping for in this first part and I think we can now make progress on the fiscal front.
Here’s a discussion of where we are now in terms of Trump’s campaign promises and some explanations of why the CBO positions are not informative of the actual future prospects that rarely get delivered to the public in the media.
I could make a prediction of who will attack this but I’ll skip that.
I sure hope you are right … but history tells me Lucy will pull the football away from Charlie Brown yet again. All the goodies are on the front end. Most of the savings are on the back end … conveniently after the next national election. Which is to say, never.
RE: “I never saw Donald Trump’s election as POTUS as a big boon towards reduced federal spending but rather as a way to deal with the shifts towards globalization that were gaining momentum. “
That’s my point. They are big government, big spenders … just Democrats with different spending priorities.
Donald Trump is helping Putin to destroy opposition to globalism.
Did you praise Brexit like I did, because you wanted Britain to remain a sovereign country that doesn’t have its fiscal, trade, and immigration policies surrendered to a monolith in Brussels? If you cheered Brexit on but oppose Ukraine’s wish to not have its fiscal, trade, and immigration policies surrendered to the Russian World run from Moscow, you are being inconsistent and are not to be trusted until you shake the cobwebs off.
This prompts me to a little story telling.
Yesterday, I had a short personal encounter with Brian Johnson who is Charles Schulz’s grandson. I told him about an exchange on Facebook I had seen between his mother, Schulz’s daughter, and another lady seeking book donations to replenish a supply for the USO reading room at the airport. Brian’s mother said she had some of her father’s works she could contribute and the other lady said she didn’t think they could use comic books. Brian laughed as I had at the lady’s total failure to see any seriousness in “Peanuts”. Brian said his grandmother was Lucy and I thought maybe his grandfather was Charlie Brown.
Maybe the seriousness gets lost when the written cartoon narrative is turned into video cartoons for children.
I sense some change in fiscal responsibility concerns as Trump has gained more experience in the midst of those in government focused on that topic.
Legalizing gay marriage in Ukraine is anti-globalist.
Not every post on Ricochet> nor every political act in America are about Ukraine and Putin.
If you cheered Brexit (i.e. the UK’s withdrawal from the EU) on but support Ukraine’s fiscal, trade, and immigration policies surrendered to the EU World run from Brussels, you are being inconsistent and are not to be trusted.
What did anyone really expect? The big four federal expenditures are the Department of Defense, Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the national debt. Since his first term, Donald Trump has said there is no way we are going to make any changes to Social Security or Medicare. I don’t recall him calling for Defense cuts, and he probably called for increases. There may (or may not) be many Republican legislators who do want to reform entitlements, but few have the guts to contradict Donald Trump.
Or, crucially, to contradict their own constituents’ wishes. There’s a reason why tackling entitlements in any serious way has long ago (i.e. long before Trump) come to be referred to as “touching the third rail”.
Everything is connected to everything. So, yes, every political act in America is about Ukraine and Putin, and about a lot more, besides.
It will happen when it becomes less contentious and gains the support of voters.
It’s tough, like when we allied with the Soviet Union to fight Nazism, and in the process became a little more like the Soviet Union ourselves. It was a tough choice, but it was the better choice. It is understandable that some of the people in Slovakia, etc., who are chafing under the yoke of Brussels, want to look to alternatives, like Russia. I think it’s a huge mistake that will have results the opposite of what’s intended, but it’s understandable that how they are reacting to the immediate concerns. Ukraine will have to deal with all of those issues, too, once it defeats the Russians and drives them out of its country. In the meantime, I don’t fault it for trying for all the EU cooperation and membership that it can get. I agree with those who think it’s by far the right choice. But let’s not imagine that there is a clearcut battle against globalism that is taking place on only one front. It’s globalism vs globalism. Fighting against the Great Powers Syndrome and its concept of Spheres of Influence is only one of the fights against globalism, although it’s the major one in eastern Europe.
Which may happen when instead of one big bill there are a number of smaller bills in which spending on A is not so easily held hostage to spending on B, etc. There seemed to be a movement in that direction before Trump announced that he wanted just one, big, beautiful bill. As far as I could tell, his announcement was in response to that reform movement.
I’ll agree to the connectedness but some things are small potatoes and some connections are made using invalid premises. What I have found interesting about Ukraine and Putin is the supporters of the military assistance to Ukraine claimed at the outset that Putin had intentions of military actions against other European countries and more recently claim now he cannot subdue Ukraine.
I align more with the latter but I think we have a military stalemate and I never thought Putin’s intention was much different from America’s in 1962 when the USSR put nuclear missiles in Cuba. Wonder what we would have done if those missiles had not been removed? But I’m a little old-fashioned and traditional.
Most likely, it will happen only after the excrement hits the fan, at which point the public will swiftly point their accusatory fingers at the very representatives for whom they kept pulling the lever for year in and year out, decade in and decade out (while simultaneously deploring the quality of Congress in general).
Ugh.
There is one word in this paragraph that you could change to make it into a true statement. Do you know what it is?
Social Security is (s) off-budget and (b) has its own, dedicated funding source. As such it does not contribute to either the debt or the deficit in any way (at least until the Trust Fund is exhausted) It does not belong as part of a discussion about debt and deficits.
Medicare/Medicaid should be a no-brainer. There is no way able bodied working age individuals should be garnering those benefits.
Far and away the wealthiest jurisdictions in America are Washington DC plus the adjacent zip codes in VA and MD. There is a reason for that. The Federal Government is hemorrhaging money.
That’s unfair to the Democrats. The Dems are brave and take tough votes and hold hands and run onto the beach, knowing that some will be lost and knowing that they have each others back, in order to achieve a big victory. Discipline in voting and messaging is not something the GOP has.
Part of trying to understand how the congressional budget process works when projecting its future effect on the national debt comes from estimates provided by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The personnel profile in that office is much like the Executive Branch bureaucracy. Surprise!
New Report Reveals Information on the ‘Nonpartisan’ Congressional Budget Office We Might Need to Know
But that only came about because the Democrats lost the House in the ’94 elections to GOP control for the first time in 40 years, due to the Gingrich Contract with America campaign, swinging some 50+ seats and ousting longtime powers like Speaker Tom Foley.
Now if the GOP of today could achieve a similar majority, maybe, just maybe, we could get somewhere. Not holding my breath.
True enough. But … These words were proclaimed by Clinton:
The era of big government is over.
And the spending showed it. Newt & Bubba. The good old days.
You mean like control of the House, Senate and presidency? They have that. What the GOP does not control is the members of the GOP.
Arguably, neither part of Congress is “controlled” unless they have filibuster-proof and possibly veto-proof majorities.
Maybe events and Democrat response will help that along.
Here’s a quote from the New York Post that reports on statements by the World Bank:
“The World Bank on Tuesday agreed with President Trump’s complaint that foreign countries engage in unfair trade practices with the US and urged the nations to ease their tariffs on American exports.
Top economists at the international institution, which helps finance low and middle-income countries, acknowledged that many nations do not provide reciprocal trade access to the US.
“This [situation] could not be sustained indefinitely,” the World Bank’s chief economist, Indermit Gill, said during a news briefing, the Washington Post reported.”
Couldn’t get link to work, need help.
https://nypost.com/2025/06/10/us-news/world-bank-agrees-with-trumps-trade-complaints-urges-countries-to-lower-tariffs-on-us/