Are Americans victims of political bait and switch? Immediate pain isn't what Republicans promised voters.

President Donald Trump promised immediate benefits, much of it on "day one"—cheaper eggs, lower inflation, peace in Ukraine. The war rages on. Egg prices have increased. Inflation, fueled by tariffs, is on the way up. But stocks, including Americans' 401-K retirement accounts, are way down.

Mr. Trump is now saying that Americans will suffer pain, but that it will pave the way for long term gains: "Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."

When people invest, they personally bear the costs of their better future—a lower short-run standard of living. The current national "investment" is being made at other people's expense, not at the personal expense of our wealthy leaders.

The immediate pain is real, but the gains will come slowly if at all. "Reshoring" cannot be done overnight. It takes years to develop skilled workers, create supply chains, and build new factories.

New factories require investments, but with constantly changing rules investors cannot know whether new factories will be profitable.

Accepting less now in order to get a better future is a classical definition of investment. An individual could work but chooses further education, living on very little in order to earn a better future living. Instead of spending all our income, we buy stock or bonds, increasing our future purchasing power.

But when people invest, they personally bear the costs of their better future—a lower short-run standard of living. The current national "investment" is being made at other people's expense, not at the personal expense of our wealthy leaders.

Indeed there is speculation that some leaders, or friends with whom they shared inside information, became even more wealthy buying stock options minutes before the announcement of the 90-day tariff "postponement" set off a one-day surge in the markets.

There is now pain all around the country. Thousands of federal workers are losing their jobs. Projects around the country and world are being discontinued, causing additional unemployment. When people lose jobs, they also usually lose medical insurance.

There are threats to eliminate medical care for millions of other Americans. Research into disease treatments and avoidance of future epidemics is being reduced.

Reindustrialization—encouraged by tax reductions for the rich and tariffs—will supposedly produce benefits that will trickle down to the men and women in the street. But trickle down benefits have been doubtful in the past, and could well be pure "vaporware."

A more certain way to improve the economy would be to distribute dependable government benefits—jobs, research, health insurance, even cash—right now, and allow consumer expenditures to bubble up to benefit industries that cater to people's actual wishes.

Cutting taxes for the rich, or giving the rich more ability to cheat on their taxes by whacking the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget, is trickle-down economics run wild.

These tax decreases for the wealthy will be partially paid for with income from higher tariffs. These tariffs will not be paid by foreigners, but by average Americans who purchase the imported goods. Tariffs are an indirect sales tax.

When private corporations employ bait and switch advertising, Americans are rightfully indignant and government regulators may try to outlaw it. Why should we accept similarly dishonest marketing by political entrepreneurs attempting to win elections?

Donald Trump clearly loves tariffs and would like to be considered a second President William McKinley—McKinley II. But the recent stock and bond market behavior, reflecting investors' cold-blooded analysis of Trump's policies, suggests that he could instead become Hoover II. (Republican President Herbert Hoover led the country into the Great Depression after signing a major increase in tariffs.)

Congressional Republicans should remember that, after Hoover, their party did not capture the White House again for 20 years. It was nearly that long before they again controlled Congress.

This is too bad. American political parties are both rife with bad ideas at the moment. Like Republicans, Democratic politicians have some bad ideas that need to be opposed by a responsible opposition party that can sometimes win elections.

In February, the economist Gabriel Zucman posted an absolutely stunning graphic online that depicts the wealth of America richest 0.00001% as a share of our nation’s total household wealth.

The share of American wealth held by the 19 lucky souls in this top 0.00001% now stands at 2%, a 10-fold increase from the share these deep pockets held over four decades ago in 1982. Collectively, as of this past December, these rich held $3.1 trillion of the country’s $146 trillion total household wealth.

If 2% doesn’t seem to you like all that much, consider that this $3.1 trillion amounts to one-50th of our country’s wealth. We have, of course, exactly 50 states. The 19 Americans in this top 0.00001% hold personal net worths ranging from $50 billion to $360 billion. They together control the same amount of wealth as an average American state—think Massachusetts or Indiana—with a population of about 7 million people.

And the growth of our top 0.00001%’s wealth share over the years has been geometric, not linear. If policy choices over the next 42 years allow the trend of the past 42 years to continue, our top 0.00001 percenters won’t merely increase their wealth share from 2 to 4%. They will be increasing their wealth share 10-fold, to about 20%.

Will what’s left of American democracy survive for much longer if this wealth-concentrating trend continues?

Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes.

Nearly a century ago, former Supreme Court jurist Louis Brandeis famously warned us: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

We’re now seeing the nightmare scenario Brandeis feared—an oligarchic subversion of American democracy—play out in real time. We can argue politely about whether any single billionaire represents a policy failure. But having our nation’s three richest billionaires—Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg—sitting front and center at the inauguration of a billionaire president sure looks like we have a president answerable to oligarchs, not America’s voters.

An extreme concentration of oligarchic-level wealth, Brandeis feared, can easily translate into an extreme concentration of political power. To believe that this concentration has not occurred here in the United States rates as totally delusional. Musk spent over $250 million on U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, less than one one-thousandth of his personal fortune, yet enough to overwhelm the campaign finance system.

Musk, maybe more significantly, used his control over a powerful social media platform, X, to promote Trump’s campaign. Bezos and another billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiung, demanded that the editorial boards of the newspapers they own, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, not run editorials endorsing Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Let’s remember that each of the country’s four wealthiest Americans—Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ellison—controls at least one major media outlet or social media platform.

Let’s also remember that Musk, nearly immediately upon Trump taking office, began making unilateral decisions that are leading to the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers, the termination of life-saving foreign aid, and, if lawsuits don’t prevent it, the dismantling of entire federal agencies.

Decades of policy failures have led to the concentration of wealth—and power—into so few hands that we are seeing our democracy crumble before our eyes. For nearly half a century, everything from wage and labor policies to antitrust enforcement and intellectual property and trade standards have been moving us in the direction of more concentrated wealth.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the federal minimum wage today stands at half its 1968 level. Over the past 50 years, union density has plummeted. The market power in virtually every major industry now sits massively concentrated in just a handful of giant corporations.

Against all these trends, tax policy remains our last line of defense, our firewall against the power of our wealthiest.

Think about things this way: Our policy choices in areas outside taxes—labor, wages, antitrust—all impact our national concentration of income. These policy choices drive the sharing of our country’s income between labor and capital and between consumers and businesses. And these policies have been driving an ever larger share of our nation’s income to those at the top.

Tax policy, by contrast, governs the conversion of income into wealth. Without taxation, necessary living expenses would cause income and wealth inequality to deepen over time—because those with smaller incomes must devote a larger portion of their income to basic living expenses. The passive income generated by the resulting unequal distribution of wealth—dividends and interest income, for instance—then proceeds to drive income inequality still higher in future years, causing the sharing of income remaining after living expenses to become even more skewed in favor of our richest.

With these dynamics in play, progressive income and wealth taxation becomes a necessary counterbalance to income inequality. Absent progressive taxation, income and wealth inequality will continuously worsen. The greater the level of income inequality, the more progressive the system of taxation necessary to counteract that concentration.

From this perspective, America’s tax policy choices have been an abject failure for nearly 50 years. Our top 1%’s share of our country’s income has more than doubled since 1980. Our tax system has become hugely less progressive. Regressive taxes like federal payroll taxes and state-level sales and property taxes have increased, while the gains from federal income tax cuts have flowed disproportionately to those at the top.

Between 1980 and today, the top federal income tax rate on paycheck income—the only substantial income that flows to most American households—has fallen by about one-fourth, from 50% to 37%. But the decline in the top income tax rate on dividends—income that flows primarily to major corporate shareholders—has fallen from 70 to 20%.

And these numbers just describe the surface of our current tax-cut scene. The investment gains of the ultra-rich compound tax-free until the underlying investments get sold. At sale, these gains face a one-time tax rate of 23.8%. That 23.8% translates into an equivalent annual tax rate that can run under 5%. And if a rich investor dies with billions of untaxed capital gains, all those gains totally escape any income-tax levy.

A tax system, to effectively contain the concentration of a society’s wealth, must contain a mechanism to tax either wealth itself, the income from that wealth, or the intergenerational transfer of wealth—or some combination of the three. America’s current tax system falls short on all these counts.

The income subject to federal income tax often represents only a fraction of the actual economic income that’s filling American billionaire pockets. Investment gains go untaxed unless and until investment assets get sold. The federal estate and gift tax system—originally intended to tax the intergenerational transfer of wealth—stands eviscerated by a combination of cuts and the refusal of Congress to shut down avoidance strategies that tax lawyers have fine-tuned and court decisions have blessed.

Today, even billionaires can avoid federal estate and gift tax entirely.

Here’s how undertaxed our billionaires have become: In a study commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, four economists at the University of California-Berkeley analyzed the tax payments of the richest 0.001% of American tax units, about 380 taxpayers in all, a total that roughly matches the annual Forbes 400.

In 2019, this study found, those 380 deep pockets ended up paying in taxes federal, state, and foreign just 2% of their wealth. The average tax burden between 2018 and 2020 for those in the top 0.00005%—some 90 tax units—amounted to just 1% of their wealth.

Meanwhile, between 2014 and 2024, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 grew from $2.3 trillion to $5.4 trillion, an average annual growth rate, net of taxes and consumption spending, of 8.9%. The wealth of just the top 19 on the Forbes list over these years grew at an annual rate of over 12%.

So do the math: Oligarchic wealth in America is growing at a rate that dwarfs the actual tax rate upon that wealth. The oligarchic cancer destroying American democracy is continuing—and will continue—to metastasize.

Unless we rise up.

The Trump administration has made a shocking claim: that it can declare living people dead to cut off their access to government benefits and the broader U.S. financial system.

According to reporting from The New York Times, the Social Security Administration (SSA), at the direction of DOGE, has begun knowingly adding living people to SSA’s death records—the Death Master File (DMF)—by assigning them false “dates of death” to “terminat[e]” their “financial lives.”

Being wrongfully identified as dead in Social Security records “can lead to benefit termination… and severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals.” Because the DMF is leveraged by many federal and state agencies to determine eligibility—and by the Treasury Department’s government-wide “Do Not Pay” system to prevent improper payments—false inclusion of a death date can lead to an individual losing their health coverage through Medicare, having their tax return delayed, or having their Social Security or other eligible benefit payments cancelled, among other harms.

There is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.

The DMF is also used by some private-sector companies with a legitimate business or anti-fraud need for the data—including financial institutions, credit agencies, insurance companies, and pension administrators. As a result, being inappropriately listed as dead can result in severe financial consequences like disruption in bank account access, credit cards being cancelled, pension benefits being paused, insurance coverage being cancelled or claims being denied, rejected employment applications, or denial of credit.

The first group of people to be wrongfully and knowingly declared dead by the Trump administration are reportedly being targeted in an immigration enforcement effort focused, at least in part, on people who were lawfully present and eligible to work until the Trump administration abruptly terminated their lawful status. These individuals would have been correctly issued Social Security numbers (SSNs) upon obtaining their lawful immigration statuses, and any change in those statuses should not limit their access to their own financial resources in U.S. banks.

The Trump administration made an unsupported claim that everyone in the initial group had either links to terrorist activity or criminal records. But an internal review by SSA staff that focused on some of the youngest targets—including children as young as 13 years old—“found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions.” The administration’s unproven claim follows its other wildly inaccurate and widely debunked claims about Social Security—including false claims that people who are 150 years old receive Social Security payments and that 40% of calls to Social Security come from fraudsters, when evidence suggests the percentage is “minuscule.”

It is deeply concerning that the administration is knowingly falsifying records. While SSA has the legal authority to collect information about people’s deaths to administer Social Security, there is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.

Moreover, it’s unclear how an individual could have themselves removed from the list if being dead is no longer the sole criterion for being included on the DMF. Recognizing that wrongful inclusion in the DMF can be “devastating” to individuals and their families, SSA has taken steps under previous administrations both to reduce the chances of such mistakes and to resolve them as quickly as possible. Previously, when a person was included in error in the DMF, they had only to make the straightforward case that they were alive, something that could be achieved with identification documents and an in-person visit to a Social Security field office. In this case, without transparent guidance on what circumstances other than death would result in inclusion on the DMF, and without a clear process for appeal, there is no longer a clear pathway to proving that the inclusion was in error.

This claim of unbounded power is made all the more concerning by the lack of effective oversight at SSA. The Trump administration has already dismissed the acting Social Security inspector general without cause and pushed out many nonpartisan career officials, reducing oversight and guardrails. And there are reports that staff objections to the legality of falsifying death information in SSA data have already directly led to the removal of at least one agency senior executive.

As SSA and DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) prioritize carrying out this reckless and seemingly illegal action, it serves as just one more example of the Trump administration’s failure to protect Social Security, including undermining core systems that are critical to running the program. At a time when the administration should be doing everything it can to reassure seniors, people with disabilities, and others who receive Social Security benefits, it is instead making deep cuts to SSA staffing, leading to overworked and understaffed field offices and degrading customer service and the reliability of SSA systems; proposing and then partially walking back the unnecessary elimination of phone services, leading to confusion and unnecessary burdens on seniors; and now falsely labeling people as dead in SSA databases.

As darkness falls in one of the most densely populated strips of land in the world, residents of Gaza wish the night had never come. The deafening sound of fighter jets comes first. Then the bombs that detonate, igniting fires which often propel debris at high speeds onto tents or people sheltering in rubble and the few structures that remain.

"Save our children from this hell," writes Salma, a mother of two, as her daughter screams in terror, when another Israeli fighter jet flies overhead. "Do you know how painful it is to see your daughter cry in terror and have no way of protecting her?" she asks rhetorically.

Like every parent in Gaza I've come to know through GoFundMe efforts, Salma wants one thing and one thing only: for the war on her children to stop. For the constant bombing, fear, death, starvation, and displacement to end. Since Israel broke the cease-fire on March 18 and resumed its quixotic quest to root out Hamas, an estimated 1,630 more people have been killed and 4,302 wounded. The United Nations says 100 children have been killed or injured every day. On the day the cease-fire broke, 183 children were killed, according to Al Jazeera.

Mix constant displacement, the lack of permanent housing, schooling, and healthcare, and children in Gaza are being deprived of their childhood.

Salma, a widow, and her two children live in northern Gaza, but it's the same everywhere—for those living in tents in the al Mawasi refugee camp in southern Gaza and those living on the streets in Gaza City. On the same night Salma's daughter screamed in terror, Israel ordered people to evacuate neighborhoods in Khan Younis in the south. Mohammed Samir Elnabris, whose story I shared in December on these pages, writes:

I wish night had never come. A difficult night, just like the nights that preceded it, but this night the tension, anxiety, and anticipation are heightened due to the evacuation notices issued to the area surrounding us. Reconnaissance aircraft of all types are constantly in the sky, accompanied by warplanes at very low altitudes. It's pitch black, and terror and fear grip our hearts, along with the sounds of children crying, terrified by the sounds of bombs. People fleeing their homes, fearing bombardment, are crowding in after being forced to evacuate in cold, stormy weather in pitch darkness.

Another message comes in from someone I don't yet know:

The situation is very dangerous, beyond description, beyond all thought. People are living in a state of shock, {with} death, bombing, loss, hunger, crying, suffering, and misery. My daughters are still very scared from every bombing. Get the message across and talk about us to help us survive. Please don't leave {us} alone in this conflict that seems like it will only end with us all being killed and exterminated.

The U.N. human rights office warned late last week that "Israel's actions in Gaza are increasingly endangering the existence of Palestinians as a group."

"In light of the cumulative impact of Israeli forces conduct in Gaza," Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, told reporters, "we are seriously concerned that Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group."

In short, genocide, as U.N. experts and others began to accuse Israel of as early as November 2023. "Time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe," the experts warned then. Except for a short cease-fire in late November of 2023 and another from approximately January 20 to March 18 of this year, the genocide continues while the U.N. takes note and the U.S. and most of the E.U. offer unconditional support.

But it's not just relentless bombing that parents face in trying to protect their children, it's also staving off infections when immune systems have been weakened by the lack of nutritious food. Israel resumed blocking all humanitarian aid on March 2. A week later they cut off electricity to the last operational desalination plant for drinking water.

The same night Salma and Mohamed and millions of other families were subject to another night of relentless bombing, Rasha, the mother of another family I've come to know through GoFundMe, sends out a "distress call" to all her contacts. Her one-year-old son, also named Mohammed, is running a fever. Doctors told her he had severe infections in his ear and throat and needed antibiotics. "But the cost is very high," she said, "because of the lack of medicine and closure of crossings."

"He needs healthy food," she added, "and all of this is very expensive. Please, my friends, my heart aches for him. Do not leave my child in this condition, he needs you."

Rasha and her family are again living in a tent in the densely packed al-Mawasi camp on the coast. They'd hoped to rebuild their home in Rafah, but Israel recently cut off the city from the rest of Gaza vowing to vigorously expand control of the territory. They don't know if they'll ever be allowed to return.

Mix constant displacement, the lack of permanent housing, schooling, and healthcare, and children in Gaza are being deprived of their childhood. Marz, a father of three, ages eight, five, and three, who once owned a clothing store in Gaza City, sends a devastating message on the same night of the bombing that impacted so many families. He says the family is now living on the street after their tent was destroyed. "Is there anyone who hears my family's voice? I am speaking to your human hearts to stand by us. We are now living a harsh journey of displacement without a permanent and real home. My children, Issam, Mohammed, and Jude, are living an indescribable catastrophe. Please help us. We are in urgent need of your kindness and humanity."

Over 200 people have donated to his family since the start of the genocide, but their collective good will is no match for a world unwilling to let Gaza's children have a childhood.

The United States is witnessing a collapse in travel and tourism from Europe, often based on a fear of what could happen when the U.S. border is reached. Many Europeans are refusing to purchase U.S. products and services in protest against the Trump administration. Solidarity is also being expressed for U.S. university professors and students in the wake of crackdowns on academic freedom and free expression on campuses across the country.

As an American in Europe, and as someone who has consistently and publicly pointed to Trump’s obvious anti-democratic ideology, I completely understand these reactions. There is justified outrage over what is happening right now in the U.S.

This justification, however, cannot hide an uncomfortable truth. Namely, that Europeans (and many of my fellow Americans) have for decades been more than happy to ignore state violence and the abuse of human rights committed by the United States so long as the victims were poorer people in “other” parts of the world, or poorer people in marginalized sections of U.S. society.

The U.S. has the death penalty, the application of which had been proven to be overtly discriminatory and racist. The U.S. has a long history of supporting regimes engaged in human rights abuses, including the suppression of academic freedom. The U.S. has for decades interfered with democratic elections across the globe, often subverting the will of the people. The U.S. destroyed Iraq in the interests of oil. The Obama government convicted more whistleblowers than all other U.S. administrations combined, and he also engaged in the wide-scale use of “extra judicial” drone warfare that led to the deaths of large numbers of civilians, including children. During his first administration, Trump passed a “Muslim Ban.”

Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.

These things, it seems, were tolerable to many European democrats. But when U.S. actions impacted Europeans coming to the U.S., caused damage to the European stock market or led to Europeans being denied jobs or research grants? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.

And therein lies an even more uncomfortable truth. That Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.

I was a PhD student in Texas on September 11, 2001. I witnessed how my country (and the UK) engaged in the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis as U.S. media (and many U.S. citizens) cheered the grotesque killing. As would become apparent, these were citizens who not only had nothing to do with September 11, but their country wasn’t even involved.

The Western reaction? A collective shoulder shrug.

Did European travel to the U.S. collapse? Did European universities call for an academic boycott of U.S. higher education and academic journals? Was there a call to end research collaboration? Did academics stop attending conferences in the U.S.? Did citizens boycott U.S. products? No. Europeans were happy to travel to the U.S. as soldiers slaughtered civilians in Iraq and the government passed the Patriot Act (allowed for mass surveillance).

Why? Because the people being killed, surveilled, stopped and searched at the airport were Muslims or other minorities, not Christian families from London, Stockholm, or Frankfurt on their way to New York or Disneyland. The Iraqi stock market crashed, not Spain’s. The slaughter in Gaza is a stain on global humanity, only made possible by U.S. weapons and financing. I have yet to hear a call for cutting cultural or political ties with the U.S. over this ongoing atrocity. If we are being completely honest with ourselves, we should at least admit that, because of its massive global reach, boycotting the U.S. would have a major impact on our daily life in ways that boycotts of other nations simply do not. So we do not do it.

My argument is simple. If we want to understand the political and material conditions that make anti-democratic movements like Trumpism possible, then we must openly and honestly confront how our own apathy about the violation of the rights of the weakest in society can be exploited and expanded to later violate the rights of groups usually seen as “safe” from such exploitation.

There is plenty of blame for Trumpism to go around. That sometimes means a painful look inward.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern, Streaming Later:

On TMI, hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan tackle President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, centered on his vow to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants. Immigration attorney Allen Orr joins to dissect the practicality of this audacious plan, navigating the legal quagmires and logistical nightmares. Recent reports estimate ICE’s capacity at just 300,000 detentions annually—can Trump’s team scale up to meet his target amidst strained resources?

The conversation shifts to a high-profile case rocking headlines: a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, despite a Supreme Court order demanding his return. News outlets note the administration’s defiance, raising the stakes—can Trump ignore the nation’s highest court without consequence?

The hosts also confront the plight of alleged gang members, like those swept up in ICE’s recent “Operation Safe Streets,” deported without due process. Stories reveal thousands branded as gang affiliates based on flimsy evidence, leaving lives in limbo. Is there any path to justice for those denied fair hearings? Most alarmingly, Trump’s provocative claim—made in a widely circulated Mar-a-Lago speech—about deporting U.S. citizens he dislikes to El Salvador ignites a firestorm.

Legal scholars cited in recent articles call it a constitutional nonstarter, but could executive overreach make it reality? With families shattered, court orders challenged, and the very notion of citizenship under siege, this episode lays bare the raw human and legal toll of Trump’s deportation juggernaut. Will it reshape America’s future, or collapse under its own weight? Join Rall, Chan, and Orr for a gripping, no-holds-barred analysis of a policy driving national division. Don’t miss this urgent exposé that pulls no punches, revealing the chaos and consequences of a nation at a crossroads. Tune in to uncover what’s really at stake!

The post TMI Show Ep 118: “Decorations Ramping Up” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

• U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have expressed an interest in selling off the U.S. Postal Service to for-profit corporations. Even piecemeal privatization of this public agency would have wide-ranging effects on postal customers, employees, businesses, and our broader economy. One nearly certain result: a dramatic increase in package delivery prices.

Unlike the for-profit carriers, the Postal Service has a universal service obligation to provide affordable deliveries to all Americans, regardless of where they live or work. Currently, USPS parcel rates are about 25% to 60% below FedEx and UPS prices.

Would we want for-profit corporations handling our ballots?

Without competition from this public service, for-profit firms would jack up delivery fees on as many customers as possible. Who would be hit hardest? Most likely those who live or work in ZIP codes where private carriers already impose surcharges because deliveries to these addresses are less profitable.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that UPS and FedEx area surcharges now apply to retail customers sending parcels using their own packaging to addresses in ZIP codes where 102 million Americans live. Not surprisingly, these include addresses in Hawaii, Alaska, and rural and remote areas. But they also cover many small towns and neighborhoods just outside major cities.

UPS and FedEx charge around $43 extra for shipments to Alaska and about $15 extra for deliveries to Hawaii and remote areas where nearly 4 million Americans live. The private carriers slap “extended area surcharges” of $8.30 on home deliveries in rural ZIP codes with a combined population of 35 million. Residential delivery surcharges run a little over $6 in suburban and small-town ZIP codes where 19 million people live.

Unlike the public Postal Service, the private carriers also impose extra charges for Saturday delivery, for fuel (based on distance), for package pickup, and for residential delivery. These charges reflect the higher costs for companies that, unlike USPS, aren’t already visiting every address six days a week.

Today’s higher FedEx and UPS delivery rates are just a taste of what would come if the Trump administration succeeds in privatizing USPS. In fact, Wells Fargo recently published a postal privatization plan that recommends hiking USPS parcel delivery rates by 30% to 140%. Their aim: to fatten up the hog before selling off this lucrative part of the postal business. Private carriers could also flat out refuse to deliver to far-flung addresses.

On top of higher delivery costs, rural communities would suffer the most from other impacts of a for-profit model. For instance, they would likely face the shuttering of many post offices and the related loss of postal jobs that pay decent wages with benefits.

Rural residents also rely heavily on USPS to deliver prescriptions, since many small-town pharmacies have shut down. The Postal Service also handles mail order prescriptions for military veterans, more than a quarter of whom live in rural areas.

During the 2024 general election, the Postal Service delivered more than 99 million ballots to or from voters. Rural voters rely particularly heavily on the mail-in option because physical polling sites are often long distances from their homes. Nationwide, half of rural county polling sites serve an area greater than 62 square miles, compared to just 2 square miles for urban sites. Would we want for-profit corporations handling our ballots?

Over its 250-year history, our public Postal Service has continually reinvented itself in response to changes in technology and the evolving needs of our society. Rather than selling this public treasure off to the highest bidder, we should explore opportunities for strengthening the Postal Service to deliver even better services in the 21st century.

In addition to the growing package delivery market, there are many opportunities for generating new revenue. For example, USPS could provide additional financial services, such as low-fee ATMs and check cashing. It could work with state and local governments to gather data on public safety and environmental risks through monitors on delivery vehicles. It could follow the models of some foreign postal services by providing check-in services for elderly and disabled residents.

With its extensive and valuable human resources and infrastructure, USPS has a strong foundation on which to continue providing a vital public service for all Americans for generations to come.

I was at an event last week where a prominent GOP pollster who often appears on CNN was discussing the details of U.S. President Donald Trump’s political profile as we approach the 100-day mark of his administration. The back and forth was interesting to me and my fellow political nerds. However, during the presentation, my inner voice sounded like Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “This is not normal.”

Unfortunately, far too many political insiders are acting as if Trump is a normal if a little eccentric president. They think that they can negotiate with him on issues and influence his staff to move him in their direction. No matter what Trump does, they see it as just a negotiating tactic.

April 14, 2025 should go down in American history as the day when Trump’s steps in the direction of authoritarianism made it clear to all that this is not a normal presidency. After Monday’s events, there can be no more debate about what Trump is and where he is taking America.

Let’s break down what happened. In a meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, President Trump openly defied a 9-0 Supreme Court decision that said that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, must be returned to the United States. As The New York Times put it:

The meeting in the Oval Office on Monday was a blunt example of Mr. Trump’s defiance of the courts. The president and his top White House officials said the decision over Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, would have to be made by [El Salvador President] Mr. Bukele.

If this was not enough, President Trump went on to outline plans for sending American citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador. More from The New York Times:

President Trump just said he was open to sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to President Bukele’s prison in El Salvador. Trump had a similar response when Bukele first offered to jail convicted American criminals in February.

“I’m all for it,” Trump said, adding that his attorney general was studying whether the idea was legally feasible. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem, no,” he said, adding: “I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people.”

Another sign that we are in a constitutional crisis happened just outside the Oval Office on Monday. President Trump had barred The Associated Press from covering certain White House events because they had refused to use his preferred nomenclature for what the White House refers to as the “Gulf of America.” Last week, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore AP access to White House events. The federal judge who ruled in this case was Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee. In his decision, McFadden wrote that:

No, the Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints... The Constitution requires no less.

On Monday, the White House blocked the AP reporter from attending the Oval Office press conference with President Trump and Bukele. Again, Trump failed to obey a court order.

Now, barring a reporter from the Oval Office may not seem to be a big deal. However, it is the government telling the media what it can report on. Plus, the courts ruled directly in the AP’s favor. The lines are clearly drawn here.

President Trump in the Oval Office on Monday openly defied decisions of the judicial branch. One was a 9-0 ruling of the Supreme Court and the other ruling was by a federal judge he appointed. As a nation, we are clearly in a constitutional crisis. This is not something theoretical or something that might happen sometime in the future. The crisis is at hand. The fabric of the American republic is being torn in two.

What we need is bold opposition from Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. If the current leadership is unwillingly to respond, they need to step aside. The first action that each of us can take to protect the American experiment is to stop pretending that Trump is a normal president.

This week was the week that our 2024 taxes were due in order to fund the fiscal year 2025 federal budget and thus our nation’s priorities. This year’s budget represents the final Biden budget. It comes at a time when our country is in a deliberate state of chaos instituted by the current administration. Under the non-elected efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency and current cabinet, we find punitive and seemingly random disjointed cutting of essential services and vital programs in addition to international aid that cuts to the core of who America is.

U.S. Congress has just passed a budget resolution requiring $1.5 trillion in savings to be realized over the next 10 years. Ultimately, budgets are moral documents. How do the current cuts, in addition to planned cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, address our needs and follow a moral compass? How does funding nuclear weapons factor in when addressing our needs and priorities?

This year’s federal tax expenditure for all nuclear weapons programs will be $110,344,000,000. This figure was released on Tax Day in this year’s U.S. Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project. That amounts to $3,499 per second. This year will see an increase of roughly $15.8 billion over FY 2024. Congress prides itself in being fiscally responsible. Yet when cities like Detroit are spending over $114 million on nuclear weapons programs, Atlanta over $245 million, Chicago over $961 million, and the impoverished Navajo nation of roughly 113,000 people are spending over $18 million, where is the rationale, fiscal responsibility, and sanity?

Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated.

The continuation of this out-of-control escalation is fueled by the myth of deterrence with dramatic increases in weapons delivery systems and missile defeat and defense expenditures. The latter is the present day version of former President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or “Star Wars.” Today’s version continues the elusive and easily outfoxed goal of hitting a bullet with a bullet to defend us coupled with a complex early detection system. With roughly 12,331 nuclear weapons in today’s global arsenals, the world remains closer to nuclear war than at any point in the past 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts our current risk at 89 seconds to midnight and nuclear Armageddon. That risk assessment comes from the current geopolitical turmoil; climate change; and evolving disruptive technologies that increase the risk of nuclear war either by intent, miscalculation, or accident presenting a very real and present danger. Everything and everyone we care about is threatened with the distinct possibility of ending the human race.

Ultimately, the only way to prevent a nuclear war is to abolish these weapons. Unlike a nuclear missile that cannot be recalled after launch, the nuclear arms race and existing arsenals can be reversed and nuclear weapons can be eliminated. What is needed is the political will. The people need to speak, and when the people lead, the leaders will follow.

Fortunately, there is a U.S. grassroots movement, Back From the Brink, bringing diverse communities together to eliminate nuclear weapons. This movement calls on the United States to take a leadership role in bringing together the world’s nuclear powers to negotiate a time-bound, verifiable, and complete elimination of all nuclear weapons. It includes four precautionary measures to safeguard against nuclear war until that goal is achieved. These include renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S. president to launch a nuclear attack; taking U.S. weapons off of hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Anyone can endorse this campaign. Presently 495 organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 430 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress have endorsed this campaign.

Last week Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) introduced U.S. House Res. 317, which lays out how we can fundamentally reform U.S. nuclear weapons policy and achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. In addition to supporting the policy points of Back From the Brink, this resolution supports: the maintenance of a de facto global moratorium on nuclear testing, protecting communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons by fully remediating their deadly legacy of environmental contamination past and current, and actively pursuing a just economic transition for the civilian and military workforce involved in this entire nuclear cycle.

We have the answer to realize significant cost savings, while simultaneously promoting sound fiscal policies that benefit us all. With life itself hanging in the balance we all must demand a meeting with our legislative leaders, urging them to endorse this legislation. If they refuse, we must ask why they are willing to put everything at risk?

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that taxpayers would pay $3,498,985.29 per second for nuclear weapons this year. The actual figure is $3,499 per second. The piece has been updated to reflect this.

Is the Trump Administration secretly waging war on senior citizens? A suspicious new trend suggests they’re passive-aggressively piling on extra hurdles to snag Social Security benefits—bureaucratic hoops and red tape that’d make even the sprightliest grandma groan. Why the sudden change? Maybe it’s a cunning ploy by the president, a self-proclaimed beacon of physical fitness, now teamed up with health nut RFK Jr. Could this be their bizarre masterplan to Make Elderly Codgers Limber Again (MECLA)? Forget bingo and rocking chairs—Trump might want seniors doing jumping jacks to prove they’re worthy of their checks!

The post Trump’s Sneaky Social Security Plot Exposed appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Taxes are complicated. That’s why every spring I hand everything over to my accountant.

Federal tax policy is even more complex. Trying to figure out how the Republicans’ current plan to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act they passed in 2017—which blew a $1-trillion to $2-trillion hole in the federal deficit—would impact taxpayers is beyond even my trusty accountant.

There are federal agencies and nonprofit think tanks that have done a good job crunching tax cut extension numbers, but most people are not aware of their work. They have to rely on the news media for that information, and to be sure, news outlets have accurately reported that the GOP tax cut extension—which expires after this year unless Congress acts—favors the uber wealthy. Most reporters also have cited the Congressional Budget Office or another reputable source that have calculated that the tax cuts would cost the government $4.6 trillion in lost revenue over a decade, bolstering the GOP’s trumped-up rationale for dismantling “unaffordable” federal agencies and programs. For the most part, however, the news media have failed to spell out the damning details.

This column is going to provide those details—and they’re going to piss you off.

Big bucks for the top 1 percent

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has been tracking the ebb and flow of the Republican tax cut extension plan. It posted its most recent updated analysis on April 11, which included a very informative bar graph. But the center buried some pertinent data in an end note at the bottom of that chart, so I asked an information designer to create a chart that clearly shows how households in different income brackets would be affected.

If the Republican-controlled Congress succeeds in extending the tax cuts, which everyone received to some extent due to the original 2017 law, income taxes would stay roughly the same, providing a windfall for the 1 percent of households that make more than $1 million a year. If the GOP fails to extend the cuts, taxes would go back to where they were before. That would especially hit the wealthiest Americans, whose taxes would help replenish government coffers and short-circuit the Republicans’ longtime goal of privatizing most government functions.

What the numbers plainly show is that the 1 percent of households that make more than $1.14 million annually would continue to receive an average tax break of more than $77,000, while households making between $66,800 and $119,200 would receive an average tax cut of only $1,120. Households making less than $66,800 would on average save only $500, while the poorest households—those earning less than $34,600 a year—would be rewarded with an average tax break of a measly $120. (At the same time, Trump’s tariffs could cost the average household $4,700 a year, according to new analysis by the Yale Budget Lab, wiping out the tax break for as many as 90 percent of households.)

Many Democrats, including Joe Biden when he was in the White House, wanted to extend the tax cuts, but only for households making less than $400,000 a year. At a House Rules Committee hearing on February 24, Jim McGovern (Mass.), ranking Democrat on the committee, offered amendments to cap the tax cut extensions at various income levels—first for households earning less than $400,000 per year, then less than $1 million, $100 million, and $1 billion per year.

All of McGovern’s amendments were voted down along straight party lines. Five of the nine Republicans on the committee who rejected the amendments are millionaires. The richest, Ralph Norman (S.C.), has a net worth of $66 million. The next wealthiest Republican on the committee, Virginia Foxx (N.C.), has $6.9 million. Two of the four Democrats on the committee who voted in favor are millionaires—McGovern himself, with a net worth of $3.4 million, and Mary Gay Scanlon (Pa.), with a net worth of $9.35 million.

Millionaires are shaping tax policy in their favor

Norman, Foxx, McGovern and Scanlon are hardly outliers. Roughly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, including about two-thirds of senators. By contrast, only 6.6 percent of Americans have that kind of money. Do wealthy legislators protect their class interest? A number of them do.

For example, the committees that drafted the tax bills the House and Senate recently passed (with no Democratic support) setting the stage for extending tax cuts are studded with Republican millionaires, according to a February report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). Besides the tax cut extension, the bills would lower corporate tax rates, exempt tips from taxes, and allow new car buyers to deduct their auto loan interest payments. All told, the Trump tax package could cost between $5 trillion and $11 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

ATF found that the average net worth of the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee is nearly $15 million. More than two-thirds of the 26 Republican members of the House committee and nearly two-thirds of the 13 Republicans on the Senate committee are millionaires, and nine of the 36 GOP members on the two tax-writing committees are worth more than $10 million. The wealthiest Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, Vern Buchanan (Fla.), is worth $249 million. The richest Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Johnson (Wis.), has a net worth of $54.6 million.

“The multimillionaire Republicans in charge of these key committees cannot properly represent average Americans’ tax and spending interests,” said ATF Executive Director David Kass in a statement. “Their prioritization of extending Trump’s tax scam demonstrates their disconnect from middle- and working-class constituents’ needs.

“While wealthy Democrats also serve on these committees,” he added, “they aren’t promoting continuing the entire Trump tax legislation which primarily benefits rich individuals like them and giant corporations—legislation that would add trillions to the deficit and threaten funding for Social Security, healthcare, education, housing and other vital public services.”

Ninety years of GOP attacks on progressive federal programs

The GOP’s current push to extend tax cuts is just the latest round of the party’s 90-year campaign to eliminate government programs based on a misguided belief that the private sector can take care of just about everything besides the military.

In the 1930s, the GOP tried to kill Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in its crib. Thirty years later, it opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, notably Medicare, Medicaid and federal education funding. Richard Nixon cut funds for anti-poverty programs. Ronald Reagan rolled back welfare, public housing and food assistance programs, declaring that government is the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. Does this all sound familiar?

Now that the Republicans have slim majorities in both houses of Congress, a vengeful Donald Trump in the White House, and Elon Musk’s swat team, they will do all they can to fulfill their dream of destroying the programs and agencies they never supported. Why? To pay for more tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, which includes them. Is that American exceptionalism or what?

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world—including nine Americans—expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.

With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.

The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks, and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely criminalized and Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in overcrowded immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.

As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward?

This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away—one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection—from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, 10 million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.

This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.

Homeless, Not Helpless

In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient—single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white, and although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: They were poor, in need of housing, and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.

NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.

At the heart of the NUH were three principles: First, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished—that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.

Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.

Projects of Survival

In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”

The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society.

KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through that winter.

On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his 90s. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.

Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous, or too overburdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.

A Survival Revival for These Times

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.

In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.

Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.

Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how—beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today—dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.

Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.

When U.S. Congress recently approved a budget proposing nearly $880 billion in spending cuts to execute President Donald Trump’s agenda, which will almost certainly mean funding tax cuts for the wealthy, it didn’t just target unnecessary spending—it targeted our healthcare.

Republicans claim this is about combating fraud, but we know the truth. Let’s be clear: Slashing Medicaid by billions of dollars is a direct attack on critically needed health services, as it covers essential healthcare like doctors visits, hospital care, cancer screenings, reproductive healthcare, and more. These cuts threaten not only our access to care, but our fundamental rights to live and thrive.

Attacks on Medicaid will impact millions of Americans, but will disproportionately harm marginalized groups, including people with disabilities; the elderly; low-income families; and most severely Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people. Given the wide-ranging impact these cuts will have on people’s ability to control their health, bodies, lives, and reproduction, this isn’t just a healthcare issue—it’s a matter of reproductive justice.

Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take.

Medicaid is a lifeline in addressing the deep inequities in healthcare coverage, and any cuts to this vital program threaten to unravel the limited progress we’ve fought so hard to make. Currently, Medicaid funds almost two-thirds of Black births, provides coverage for almost a third of Black women, and insures over half of Black girls. The fact of the matter is that Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people have the most to lose, and it’s undeniable that Medicaid cuts will only exacerbate the Black maternal mortality crisis our communities are already struggling to survive.

It is true that providing lifesaving healthcare to millions of people comes at a cost. But when politicians start looking for ways to trim the federal budget, Medicaid is often first on the chopping block. And yet, slashing Medicaid has proven politically impossible—because the truth is, 8 in 10 Americans overwhelmingly support it. People like being able to see a doctor when they need to, and they recognize Medicaid is essential in making that possible.

Despite its popularity, cuts to Medicaid may soon become reality because of decades of relentless attacks on reproductive justice by our elected leaders. From forced sterilization, to shackling women during birth, from the Hyde Amendment and to overturning the federal right to an abortion, this country has an insidious history of reproductive abuse—particularly against Black women. Now, attacks on Medicaid are just the latest tactic used by anti-choice politicians to strip us of our bodily autonomy and further deny us access to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.

Access to healthcare should never be determined by income or zip code, but these cuts force states to make up this deficit by either raising taxes or slashing education budgets, further burdening our communities. Rural Americans, particularly, will suffer as rural hospitals often rely heavily on Medicaid funding to stay afloat. These cuts will worsen maternal healthcare deserts, which have 1 in 6 Black babies born in areas with limited or no access to essential maternal care.

What’s worse, adding “work requirements,” which were narrowly avoided under Trump’s first administration, will also be used as a tool to remove people from Medicaid. Not because they are not working, but because new bureaucratic reporting requirements will create confusion, and ultimately cause people, including people with disabilities and the elderly, to be disqualified from coverage.

In reality, 92% of Medicaid beneficiaries under 65 are employed, debunking the harmful stereotype that people on Medicaid are not working. There is a long history of scapegoating poor people for receiving social services and adding increased burdens to show they “deserve” help. This is the same racist welfare reform narrative we have heard for decades—the false “welfare queen” myth, used to police Black women, incarcerate Black mothers, and justify cuts to social services.

Make no mistake, Black women will bear the brunt of these Medicaid cuts. Yes, our healthcare system, including Medicaid, has flaws, but slashing coverage for the most vulnerable Americans is not the solution. During a time when access to reproductive healthcare is under attack like never before and Black maternal mortality rates are still continuing to rise, we need policy solutions rooted in reproductive justice.

This means centering Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people who are disproportionately impacted by Medicaid cuts and the policies driving these changes. Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take. Our lives—and our future—depend on it.

Today is Tax Day, and the brazen attack of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency against the federal government looms large over the Internal Revenue Service. The recent announcement that reductions in force are commencing at the IRS spells danger for taxpayer services, essential government workers, and the heart of our voluntary tax system.

As the president of the union representing IRS employees and the executive director of the largest tax fairness coalition, we each bring a different perspective to this unfolding catastrophe. But we share the same strong objection to DOGE’s drastic, ill-conceived and likely illegal attack on the nation’s tax collection agency.

The immediate victims of the DOGE attacks on the agency are the laid-off employees and those threatened with firing. Though Musk and President Donald Trump present their haphazard crusade as one waged against elites in the nation’s capital, the reality is that about 85% of federal employees work outside the Washington, D.C., area. As a result, neighbors across the country will lose their jobs, and communities everywhere will feel the economic impact of lost IRS positions and facilities.

If Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

IRS employees are disproportionately female and members of racial or ethnic minorities, groups that have historically faced discrimination in hiring and advancement. Nearly 10% of IRS workers are military veterans. The National Treasury Employees Union is currently in court fighting these improper layoffs.

Next, taxpayers filing their annual returns and expecting prompt refunds will feel the impact. The reduction in IRS employees means fewer answered calls, longer wait times for help, and delayed refunds. The administration’s plan to shut over 100 taxpayer assistance centers across the country will leave most Americans unable to get in-person help with their tax issues.

As damaging as the cuts are to every federal agency, cuts to the IRS are different in one important respect: They could cost us a fortune in lost revenue.

Roughly 70% of the personnel cuts thus far have been in enforcement, which will make it easier to avoid detection for the millionaire and billionaire tax cheats who evade an estimated $150 billion in taxes every year. It is estimated that every dollar cut from enforcement costs $5 to $9 in revenue. So if Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

However, it’s really not surprising that Musk, the richest individual in the world, is focusing on diminishing the agency’s ability to enforce the law. That’s what his allies in Congress have been trying to do ever since the agency received restored funding in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. That increased enforcement has focused exclusively on wealthy households and big corporations. Musk has a vested interest in hobbling IRS efforts to ensure the rich and big corporations pay what they owe.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s restored funding for the IRS yielded successes. As of last summer, the agency had collected over $1 billion just from 1,600 millionaires who owed but had failed to pay at least $250,000 each. It also informed Microsoft that it owed $29 billion in back taxes and had plans to increase audits on big companies (those worth more than $250 million), large partnerships (those with over $10 million in assets), and individuals with income over $10 million.

The Musk axe might also fall on the IRS Direct File program, the new system allowing taxpayers in about half the country to file for free directly with the government, bypassing expensive tax preparation firms. (The program is still in the pilot stage and will eventually be available to all taxpayers.) Musk announced recently he “deleted” the technical support department that helped create Direct File, but as of now the service itself is still operational. We don’t know how long that will last with Musk’s operatives roaming the halls of the IRS.

The restored funding for the IRS also helped it improve customer service. The average wait time on calls to the agency had dropped from 30 minutes to 3; over 50 in-person taxpayer assistance centers had been opened before the mass closures, and backlogs of unprocessed returns dropped.

All of this is at risk, of course, as DOGE prepares a “hackathon” that would allow our national tax data to be easily accessible to third parties. Compromising the tax data of millions of Americans in conjunction with efforts to stall attempts to modernize our tax system portend nothing less than disaster for the services we depend on.

Because the IRS brings in the revenue that funds the rest of the government, Musk’s gang is striking at the heart of the federal government’s ability to fund healthcare for seniors, nutrition for children, and other needs of the American people. The DOGE attack on the IRS is also an attack on economic justice and equality. Taxes on ultra-high income and extreme wealth help to narrow the nation’s destabilizing economic gaps. It’s hard not to conclude that those very injuries—not “waste, fraud and abuse”—are the real aim of DOGE’s wayward campaign.

Yesterday was the day democracy in our nation officially died.

We no longer live in the America we grew up in: “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The country the rest of the world looked up to and depended on. The country that claimed to follow the rule of law, and valued compassion and the protection of its most vulnerable people.

We are now in the midst of a outright coup against the Constitution, against the United States, and against our founding ideals: Donald Trump proclaimed it yesterday when he openly defied the Supreme Court and our founding documents with a sneer, and his neofascist sycophants chuckled and giggled in the Oval Office.

When Marco Rubio claimed that arresting and deporting a man legally living in the US was “foreign policy” that can’t be overseen by the Supreme Court and then congratulated himself on his cleverness.

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who committed no crime, is now held in El Salvador’s most notorious concentration camp, where as many as 75 men are packed into cells designed for a fraction of that number.

Prisoners are not allowed outside — not for fresh air, not for exercise — and the fluorescent lights never go off. Food is minimal: plain rice or beans twice a day, with water. There is no possibility of appeal for him or the other 75,000 people El Salvadoran dictator Bukele has arrested and imprisoned without due process.

This father of three US citizens, this husband of a US citizen, who had been in the US with the permission of our government, is today packed in with savage gang members — literally murderers and rapists — in one of the most infamous and violent prisons in the world.

He has is no access to legal counsel, no information about charges or release, and medical care is often denied except in extreme emergencies. Days blur into nights as men lie on concrete floors or sit in silence, many carving repetitive paths along the walls to stay sane.

Kilmar may be doing the same, clinging to routine, to hope, to anything that reminds him he once belonged to a country that promised justice.

But then came the most lawless president in the history of America, who yesterday all but declared that we are no longer a constitutional democratic republic as long as he is president.

Article I, Section 9 of the United States’ Constitution is unambiguous about habeas corpus, Latin for “produce the body,” which means no person can be imprisoned without first knowing the charges against them, being able to challenge those charges, and having a court of law decide their fate.

This right embraced by our Founders and written into our Constitution literally dates back to the year 1215 when King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, as Article I Section 9 clearly states:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

(Trump is falsely and cynically claiming in an illegal Executive Order that the government of Venezuela has sent gang members to “invade” the US. Bizarrely, even if a court were to uphold this “invasion” gimmick, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is neither a gang member nor even a Venezuelan; he’s a citizen of El Salvador who’s lived in the US since he was 16, is a union worker and beloved member of his community, and was here legally.)

Fifth Amendment to the Constitution:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Sixth Amendment to the Constitution:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

Seventh Amendment to the Constitution:

“[T]he right of trial by jury shall be preserved…”

Eighth Amendment to the Constitution:

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Please point out to me where, in our Constitution, it says that the President of the United States or the Secretary of State can simply order a “person” (see 5th Amendment; nowhere does the word “citizen” appear) to be arrested and transported to a foreign hellhole concentration camp without a warrant, without an attorney, without a trial, and without even advance notice that might give him a chance to protest his innocence.

An unanimous Supreme Court ruled last week that our Constitution, as quoted above, says exactly what it means and Trump must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is not a criminal and has been denied all of the due process provisions detailed above in our Constitution and its amendments.

Justice Sotomayor was explicit:

“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. …
“[T]he proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with ‘due process of law,’ including notice and an opportunity to be heard…
“It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws. And to the millions of American citizens who are frightened by his systematic dismantling of our legal system.

It was an open assertion by Trump that he can do anything he wants, no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional, without fear of consequences. That he has successfully staged a coup against the government of the United States and her laws and has every intention of running this country like Russia or Hungary.

And not only that, he told El Salvador’s authoritarian president Bukele that the people he next wants to send to his slave labor camp are American citizens like you and me:

“Home grown criminals. Home growns are next. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Which brings us to a frightening echo of Jefferson’s objections to the “tyranny” of King George II, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence he authored and was signed on July 4, 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. …

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws…

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: …

“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” (emphasis added)

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

That would be, the Declaration says, the very definition of tyranny. As Senator Chris Murphy just posted to Bluesky:

“You may not think this case matters to you. But Abrego Garcia was legally in the U.S., just like all the rest of us. His status as an immigrant doesn't matter as a matter of law. If Trump can lock up or remove ANYONE — no matter what the courts say — we are all at grave risk.”

Trump should be impeached for his defiance of the Supreme Court and our Constitution. For spitting in the face of our Founders and every American veteran who has ever fought (or died) for this country and it’s ideals. For using foreign concentration camps.

Tragically, however, Republicans in Congress and across the country are now fully in on the coup. They have chosen an egomaniacal, self-centered narcissist and his billionaire friends over their integrity, country, and their oath of office.

Show up in the streets this coming Saturday and reach out to your elected representatives to demand a return to the rule of law.

The number for Congress is 202-224-3121, at least for the moment; like with Social Security, Trump may cut that phone number off any day now, too.

Streaming 10 AM Eastern this morning, but you can listen/watch any time afterwards:

On The TMI Show, Ted Rall and Manila Chan expose the shocking contradictions in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, delivering a serious yet electrifying breakdown of a system gone rogue. Trump has demanded that immigrants who “broke American law by coming illegally” be reported, yet his administration is illegally deporting people who followed every rule, often through underhanded tactics. The hosts spotlight a Columbia University student, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was lured to a citizenship hearing expecting approval, only to be ambushed and detained by ICE agents in a stunning betrayal.

Drawing from a New York Times investigation, the episode reveals that 90% of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison are not gang members and have no criminal records—ordinary people like students and workers caught in a merciless dragnet. The hosts also tackle the administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s brutal prison despite legal protections. The White House acknowledges the error but refuses to act, leaving Garcia stranded in a humanitarian crisis.

With razor-sharp analysis, Rall and Chan unravel how these actions not only break the law but erode trust in justice itself, painting a chilling picture of an administration wielding deportation as a political weapon. The episode connects Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric to real human devastation, from shattered families to ignored court rulings, urging viewers to confront the stakes. Packed with hard-hitting facts and raw urgency, this TMI Show installment is a must-watch for anyone alarmed by the erosion of the rule of law. Tune in for an unflinching look at a crisis where innocence is no defense, and the law is twisted to punish the vulnerable.

The post TMI Show Ep 117: “Deported Accidentally On Purpose” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Each year for Tax Day, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies release a tax receipt so you can learn where your taxes are actually going.

This year, you may be more worried about the price of eggs than your tax dollars. But with President Donald Trump now urging a $1 trillion military budget, it’s worth thinking about what we’re already spending.

Last year, the average taxpayer paid $3,707 for weapons and wars. That’s the equivalent of 628 dozen eggs. So if you thought buying a dozen or two a week for your family was taxing, well, that’s just the beginning.

Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Yet the president and his allies in Congress are planning on spending more for war and mass deportations—and less on just about everything else.

And it is a war budget, make no mistake. President Trump has escalated bombing in Yemen and doubled down on providing weapons to Israel, raising the chances of a new, full-blown Middle East war.

The president is also flirting with war with China, both through his trade war but also more directly. Much of the Pentagon’s future spending is in preparation for a war with China.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and DOGE are supposed to save money. But look at what they’re cutting: The average taxpayer paid just $39 for USAID last year, the international aid program that DOGE eliminated. For the cost of just six dozen eggs per taxpayer, that saved millions of lives—including millions of children who are now at risk.

DOGE and the president have fired staff and cut programs at the National Institutes of Health that conduct lifesaving cancer research. To discover those cures, the average taxpayer paid $149 in 2024—about 25 dozen eggs. Not a bad investment to help treat cancer.

The president also eliminated a program for museum and library funding for which the average taxpayer paid just $1.43 in 2024—about three eggs. And the president is dismantling an agency called the Interagency Council on Homelessness that coordinates services to help end homelessness, for which the average taxpayer paid just one penny in 2024.

These are just average figures, so those with lower incomes are paying far less for these things. Either way, these aren’t the kinds of cuts you’d make if you were really looking to get the best bang for your buck.

Instead, you might start with weapons contractors. In 2024, the average taxpayer paid $1,430 for Pentagon contractors—the equivalent of 242 dozen eggs.

One of those contractors is SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Indeed, SpaceX is benefiting from new Pentagon contracts while Musk takes his chainsaw to cancer research and homeless services. Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Naturally, a $1 trillion Pentagon budget will open the floodgates for more money for contractors, who already get over half the Pentagon budget each year. Cutting that planned $1 trillion by 10% could pay to avert GOP plans to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps over the next 10 years.

Or you could skip the president’s plans for mass deportations and detentions of immigrants. At $98 for the average taxpayer in 2024, this amount is set to balloon as Congress prepares billions in new funding for the president’s deportations of students, fathers, mothers, and even a U.S. citizen child seeking emergency cancer treatment.

The U.S. needs humane and commonsense immigration law, not an indiscriminate dragnet that scapegoats even legal residents for problems they had no role in creating. We could put that money back into threatened services like the NIH, local libraries, and ending homelessness—or all of the above, given how comparatively cheap those things are.

With many Americans struggling to afford the price of eggs, healthcare, and housing, the government can and should help with those real problems instead of creating new ones with new wars and new mass deportation plans.

Today our 2024 taxes are due. You likely had most of your federal taxes deducted from your paychecks throughout the year. This is not true, however, for mega-millionaires and billionaires, some of whom are practically running our government right now. They receive much of their income in the form of appreciation on the stocks of the corporations they run. And the companies themselves use loopholes and deductions to reduce their tax bill, sometimes down to zero.

Take Tesla (please!).

The company, valued at over $1 trillion, paid no federal income tax on its 2024 income of $2.3 billion. And its CEO, Elon Musk, who had hoarded some $342 billion in wealth by earlier this year, avoids paying taxes on most of his income until he chooses to “realize” capital gains by selling his enormously appreciated stock.

Because of our overall low taxes, the U.S. does not collect as much revenue as other comparable nations. This means you get a lot less by being an American citizen than you get by being a French, German or Swedish citizen. Less health care, less child care, less access to affordable college.

These low taxes are part of the reason that America experiences supercharged inequality. While other countries do more to boost people at the bottom and enable upward mobility for the middle class, in the U.S. low taxes combined with an anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment regulatory regime means that here the rich get richer and the rest of us stagnate.

A regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America.

Further, the extreme wealth of the billionaire class often lets them buy the elected officials and the policies they want—usually policies that add further to their riches in a vicious cycle that leaves most of us worse off. President Trump has given Musk the power to fire tens of thousands of workers, eliminate funding for hospitals and universities around the country, and destroy Congressionally-created agencies that carry out vital public functions.

Shutting down special tax breaks for very wealthy individuals and profitable corporations could go a long way to addressing these problems. But Trump and his allies in Congress are moving dramatically in the opposite direction. While they plan to double down on tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy, they are also allowing the most destructive billionaire-driven attack we’ve ever seen on the policies that keep us healthy and safe.

Musk is wielding a chainsaw against public services using his so-called DOGE (“Department of Government Efficiency” though it’s not a government agency and will likely undermine efficiency). DOGE’s cuts to services could decimate education, health, and income support. And its cuts to public oversight will enable corporations to more easily exploit us as workers, consumers, and community members.

For example, Trump and Musk are trying to eliminate the Department of Education and slash school budgets in ways that will particularly harm children with disabilities, students in disadvantaged rural and urban schools, and college access for working class kids.

They’ve fired 10,000 staff members at the Department of Health and Human Services, including those who ensure vaccine distribution, drug safety, and health care access. They’ve haphazardly slashed funding nationwide for labs conducting medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, maternal health, and more.

They tried to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency which has recovered more than $21 billion for consumers from companies that engage in unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. And they even slashed the Federal Emergency Management Association which helps communities facing floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, leaving communities unprotected.

Their reasons are three-fold, all bad for regular people:

• Cutting public services can free policymakers to pass expensive tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations.
• It can also allow privatization of services so Musk and others can demand payment to provide them.
• Finally by hobbling regulations and firing public employees that safeguard factories, inspect meat, and test drugs, Musk hopes to juice corporate profits as CEOs are permitted to shed factory safety equipment, ignore anti-pollution rules, and violate labor laws.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the crazy on-again, off-again tariffs that are roiling our financial markets and industrial supply chains.

Policymakers of the 20th century created regulations, safety nets, and labor standards that made Americans more educated, more prosperous, and healthier. They didn’t work perfectly of course. But education, income, and health improved dramatically over this span.

Educational investments boosted high school attainment rates for adults from a mere 10 percent in 1910 to 90 percent by 2017. With more education and unionization, inflation-adjusted per capita income went from $18,460 in 1967 to $46,193 by 2023. Research and vaccination nearly eradicated polio, smallpox, and measles. And safety standards meant the number of workers killed on the job plummeted from 15.8 to 1.9 per 100,000 between 1928 (when tracking began) and 1998. The big picture: life expectancy at birth nearly doubled (from 46.6 years to 74.7 years) for white men and more than doubled (from 32.5 years to 68.2 years) for Black men between 1900 and the year 2000.

In other words, a regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America. In 2025, it seems, Trump and those he enables are trying to make American impoverished again by rolling back the 20th century and its accomplishments.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.