Trump's Budget Bill is a Blueprint for Death and Destruction

This chart summarizes better than any verbal description can how trump’s obscene wrecking ball of a budget bill is all about taking from the poor to give to the rich.

And here are some quotes from around Substack that caught my eye yesterday:

Brad DeLong, economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley:

Immigrants have been tremendously overrepresented among America’s inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientific leaders, and their children have often risen to even greater heights. Closing the door to this flow, or even signaling that the welcome mat is being withdrawn, does not merely reduce the number of workers or students; it atrophies the nation’s capacity to renew itself, to adapt to shocks, and to remain at the cutting edge. The lesson from history is clear: societies that turn inward and stifle the inflow of new people and new ideas soon find themselves stagnating, outpaced by those that remain open.

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), interviewed by his former MIT colleague, economist Paul Krugman:

Most of the dollars of Medicaid don't go to the folks that the conversation is focused on. They mostly go to our moms and grandmoms who are in these institutions that need long-term care. States are going to have to decide who's going to suffer. They're about to lose a huge revenue source. Are they going to kick people off the coverage? Are they going to pay nursing homes even less? We already pay nursing homes way too little. Are they going to kick people off home care?

… And let's be clear, the public health infrastructure that RFK is gutting is not just vaccinations, those get the headlines. But if you think about it, we saw the public health system in action with COVID. It's information. He's gutting all the information we have about communicable disease and transmission. It's the kind of responses that make it possible to save people's lives. And we're losing all that infrastructure.

Former Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman:

In almost every way imaginable, Donald Trump’s second term is a purer expression of his personality and preferences than his first term was. Not only is he far less constrained — by the courts, by the law, by Congress, or by aides who might suffer an unfortunate attack of conscience — he has created a system in which his desires and predilections are translated into policy far more smoothly than before.

So it should not be surprising that a man who built a career on scams, cons, grifts, and swindles has fundamentally reoriented the US government’s approach to corruption. It isn’t just that Trump has ramped up his own personal self-dealing (though he most certainly has), or that his administration is tolerant of conflicts of interest in other officials (though it is). Just as important, Trump is enacting a sweeping set of policy changes that will make it more likely that Americans will themselves be the victims of all kinds of scams.

Gary Blumenthal, former Kansas State Representative, who now lives in Pennsylvania and began posting on Substack just three days ago:

Republicans have been trying to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare for generations. These are the same politicians who have always resented any expectation that they live up to their supposed Judeo-Christian values. It’s easier to sneer that the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the foster kids, the kids with cancer are somehow responsible for their misfortune. It’s easier to insist that billionaires deserve another trillion-dollar tax cut than to acknowledge that government has a moral duty to help people live with dignity.

But here’s what they never seem to grasp: when you rip insurance away from millions, you don’t make sickness go away. You make it everyone’s problem.

Emergency rooms will become overrun. Hospitals will cut services or close altogether. Prescription drugs will go unpaid. The costs of uncompensated care will skyrocket and eventually show up in your insurance premiums, your property taxes, and your community’s health crises.

And finally, Jim Stewartson, who writes on Substack under the title “Mindwar: The Psychological War on Democracy.” Stewartson asked Chat GPT to analyze two-and-a-half minutes of a demented word salad of a speech that trump gave on Thursday night in Iowa. For all the reservations I have about AI, what Chat GPT spat back is astonishingly dead on. To appreciate its incisiveness, I urge you to read it in full here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-167524553 But here’s its conclusion:

This speech displays disorganized, grandiose, and paranoid qualities that raise concerns about the speaker’s mental state. The patterns may be consistent with narcissistic traits, delusional thinking, cognitive impairment, or manic symptoms, but no clinical diagnosis can be responsibly made without a full assessment. Nonetheless, from a psychological standpoint, this style of discourse would be highly abnormal in most professional or clinical contexts.