DOGE, the Big Beautiful Bill and the 'Rich Men North of Richmond

 I was under the illusion that with Donald Trump back in charge and the wind at his back Washington Republicans might actually take off the gloves and say eff-it and take on the swamp.  With the failures inherent in the Big Beautiful Bill, it appears I was wrong.  I don’t blame Trump. This abysmal betrayal of the American people was written in the halls of Congress… 

The Republicans in Congress talk a good game, but when it comes to actually doing what they say they’re going to do, it turns out they’re really snake oil salesmen. Not that this is new.  Remember when they ran on killing Obamacare throughout Obama’s presidency then bungled it when Trump became president?

We’re now watching that same treachery play itself out in real time, and it involves the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that just passed the House. This monstrosity ostensibly does a number of good things.  It extends Trump’s 2017 taxes that were set to expire, it increases spending on border security and apparently it cuts federal support for Planned Parenthood.  All of these are good things… but they’re the equivalent of trying to save the Titanic by emptying water over the side one bucket at a time while a thousand gallons of water pour into the hull every second. 

What this bill doesn’t do is cut spending nor cut the deficit.  Indeed, it puts the deficit on overdrive, just as interest rates on government debt seem to be heading upward. The president’s advisor Steven Miller (who is one of the smartest guys in Washington) pushes back, by pointing out that Reagan’s tax cuts weren’t balanced by spending cuts.  True, but then Reagan didn't have, if I remember correctly, a national debt 125% the size of the GDP that needed to be serviced.

A small part of this problem has to do with the calendar.  The writing of this budget began back in December after it became clear the GOP would have both houses but before they were technically in complete control.  As such, this Frankenstein started being put together long before DOGE started showcasing exactly how dysfunctional the federal government is.  But that’s no excuse.  It’s been over 4 months since the Elon Musk managed vehicle started highlighting problems.

This One Big Beautiful Bill Act demonstrates exactly why the federal government is as screwed up as it is. They say that you can’t turn around a ship on a dime, and that’s true.  But there’s a difference between turning on a dime and setting a course, full speed ahead, for the closest iceberg. 

This bill literally adds $2.5 trillion to the government’s debt and runs a deficit larger than Biden’s last one!  At the same time it basically allows the government to go on, business as usual.  There are no major cuts to spending.  There are no elimination of departments.  There is no substantial paring of regulation.  There’s basically the same budget compiled by the Democrats, RINOs and the administrative state every year with infinitesimal changes except for the taxes.

This bill doesn’t reflect the will of the people, it reflects the will of the establishment and the swamp. 

If Congress really wanted to fix the budget they’d take to heart many of the recommendations and revelations from DOGE, as well as codify much of what Trump has done or tried to do via Executive Orders. Hell, it doesn’t even eliminate the Department of Education, something Trump explicitly ran on. 

This bill cuts $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s attempt to get everything, including the kitchen sink into the budget, including green energy, social spending and taxes on the rich.  Four billion sounds like a lot until you understand that the IRA is a $1.4 trillion boondoggle. 

The reality is, 2/3 of the federal budget, fully $4 trillion out of $6 trillion is wealth redistribution.  Even if you argue that Social Security isn’t that, which is mostly true, and remove it, you’re still looking at almost half the federal budget being wealth distribution of one sort or another.  How much of that is waste, fraud and abuse? 

Elon Musk had initially suggested that he thought $2 Trillion could be cut from the budget. He lowered that target to $1 Trillion and in the first 4 months of the year DOGE has done a yeoman’s job and cut $170 billion of waste. And that’s with just 100 people on staff and facing a bureaucracy of literally millions who scheme and obfuscate at every turn in order to maintain the cash pipeline.  Imagine how much a DOGE team of 1,000 could do!

But more than actual cuts, DOGE recommended things like personnel cuts, cutting green energy subsidies and of course cutting regulation.  But relatively little is actually being codified in law. That’s despite the fact that 67% of Americans support DOGE cuts of at least $1 trillion, 77% support looking at the entirety of the budget to find savings and 78% support cutting spending to balance the budget.  Indeed, so little is being cut that Elon Musk has announced that he will be stepping back to refocus his efforts on his companies and playing a much smaller role in political spending.    

Inspired by promises to cut spending, taxes and regulation, MAGA voters powered Republicans to win the White House, take the Senate and retain the House. They had the richest and possibly the smartest man in the world not only on their side, but knee deep in funding them, getting them elected and working around the clock to ferret out corruption and fraud in government. Plus, every day seemed to shine more light on the corruption of Democrat / swamp machine.  As a result of all of this Republicans found themselves the beneficiaries of the most passionate electorate America may have ever seen. They were on top of the world.  And what did they do with all of this momentum? Worse than nothing, they gave us Democrat lite.

No major regulatory cuts.  No major cuts to wealth redistribution programs. No departments and few programs actually eliminated. No reining in of the imperial judiciary seeking to derail Trump at every turn.  No, rather than listen to voters and take a sledgehammer to the twin albatross of regulation and spending they use a dull putty knife to create the illusion of actual progress.

Of course we all know why nothing ever changes in Washington. Politicians go to DC and most get sucked into the Georgetown cocktail party scene grift, into being invited to pontificate on Sunday morning shows and give speeches to groups of deep pocketed donors from industries over whom them hold a sword of Damocles.

The fact that Donald Trump didn’t care about any of that, wasn’t swayed by any of that is one of the things that made him so appealing. That’s the reason MAGA put him back in the White House…

Unfortunately for the country however, the GOP in Congress is led by swamp weasels Mike Johnson and John Thune, and Trump is Gulliver to their Lilliputians. They have no real interest in upsetting the grift applecart despite what America wants.  They put America First lipstick on a Business as Usual pig and call it progress.  If the GOP loses Congress next year, look no farther than its leadership.  Like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel before them, they are more interested in the trappings of leadership than actually solving America’s problems. Rich Men North of Richmond indeed.

President Obama's deleterious effect on America's work ethic.

The United States was built on the backs of hard working people. From pilgrims who survived an ocean’s journey and founded a colony at Plymouth to slaves who endured the blistering sun as they harvested cotton to settlers who braved temperatures, terrain and Indians to fulfill a Manifest Destiny, the United States was the product of people who worked like their lives depended on it. And in many cases, they did. In the 20th century however, other than a number of wars, and increasingly, simply living in intercity neighborhoods, most aspects of working in America don’t involve putting your life on the line in order to survive.

Today, America is still powered by work, in whatever form it takes, everything from building bridges to creating smartphone apps to finding investment opportunities. Work has created a foundation for the prosperity that has given the United States two centuries of greatness. Unfortunately, the very concept of work as something positive, something necessary, something that is part of a normal family’s existence, is slowly going away… and it’s no accident.

One wonders what someone could do to destroy the work ethic…

For starters, try two full years of unemployment benefits… although the longest period today has dropped to 83 weeks – a year and a half – President Obama had benefits up to an unprecedented 99 weeks in his first year in office. This, despite the fact that studies show that fully 1/3 of those receiving unemployment benefits find a job within one week of their benefits expiring, and a sizable number of the rest soon thereafter. This is not just an exercise in navel gazing… it has a real impact. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, despite offering between $9 and $20 per hour and a 7% unemployment rate, hundreds of employers cannot fill their open positions. Either they can’t find enough qualified applicants (thank you teachers’ unions) or the pay they are offering is simply not good enough to convince people to give up their unemployment benefits.

And unemployment benefits are not the only government program weighing on the work ethic. Then there is welfare. The GOP half of the Senate Budget Committee released a report last week that was astonishing: “Welfare spending per day per household in poverty is $168, which is higher than the $137 median US income per day.” To put that in perspective, those welfare benefits, including food stamps, housing, healthcare and child care amongst other programs, equal to $61,320 per year per household in poverty. That compares to the median US household income of $50,054 per year. And to add insult to injury, that $50,054 is taxable while the welfare benefits are not. A conservative 20% combined federal, state and local tax rate would bring that take home pay to approximately $40,000, fully 35% lower than the income from the household living in “poverty”.

Now of course liberals say that these numbers are skewed and that all those benefits don’t go to people living in poverty, but also go to people who are experiencing particular hardships. Perhaps, but isn’t that exactly what unemployment insurance is for? Should welfare benefits really be going to those who are not living in poverty? And of course, don’t forget, poverty in 2012 doesn’t mean what you might expect.

Then there is this nugget from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: While the economy has created 2.6 million jobs since June 2009, fully 3.1 million workers signed up for disability benefits. There is something staggering about the fact that for every one person who found a job in the last three years, there was another person who not only didn’t help grow the economy, but who sought support provided by people with jobs! It’s like you and a stranger going to apply for a job. You get the job and the stranger says he can’t actually work but wants to be paid out of your salary… You might not be surprised to learn that lax enforcement and fraud are part of the mix.

Finally there is this. It’s called the Labor Force Participation Rate. Essentially it’s the percentage of people 16 years of age and older who are either working or looking for work. (Those not in that number include students, retirees, those unable to work and those not looking for work.) For most of the last 20 years that number has been between 66% & 67%. Since President Obama took office that number has plummeted to 63.6%. That is the lowest level in over three decades. Fundamentally, what that means is that since President Obama was sworn in, fully 2.2% of the adult population of the United States has decided to exit the workforce. (Remember, that doesn’t include those who are looking for work…) That works out to be approximately 5 million people who have decided that they can get by one way or another without working… which means of course that someone else has to pay to support them.

Taken together these data are nothing less than catastrophic. A country that was built on sweat, ingenuity and perseverance is today foundering under the sheer weight of a segment of the population that sees either no need or no point in contributing to the prosperity of the nation. It’s no wonder that the economy is stagnating despite the infusion of over $5 trillion in debt over the last four years.

This is Margret Thatcher’s “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money” playing itself out in real life. Today we have fewer and fewer people getting jobs while we have skyrocketing numbers of people living off of government handouts. Unfortunately, a majority of voters just reelected a man who not only doesn’t see a problem with this, but who has been driving it. What’s worse, he’s using tax and regulatory policy to dissuade investors, entrepreneurs and businessmen from starting or growing the businesses whose jobs are supposed to support this lunacy in the first place. And of course forgotten in all of this is that work, in addition to providing a person with an income, also provides a feeling of dignity, independence and the pride in the fact that they are benefiting not only themselves but the society as a whole.  One has to wonder, when 2016 comes around will there be enough Americans left with jobs (or the memory of jobs) to derail this progressive train to oblivion?

When America needed a leader, Romney was a manager

As one who writes about everything political, one of the downsides of living in a state that is utterly unimportant from the Electoral College perspective is the fact that you’re insulated from much of the advertising campaigns that ravaged the battleground states. (From the perspective of a normal person however, that would likely be a blessing…)

I had friends who complained about not being able to get through an evening meal without getting robocalls. Others told of more campaign commercials than actual programming. I on the other hand saw one Barack Obama commercial during a nationally televised football game on Sunday and two Mitt Romney commercials the week before. Other than that, nada, the entire campaign.

That insulation from the billion dollar barrage skewed my perspective, at least as it relates to how the rest of the country was seeing this election. As a result, my prediction that Mitt Romney was going to win by double digits was… slightly off. I suggested that the polls were far from accurate for a variety of reasons from race to enthusiasm to undecided voters. By 8 PM on Tuesday it became clear I was lucky I had not bet my house on my prediction. I was wrong on every single point.

So how did I and so many others get it so wrong?

Maybe it was believing the hype about the effectiveness of the big dollars that drove the advertising I never saw. Romney did spend a lot, but it was money poorly spent. Why? Because he and his supporters outspent the Obama team across the board: In Ohio $97 million went to support Mitt while $90 went to support Barack Obama. In Virginia the numbers were $73 million vs. $65 million while in Florida they were $100 million vs. $78 million. And what did he get for all of that? Nothing. He needed those states and he lost all three.

Maybe it was ground game. This is art of getting your supporters to the polls but it’s often hard to see beforehand. And it’s particularly important in union stronghold states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, states Romney thought he would or at least could win. In all four Romney exceeded McCain’s 2008 totals, while the president underperformed his. It wasn’t enough. In a year where the enthusiasm gap was widely expected to favor the challenger the GOP failed in the closest thing to basic blocking and tackling, getting supporters to the polls.

Then there was Hurricane Sandy. As expected, turnout was down in reliably blue New York and New Jersey. The real impact, unforeseen by me however, was far beyond the storm. It was in the rest of the country where they were reading about it. Sandy did three things. One, she stunted Romney’s ascent and took him off the front page. Two, she kicked Benghazi to the back burner. Three, she gave the media a much desired backdrop upon which to project a very presidential Barack Obama.

These combined to help Mitt Romney lose the presidency. They do not however explain the surprise. That was something all together different: Enthusiasm. I for one expected GOP enthusiasm to be off the charts. It wasn’t. After four years of Barack Obama’s socialist policies one would have expected conservatives, Tea Party types, libertarians and Republicans to head to the polling stations with pitchforks and torches and ready to throw out anyone dressed in blue. Surprisingly, they did not. Indeed, Romney was not even able to get the same number of votes McCain did. Romney received two million fewer votes, despite having the worst economic recovery in a century and four years of progressivism against which to campaign.

At the end of the day, Mitt Romney lost because he did not sufficiently articulate why Americans should go out and vote for him. He is a good and decent man and he attracted 49% of the vote. But elections are about winning. A nation doesn’t need a manager who says “Vote for me because I’ll do a better job than that guy”, it needs a leader who says “Vote for me because I’ll do this and I won’t do that”. Barack Obama left Christopher Stevens as a sitting duck and in the end he and three other Americans died. Americans barely heard a peep about that from Mitt Romney. Barack Obama and Eric Holder have the blood of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American Border Patrol agent on their hands; again, crickets from Mitt Romney.

Millions of illegal immigrants cross into the country each year and Mitt Romney talked about “self deportation”. Obamacare is destroying jobs while the IRS is arming to enforce its mandates and Mitt Romney equivocated. The tax code costs Americans half a trillion dollars a year and restrains the creation of millions of jobs and Mitt Romney promises to fiddle with some opaque “middle class tax cuts”.

In 1964 Barry Goldwater said “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. In 2012 that was not a problem. Today’s adage might be “Milquetoast in the defense of liberty is no defense at all”. At a moment in time when Americans needed a man to arouse them and lead them out of the thickening forest of liberalism they instead got a man who wanted to discuss how to prune some low hanging branches. It should have been no surprise they chose to stick with Johnny Appleseed.

The November Choice: An election of historic proportions.

As I think about the election in November, I can’t help but think about Matt Ridley and his outstanding book “The Rational Optimist – How Prosperity Evolves”. In it he chronicles the evolution of human society and demonstrates a perfect understanding of why nations fail:

“Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialization”.

But then “governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

From Ancient Egypt to the Roman Empire to the Ming Dynasty to the Soviet Union, these and countless other entities collapsed under the weight of their own regulation, either from the state or the church.

One has to wonder where is the tipping point that harkens the descent of a nation into the chaos that inevitably leads to its end… and more importantly, where the United States is on that scale. If you imagine a spectrum with tyranny on the left and anarchy on the right, the Constitution of the United States was crafted so that the government be a fulcrum balancing the state between the two. It worked that way for a while.

For its first 125 years the government of the United States was largely reluctant to take over the lives of its citizens. Over the last century it has become far more enthusiastic in that pursuit, with a particular emphasis in the fifty years. As Ridley points out, this is not particularly unique among nations. The United States is unique however. It is the only nation that was established for the specific purpose of allowing its people to live in freedom. The Declaration of Independence clearly articulates that the rights of men are natural and are not bestowed by any government. The Constitution sought to codify limitations on the government’s ability to infringe on those rights.

As we all know, those Constitutional limits seem to resemble paper tigers more and more each day, from everything from Obamacare to ethanol mandates to eminent domain abuses. The question as it relates to November is, must the United States go the way of the Roman Empire or can it figure out how to save itself from the seemingly inevitable fate of states?

Rarely are voters presented with two so clearly different paths ahead. On the one hand you have Mitt Romney who is an unabashed fan of the markets and market solutions. While Romney may be tin eared in some respects – read RomneyCare – he has become an avowed advocate of government restraint. His selection of Paul Ryan demonstrates his intent to address the growth of government while that’s still possible.

While Romney may not have the libertarian leanings that many of us would like, he stands in stark contrast to the man he faces in November. Romney seeks to move the lever (the board that sits on the fulcrum) rightward to balance the scale of freedom closer towards the center, Barack Obama seeks to slam it to the left where government takes over every aspect of a citizen’s life and freedom and free markets become little more than a distant memory.

Not sure about that? A few points should demonstrate the truth of that statement.

More than one third of the American households receive income based welfare assistance from the United States government – that doesn’t even include Social Security! Barack Obama has actively sought to increase that proportion, including gutting the 1996 welfare reform that reduced welfare rolls by half, and embarking on an advertising campaign to increase food stamp rolls.

At the same time fully half the population pays no income taxes while the President suggests the rich are somehow taking advantage of the system. This despite the fact that the top 1% of income earners pay 37% of all income taxes yet take home only 17% of all income. At what point do the people in that 1% or 5% or 10% decide to take their money and play somewhere else? If just the top 10% of taxpayers emigrated, they would take with them 71% of income tax revenue.

Then there is the notion of success. The President famously told businessmen that “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." That gets to the core of what Barack Obama counts as success. To hammer the point home, a week later he held up General Motors as a stellar example of success, going so far as to suggest “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” Of course this success that Obama is so proud of was bought by pouring tens of billions of taxpayer’s dollars into the company.

Then there is the regulation. In his first three years in office Barack Obama issued 106 major regulations that will impact the economy by more than $100 million or more. This compares with 38 (a still too high number) by his predecessor. A President Obama not constrained by another reelection campaign will likely increase that number dramatically.

Whether in the form of the Ming Dynasty, 18th century France or modern Greece, Spain or California, history demonstrates clearly that when government grows to the point that it overwhelms the citizenry’s ability to operate with even the most basic level of freedom, particularly economic freedom, the house collapses. Romney was not my first choice for the next president, but at least he’s mostly committed to the notion of individual liberty and economic freedom. Compare that to the cleptocratic and authoritarian Obama and the choice is simple. One wonders if the Romans had the opportunity in 180 AD would they have been smart enough to put someone other than Commodus on the throne. We are at that same point in 2012. The difference is, we have a choice. The question is, will voters understand what’s at stake when they walk into the booth in November?

Capitulation & a Pork King... not a good start for the GOP

Voter turnout in the United States is an embarrassment. For a republic that is supposed to be the vanguard of democracy around the world, when 55% of eligible voters casting ballots is considered good, that's rather dismaying. Of course, seeing what happens when the uninformed vote, we may want to consider putting some hurdles in place. Perhaps we should force voters to pass the same test we require of immigrants seeking citizenship.

One reason voter turnout is so low is that many voters feel that regardless of who they vote for, nothing is going to change. Given the amount of time and energy that goes into picking candidates that might seem a bit odd. For federal offices campaigns can start two years before the actual election. Primaries start out sometimes with a dozen or more contenders that frequently represent a wide spectrum of ideas within the party. After months of back and forth voters in each party nominate their standard bearers to face off in the general election. (Sometimes it’s the case that the nominees are almost mirror images of one another, as happened in New York’s 23rd Congressional district in 2009.) The election is then supposed to decide between competing views and the victor heads off to Washington. Despite all of that effort every two years, many people feel like nothing ever changes.

The 2010 election was supposed to be different. Anyone with a pulse could see that 2010 was unusual. The Tea Party movement had taken on a life of its own and became a national story throughout the cycle. The mainstream media and much of the Democratic Party spent most of the cycle telling lies about the Tea Parties and spoofing their members. On the Republican side you had candidates tacking to the right in order to gain the support of various Tea Party groups.

When the dust settled on November 3rd one might have thought that the universe had been turned upside down. The Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate. In the matter of two years the Democrats went from having an overwhelming majority in the House to having the fewest seats they’ve held since 1947. They lost their filibuster proof majority in the Senate in January when the nominally Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts and on election day they lost six more seats. Come January 2011 one might imagine that America had actually turned off the Road to Serfdom and decided to pursue prosperity.

Then again maybe not… Unfortunately, if the events of the last week are any indication of what’s coming prosperity may be delayed somewhat. Two events demonstrate that the voters who abstain from voting because it doesn’t matter who’s in power just might be right.

The first involves the hierarchy in the House. On Wednesday the Republican Steering Committee assigned the chairmanship of the single most powerful committee in House: Appropriations. The House Appropriations Committee controls essentially all federal spending. Simply put, it doesn’t matter what Congress or the President say or do, if Congress doesn’t appropriate money for something, it’s not likely to get done, and almost all appropriations must come through the House Appropriations Committee. And so, in this atmosphere of change where voters stood up and demanded fiscal restraint, who did the GOP put in charge of the purse strings of almost 30% of GDP? One of the Young Guns who live and breathe fiscal restraint? No – although none of the three were on the Committee in the first place. A hardened veteran of the House with bonafide spending restraint credentials? No. Rather, John Boehner and the Steering Committee put Hal Rogers in charge. Who’s Hal Rogers? Just a 30 year house veteran known in his home state of Kentucky as the “Prince of Pork” for his success in sending American taxpayers money to the Bluegrass State. Just in the last three years Congressman Rogers secured 135 earmarks worth $246.4 million of your money. (He now claims he has seen the light and is swearing off earmarks…) If this isn’t a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse then the phrase has no meaning. In a universe where the government spends trillions of dollars it neither has nor should be spending in the first place, this appointment says much about what the GOP really stands for.

The second wound the GOP inflicted on America last week was the agreement with President Obama to extend the Bush tax cuts. While an extension of the tax cuts was important, the GOP needlessly gave away the farm in order to get it. Having come off a resounding victory where the country clearly voiced its desire for a change in direction and demanded a halt to government spending, there was no need for the GOP to capitulate to Democrat spending demands. Nonetheless, Mitch McConnell and his cronies did so and agreed to extend unemployment benefits for another full year - for a total of 3 years of unemployment benefits. What’s worse, before even making it to the House floor the bill has been loaded with an extension of ethanol credits (AKA subsidies to farmers), subsidies for energy efficient appliances and benefits for mass-transit employees. To an objective observer this is nothing but Washington as usual. The GOP had an opportunity to take a stand and send a clear message to the Democrats, and more importantly to the American people who will be voting in the 2012 elections. Had they demanded a clean vote on a full extension of the tax cuts, the Democrats, who still control both houses, would likely have refused or defeated it. Taxes would have then gone up on January 1st. At that point, with control in the House and a much stronger hand in the Senate, the GOP could have brought a clean bill to the floor and it would have passed. Despite his class warfare rhetoric, President Obama would have likely felt compelled to sign it. Either way, the issue would have brought to the fore a clarifying fight where the GOP would have won the day and eventually the cuts. But alas it seems that is not how things seem to work in Washington …

It’s often said that you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. Conservatives can only hope that that is not true for the GOP because if last week’s actions a precursor of two more years of go-along-to-get-along politics as usual, then Barack Obama is going to be a happy man as he is elected to his second term when conservatives stay home after rightfully concluding that there is really little difference between the parties. If such a disaster occurs the GOP should be laid to rest with Abraham Lincoln and America should look for a national Tea Party to help rescue the Republic.