Priorities.

Welcome to the second installment of Unf*cking the Republic, where we dissect the good, the bad and the ugly of American politics and highlight the disconnect between U.S policy and reality. Today, we’re talking about the budget, national priorities and dispelling the myth that things like healthcare, education and social safety nets are too expensive. We’re fucking up trickle down by busting up the budget and breaking down how our priorities expose our lack of humanity.We’re number one baby! We have the most billionaires, the biggest debt, most incarcerated people and we’re number one in defense spending. ‘Murica! Fuck yea!

Our debt is a monster because we spend like drunken sailors. On some stuff. But when it comes to funding things like healthcare, education, food security, mental health and clean water, suddenly we get alligator arms.

Poor people have been budgetary boogeymen in this country for decades. Reagan had his welfare queens. George H.W. Bush had his thousand points of light, which was a call to volunteerism and return to church values instead of sucking off the government. Bill Clinton had a convenient answer for all of the poverty-stricken Americans who found themselves sidelined by economic gain and opportunity during the Reagan and Bush years. He opened the prison pipeline and helped fill jails nationwide with new Draconian drug laws. Can you feel my pain now, Bill?

Skipping Dubya for a second...The Obama administration did put Humpty Dumpty back together again after Bush screwed the pooch by cutting taxes on the eve of starting two wars and fostering an environment of reckless fuckery in banking that led to the housing collapse and Great Recession. But Obama blew his political capital in his first two years on the ACA and the Recovery and Reinvestment Act before running into the Cantor/Ryan/McConnell legislative buzzsaw. So he has the distinction of overseeing a massive widening of inequality that saw 90% of the post-recession wealth gains go to the top one percent of wealthy Americans. The Trump years? Forget it. Today the wealth gap is greater than it was in France just prior to the French Revolution.

Back to everyone’s favorite whipping post, Dubya. Turns out, in the modern presidential era, the president that focused most on building the lower and middle classes was George W. Bush. He did more to close the home ownership gap among impoverished and ethnic populations and increase real wages than the other presidents. Ask conservatives how they feel about Dubya and you probably won’t get a great reaction. Not because they think he’s a lousy public speaker, used ginned up intelligence to wage wars on two nations that didn’t attack us, blow open the national debt and allow the financial sector to run amok with little to no oversight, leading to the complete implosion of the financial markets. No, silly. They’ll tell you he was soft on immigration and didn’t cut welfare or taxes enough for their taste. Seriously. That’s their big Bush problem.

You know why they call Medicare and Social Security entitlements? Because we’re entitled to them, you fucking pricks. They’re fully funded. We pay for those things. With our money. Oh, and those “illegal immigrants” people hate so much—those migrant workers that pick fruit, or wash dishes in greasy diners, mow your fucking lawn and take care of your kids? They pay about $7 billion a year into Social Security through payroll taxes using fake ID numbers and will never get the benefits of them. So basically, they’re helping to subsidize your retirement while they do work that our lazy fucking kids think they’re too good to do. Who’s entitled now?

There are two sides of the American budget. Mandatory and Discretionary. Mandatory spending is required by law. We chose these things and legislated them over time. Discretionary is what we choose on an ongoing basis and, for argument’s sake, let’s say it’s about 60/40 mandatory to discretionary.

Let’s start with discretionary spending, the things we choose to fund in the budget based upon how much money we expect to take in through revenues. Basically, taxes.

Military funding is about $700 billion, which is 53% of the discretionary spending budget. If you add spending on veterans programs to the overall military budget, it’s 57%. Currently, we operate more than 800 bases around the world. Some small, some enormous. All told, outside of the costs to operate our bases where we’re “at war,” we spend upwards of eighty to one hundred billion a year to maintain them.

About 35% funds things like science, space exploration, the environment, transportation, the justice system and international affairs.

The leftover funds are allocated toward social safety net programs. You know, stuff for those welfare queens. The thousand points of light. Things like SNAP (food stamps), supplemental income for the elderly or disabled poor, school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance and such.

All told, it’s about 8%. Welfare is 8% of the discretionary budget…or, if you prefer, a little more than 3% of the entire budget. So when you hear people argue about welfare, remind them that they’re talking about 3.5% of the budget.

Switching to the other side of the equation, we have the bigger part of the budget—about 60% of government spending known as mandatory spending. These are items that are legislated, many of them coming throughout the 20th Century as America matured. Programs that saved the nation under Roosevelt and Truman or guaranteed a future in Johnson’s Great Society. The big three—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—account for the lion’s share of the budget, about 85%. The remaining 15% or so goes toward retirement funds, income security programs and miscellaneous veteran spending.

When people freak out about things like Medicaid as an entitlement, it’s helpful to put it in a bit of perspective. For example, we’ll spend as much in interest on our debt this year as we will on Medicaid. That’s right, just the interest on our debt, fueled by our now multi-trillion dollar budget deficit, will be more than what we spend on health coverage for the poorest people in America. Who are they? Well, one in five Americans receives Medicaid benefits. That’s 20%. So look around you.

Please please remember that Social Security and Medicare are fully funded programs. They’re covered before we even begin breaking down our priorities because the money comes directly from taxpayers and goes into the budget. We levy taxes to pay for all of the other stuff, and if there’s a shortfall, we have three options. Raise taxes, borrow money or just print it.

Now the argument against raising taxes has been pretty well documented over the past few decades. It’s had a few different names like “Trickle Down” and “Job Killer,” but the thesis is essentially the same. If we raise taxes on the rich, they’ll flee. To where? No one knows. But they’ll leave. The MAGA crew likes to point out that America was at its best in the post-World War Two era, conveniently forgetting that the tax rate on the highest earners during that period ranged from seventy to ninety percent.

Why was it so high? Because we had a fucking war to pay for. And guess what happened to the wealthy during that period? They got wealthier. In fact, everyone did. Because that’s what happens when you invest in everyone. The rising tide lifts all boats.

So because the propaganda battle has been so decisively won—the battle that has average Americans vote against their best interests and protect low taxes on the wealthy—we have had no choice but to fill our budget gaps by borrowing. And because we’re the largest economy on the planet by far, we’ve been able to do so without blowing our creditworthiness. No matter how much we borrow, there’s always a market. But economists on both sides of the aisle were always concerned that we could go too far. That we could print too much money or borrow too much money. As it turns out, this too has been a convenient part of the modern narrative against spending on discretionary items like food, healthcare or education. The propaganda machine basically distills down to this:

We need to borrow more or print money to fund the military.

Outside of that, it’s every family for themselves.

Then came the Pandemic.

For years, the mantra was that we can’t simply print money to get out of a situation. (Even though we did it in 2008 and 2009.) In theory, printing money would devalue the currency and increase interest rates, which would pressure inflation and begin the cycle of hyper inflation and interest rates. Gas would go through the roof and cause lines at the gas stations like the 1970s! There will be food shortages and mass unemployment. Bell bottoms will become all the rage!

Then COVID-19 exposed this concept as a myth.

We injected trillions of dollars into the economy. Everyone got a check. We poured money into the banks. We bought corporate bonds (which is fucking unbelievable) to ensure liquidity in the fixed income market. PPP money flew out not once but twice. And we braced for impact!

And then...nothing.

Nothing happened.

No skyrocketing interest rates. No run on gas. No crazy inflation. Just a whole bunch of people losing jobs, losing their healthcare, losing loved ones. But the markets? Fine and fucking dandy. In fact, the top 1% of the country did really, really well in 2020.

Equities went through the roof because investors, private and institutional, know that the U.S. is one of only a handful of countries in the world with the economic depth and resources to print money with alacrity. And we’re the world’s reserve currency to boot, which makes us extra, extra special. So if we get in trouble, we can just invent more money. We can just decide to not let our corporations and investments suffer.

Which means…if we can simply decide to buy corporate bonds and provide liquidity to banks to the tune of trillions, we could also decide to just give everyone in America food…clean water...healthcare…debt free education. In fact, it would probably be cheaper to do that than spend a couple trillion on corporate welfare and wars we invent.

Seriously, think about this for a second. For decades, they’ve been telling us that we can’t afford to subsidize education and healthcare like every other fucking developed country on the planet because our “entitlements” cost too much money. We’ll blow the deficit. Add to the debt. Saddle future generations. Sorry folks, but putting food on the table, providing an education and offering health care is a bridge too far. I’ll say this much. Thank god this pandemic came in an election year. Because, dollars to donuts, they never would have sent out stimulus checks to the people. This fucker would have just bailed out the banks and let everyone else suffer.

The upshot? We were able to pour trillions of dollars in a matter of months into the system and nothing fucking changed.

When Bill Clinton took office, the U.S. had $4 trillion in debt. Total.

IN 2020, we ran a $4 trillion dollar deficit.

In other words, in just one year, we’re going to lose more money than the total amount of accumulated debt of the nation through 1992.

But go ahead…tell me again how we can’t afford food stamps. Fuckers.

That’s it. That’s the whole lesson here. That our circumstances—homelessness, poverty, for-profit healthcare, mass incarceration, bankruptcies due to medical bills or college debt—all of it is a choice. And by the way…that’s not real Capitalism folks. But that’s for another episode.

Here endeth the lesson.