The House passed President Trump’s budget bill on Feb. 25. At a time when there is an outcry to deal with the national debt, instead of the fiscally responsible choice to raise taxes and lower spending, this bill includes a bloated tax cut that primarily benefits wealthy individuals and is partially paid for by significant cuts to Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California).
I was uninsured and obtained Medi-Cal for a few months at the end of my pregnancy and during the first few months of my son’s life. Thank God! He needed a skull surgery at 2 1/2 months for a condition that would have caused retardation if not promptly treated. Is the lack of a safety net what we want for our nation’s most vulnerable children?
Compare this proposed budget to the words of one of our Founding Fathers, John Adams:
“Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.”
If you share my concerns about the national debt and about keeping safety nets in place, call your national representative and both senators to express your concern and/or outrage, and throw in your local newspaper, like New Times.
Ingrid Pires
Pismo Beach
This article appears in Weddings 2025.
German and Italian fascism developed from the economic conditions of the Great Depression and as a reaction of capitalist parties eyeballing the communist revolution of 1917 in Russia. Their parties had distinct uniforms, salutes, issued propaganda, and had party symbols and were very outward, overt, and proud of their platforms.
Having fascism blow up in their faces and after the death of millions, today’s fascists wont be so overt. They’ll continue to use the state to ensure the prosperity of elites and certain corporations, but they’ll do it very surreptitiously. They’ll wear cute shirts that read “Tech Support” while standing next to the POTUS, but at the same time, they’ll create the same lists of enemies they had, they’ll spy on their populations, and they’ll favor their supporters with jobs and bread. We will be encouraged to rat out our neighbors for growing their own food, fixing their own cars, having premarital sex, practicing any religion other than the official state religion (Christianity), and reading books that aren’t approved by the state.
We already have a DHS requirement for illegal immigrants to register, ICE has a hotline to report illegal immigrants and shortly, there will be a monetary reward for turning these people in. No fan of mass, illegal immigration myself, I can’t help but see parallels between these rat lines and the Nazi party’s slow, legal, subjugation of Jews starting with laws that prohibited jews from marrying Germans/Aryans, to the taking of their property by the state, to loading them in box cars and incinerating them in death camps. It started with Jews, but grew to include homosexuals, dissidents, communists, and anyone the Party felt was a threat. Again, the DHS just created an obligation for undocumented migrants to register with the state. It starts with the most vulnerable but can quickly grow to include anyone the state and its fascists deem enemies. We should be concerned and on watch, folks. The only thing we have on our side is our numbers and hopefully, a willingness to set aside racial animosity for solidarity. As our economy collapses, it will create bizarre conglomerations of uninformed masses easily swayed by the language of fascists promising that “the South will rise again.” Not in my California.
I like cornbread, low riders, soul music, surfing, and nopal.
Start saving your rubles comrade.
Marco:
Rubles are Russian, Nazis were fascists and hated Communists (Soviets). Similar to those fascists, the ones occupying the White House also hate anything communal. This is why they are dismantling public institutions that administer social spending. The costs and budgets associated with these venerable institutions are, to them, invalid. They see the services they provide, you know, keeping old people, the infirm , and poor fed, as the only reason they pay tax. If they can eliminate social spending, they will be completely free to continue their reign of terror. The only spending they see as worthy is that that pays for a police state.
We are in danger, all of us. Elon Musk acts as a spectacle who smiles, giggles, and parades his children in the Oval Office as if he were like any of us. He is not. These people are actual fascists, sure, they may be members of the Republican party, but they are not Republican in any sense of the word. This is a fascist regime and anything is possible. They have the SCOTUS, they have hand picked generals in the military, and if they could, they’d tear the US Constitution up and replace it with an enemies list. If you’re not on it, your free. If you are on it, well, there’s always cyanide, right?
It’s only a matter of time before some pencil necked careerist in the fascist bureaucracy, similar Adolph Eichmann, signs off on the order to throw critics in vans and kick us out of helicopters over the open sea, just like the US backed regime in Argentina did.
As an army veteran, I can truly say these people in the White House are un-American.
So “dealing with the national debt” is a misguided priority? Someone is going to have to pay it off. While I am old and may be dead before the harsh “collection” process begins, younger voters are going to be stuck with it and will feel the pain.
John D:
There are options other than taking the food and medicine out of the mouths of this country’s poor and elderly:
1. Balance the budget
2. Cut defense spending in half and close all overseas military bases.
3. Tax concentrated wealth at the rate your parents paid in the 1950s.
No one talks about cutting defense spending, it’s the big secret. That’s our solution, fire all the generals and stop pork barrel defense contracts.
This country’s elite will do anything but blame themselves for our national debt. They are the ones that demanded and got bail out after bail out after gambling and losing on the stock market and housing market again and again. Doing so has reduced the purchasing power of the dollar to about twenty cents. No, these sociopaths will instead, blame the old lady struggling with diabetes and living in her car with three cats who might, just might, get a few bucks from the state.
This administration claims that firing federal workers is required to balance our national books. Their goal to save our economy isn’t serious. It’s Orwellian double speak: “War is peace,” “firing federal workers helps our economy.” Their goal isn’t to reduce spending on federal wages but rather, to eliminate the institutions entirely that administrate what is left of our weak social safety net or public services. Taxes are the only thing left that connect them to the rest of us and they want to be completely free of us, free to come down like vultures whenever they care and pick the bones of American workers, poor, ill, the aged,and unemployed.
It’s only a matter of time before our taxes are raised and theirs lowered. They are going to tax the hell out of us. If these sociopaths were serious about reducing spending, they would cut the Pentagon budget immediately by half. They would raise corporate taxes and create a one time wealth tax. The federal government would come in and seize 30% of their wealth and use it to pay down our national debt.
Our economy is in ruins and we face collapse.