I’m writing about this:

Nobody wants to hear it, but the next Democratic president is going to have to do some nut cuttin’ on the national debt (Republicans never do anything to pay down the debt when they control office). It will be painful. It will piss people off. But it will be necessary.

— Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social)
12:25 PM • Aug 6, 2026

Here’s his follow up:

Garcia is Washington Bureau Chief at The Independent, and I follow him to get a flavor for better-than-average DC conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, his use of “nut cutting” in this case is completely wrong. I don’t use that term, or if I do when I write a post, I always prefix it with “As Dick Nixon would have said” because Nixon liked to use that term, as he did many other profane terms, because he was an asshole and mostly assholes talk about “nut cutting”.

Before I go on, I should note that I’ve actually seen a nut cutting. My wife is from a family of farmer/ranchers who would never call it a nut cutting. They’d call it “working cattle”. Nut cutting — turning a bull into a steer — is just part of it. They also do a bunch of other vet care when they have the young bull in a crush. It’s pretty brutal, but cattle are bred to be very resilient, plus they are also quite stupid. Unless we’re going to stop eating meat, nuts will be cut, because bulls are hard to manage and don’t yield good meat.

Back to the expression: Garcia is using it incorrectly because nut cutting is not a “trim” — it is transformational for the bull that undergoes it. The expression is really a variant of “come to Jesus moment”, “time to get serious” or other phrases indicating that a difficult but important decision is needed.

That said, in one way, Garcia is using the expression correctly, because if Democrats approach the Trump cleanup with a mentality of “gosh, we had better not do anything good because we have to raise taxes and do some austerity to handle the national debt” it will truly be transformational. We’ll transform ourselves into a losing party.

How to deal with the Trump debt is a question that will require multiple blog posts, but I have a few thoughts.

First, taxing the rich won’t fix the problem, but it’s a hell of a good start. There’s no way that Democrats should come into office and make the national debt our first priority. As long as we’re shaving away at it, good enough.

Second, cutting defense won’t fix the problem, but we will need to be smart about digging ourselves out of the hole that Trump will leave after expending all of our expensive munitions in the stupid Iran war. It’s clear that using six- or seven-figure missiles to shoot down four- or five-figure drones is a losing strategy, and we need some form of drone offense and drone defense instead of the current expensive path we’re on. Also, cancel the stupid “Trump class” battleships, and have a top-to-toe audit of our defense procurement with the aim of cutting waste. I’m sure we can wring a few billions out of that budget.

Third, I’d love to see the numbers on cutting out or reducing insurance middlemen in our incredibly expensive healthcare system.

That’s just a start. Garcia clearly wants to replay the same tired old DC playbook that’s trotted out every time Democrats are in power. As soon as we take office, all of a sudden the national debt is a pressing issue. We can’t let that happen.

If you’ve read this far, here’s a funny video from Kyle Clark on the subject of nut cutting. He uses the term correctly, btw.

A viewer named Debbie got the phrase “nut cuttin time down on the ranch” banned from my program.

Debbie ruined it for everyone.

— Kyle Clark (@kylec.bsky.social)
5:27 AM • Apr 9, 2026

I like Jasmine Crockett, and it’s OK for her to be mad/sad/not glad about losing the Texas primary. But this is kinda nuts:

I don’t disagree with much of what Crockett said, but I will note that the polls look better than they did when Beto O’Rourke ran against Cruz. Still, she’s not dumb. She knows that saying this to a national reporter will generate a story. So, here we are. If she sincerely thinks that Talarico would lose, some comments about how great he is and how she’s going to help the best she can would be the smart move. If she thinks Talarico can win and doesn’t want it to happen, doing what she did will hurt him. It’s disqualifying for a bigger role in Democratic politics, in my sad opinion.

“They say that patriotism is the last refuge

To which a scoundrel clings

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king”

- Bob Dylan, “Sweetheart Like You”, 1983

There’s a reason Dylan is the first song writer to win the Nobel Prize for Poetry. But who knew he was a prognosticator as well?

 Which brings me to the saga of Senator Ron Wyden, Jeffrey Epstein, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, other big banks, the United States Treasury Department and CBS’ 60 Minutes. It’s a sordid tale of elitism, power, dirty money, inequality and lack of accountability or consequences.

Senator Wyden published a report the other day called “Looking the Other Way: How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking.” It may be the defining story of late-stage capitalism and the inevitable decline of American society.

You can read the entire report HERE.

Sen. Wyden Report: Banks Systematically Ignored Jeffrey Epstein’s Crimes - The American Prospect

The report shows how employees at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan helped to hide Epstein’s activities because he was a load-bearing part of their ‘wall of cash.’

The American Prospect • Whitney Curry Wimbish

The details are disturbing, scandalous and descriptive of a “system” that has failed in reining in wealthy lawbreakers, corporations and the people that run them.

Investigative journalist Dean Blundell does a further deep dive into this scandal (and it IS a scandal of major proportions):

BREAKING: CBS Taped BOMBSHELL 60 Minutes Epstein Story. Then Bari Weiss Fired the Reporter and Buried the Tape To Cover For Trump.

A billion dollars, three banks, a Senate report nobody in power wants you to read, and a 60 Minutes segment that mysteriously died the moment Bari Weiss got the keys to CBS News.

Dean Blundell

As Blundell writes,

Of course, when elite wrongdoing is involved, there is usually some sort of obstruction to ensure the public does not have access to the information needed to hold entities and people accountable.

Blundell provides the goods:

_______________________________ 

Let’s take a quick look at the latest in a long string of business gurus (remember Jack Welch of GE, John Stonecipher of Boeing and Michael Milliken of Drexel Burnham Lambert, among others) and the most recent GOAT banker, Jamie Dimon.

In 2025, per the SEC, Dimon made over $40 million, roughly 363 times the median JP Morgan employee. While there is no definitive record of the ratio of CEO pay to median worker for big banks in 1976 (the rule mandating such reporting is called the Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule and is part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama in 2010 which became effective in 2017), the Economic Policy Institute estimates that CEO to median worker pay was 27.7 times the median worker in 1976. That’s a ratio increase of over 1,300%.

Now, you might ask if CEOs are worth1,300% more than they were in 1976? Good question. Conventional reasoning would cite: greater use of stock awards in compensation with compensation increasingly tied to stock price rather than salary; deregulation and consolidation of the banking industry; much larger financial institutions after interstate banking and mergers; and competition among boards to attract and retain top executives (IMHO, the main factor is the small club of corporate executives and CEOs who sit on each other’s lucrative boards and take care of each other).

But I think there is a more relevant question. If CEOs are worth that much, shouldn’t they be accountable and responsible for what happens on their watch? Especially for failure to file legally mandated reports on suspicious activity like money laundering?

 More directly, if CEOs are credited with the success of an entity via insane compensation packages, shouldn’t they also be responsible for failures of that entity, especially failures due to noncompliance with critical laws and regulations?

_______________________________

It’s worth reviewing and emphasizing the important points here:

• Three major banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America - broke the law by failing to report suspicious banking activity, and only reported it years after the fact when it no longer mattered;

• Senior executives of all three banks were aware of the Epstein relationship;

• Essentially no one in these financial institutions has been held responsible by the government or the institutions themselves - in any way - for this lawbreaking;

• The Department of the Treasury is currently withholding key information from Congress and the public on these banks’ activities and reports (for which there seems to be no rationale other than to protect wealthy elites);

• Supporters of Trump (and maybe Epstein?) who now own major legacy media organizations have actively killed a story that would report on these banks and Treasury’s actions in this sordid affair.

_______________________________

Jamie Dimon is a CEO who makes over $40 million per year, and whose net worth is estimated at $3.2 billion. Dimon accrued that wealth primarily through his career in helping run financial institutions such as American Express, Citigroup and JP Morgan.

Jamie Dimon became ultrawealthy because he was credited with the financial success of those organizations.

In this instance, Dimon and his peers are doing what late-stage capitalism does best: privatizing success (profits) and socializing failure (losses and law-breaking).

Jamie Dimon is also nominally a Democrat. I don’t give a flying f^*k. As the highly compensated leader of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon needs to be held accountable for the serial lawbreaking of JP Morgan regarding flouting laws requiring reporting of suspicious account activity, specifically regarding the leader of the world’s worst sex trafficking ring, Jeffrey Epstein.

The same goes for executives and CEOs at the other financial institutions that actively underwrote Epstein’s depraved and illegal actions.

And it should also go without saying that people like Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent should be held personally responsible for obstructing justice and withholding public information about criminal activity (there’s a whole ‘nother issue of public “servants” working for the public in government agencies keeping public information secret for the benefit of “insiders” and an elite view).

_______________________________

This is a no-brainer issue for Democrats. It combines the Epstein Class, elite institutional corruption, money laundering, media capture by oligarchs, and lack of accountability/consequences in an easily understandable narrative that - again - can be tied to pocketbook issues that directly impact “regular people”.

Bob Dylan - Sweetheart Like You

Photo is of my porch petunias - a very Scandinavian red

In 2008 I was at the national Democratic Convention in Denver and disillusioned. I had taken a walk that morning and came upon the crew of Morning Joe setting up in a Denver coffee shop for their horrible four hours of punditry, which I knew would consist of vaguely racist speculation on whether Obama was or was not a Muslim (or an American at all) and how poor people have to tighten their belts so we can trim Medicaid. I just felt my face set in disgust and walked faster.

I felt the same unease in the convention hall. I watched Spike Lee do a star turn around the venue as a clearly unhappy Jim Webb sat scowling, his face all made up, waiting for his turn to do his “hit” on cable with the frighteningly thin cable news hosts. I got lost in the venue at one point and passed Anderson Cooper in a hallway and his skin was so perfect and expensively moisturized it looked lit from within. He smells rich, like vetiver and sandalwood. I was sitting with a retired Common Pleas judge and his wife, lovely earnest people, and the word that came to my mind for us was “frumpy”. We looked frumpy compared to The Pros. Somehow these people had taken our thing, the election of a President, and turned it into their content and their careers.

I got the same feeling this past month as the El-Sayed campaign picked up steam and national media swooped in. But not about cable news hosts or AP reporters or the Detroit paper. Instead, I was watching streamers like Hasan Piker and and You Tube and Tik Tok stars like the “I’ve had it” lady preening and strutting and speaking too loudly and too quickly, in memes. I felt like telling the young volunteers “don’t let Hasan Piker take this great thing you’re doing with other people like you, face to face and turn it into online content. Don’t make the same mistakes with your political media that we did with ours.”

Because new media are as voracious and career driven as old media. They will consume the whole process if we let them. We’ll start using their phrases and adopt their cynical views about optics and electability and cycles. They’ll turn us into performers in our own lives. They’re pros. We’re amateurs. Let’s protect our amateur status, value it, keep the pros at arm’s length, because all the pros are going to do is turn our civic work into a circus and make the people we’re trying to reach sour and hopeless, and we don’t want that. People are sad enough.

My youngest son lives in Detroit and is an affable, easy going ‘lil Lefty and he was enjoying riding his bike in and around this Senate primary spectacle. I told him my misgivings about it, how I wanted to tell El-Sayed’s campaign to stay local and keep the amateurs and voters front and center and sideline the influencers.  He dismissed my concerns (what he said was “it was fun and you just hate fun”). Can’t argue with that. I do hate fun.

But I am going to try to get this message of mine to the campaign anyway, where they probably won’t listen to me anymore than more traditional Democrats did 20 years ago when I told them Morning Joe and multimillionaire pundits were poison and were ruining our thing, our politics, our government. Sideline the influencers. Push them back where they belong. They’re the observers. We’re the main event.

Francesca Hong is the “left wing” candidate for governor in Wisconsin. She’s running the playbook that we’ve seen in other elections: opposition to data centers, no corporate PAC money, free school lunch, universal health insurance (“BadgerCare for all”) and others that you can see on her campaign site. Since she’s the “leftist” candidate, that raises questions of “electability” in the general election among centrist Democrats and the consultants who take their money.

However, this is not the case for Republican consultants. Scott sent me a Twitter link to a piece by Ken Klippenstein about a leaked Republican consultant’s report on Hong, and I tracked down the original source from the Milwaukee Sentinel. It sounds like it could have been written by someone writing or commenting at this blog:

Here’s Hong’s intro video if you want to get an idea of her “populist biography”. It’s impressive.

I’m Francesca Hong, a single mom, service worker, and State Rep—now running for Governor of Wisconsin.

This campaign won’t be funded by billionaires or corporate PACs. It’s powered by working people.

If you’re ready to take back our state, chip in today:
secure.actblue.com/donate/fran-...

— Francesca Hong 홍윤정 (@francescahongwi.bsky.social)
11:47 AM • Sep 17, 2025

“Leftist” Democrats have found a key to winning elections: promise things people want and don’t let yourself be bought by donors. This incredibly sophisticated strategy is apparently beyond the ken of the Democratic consultants who were, for example, advising Hayley Stevens. I watched a few minutes of the Stevens/El-Sayed debate and AES made big hay on the millions of dollars AIPAC and others poured into ads for Stevens’ campaign. She had no good response, though she did parrot a bunch of what I’m sure were well-workshopped slogans (she’s “transparent”). Politicians taking a bunch of corporate money isn’t popular, and people aren’t stupid: they know that corporate money buys influence, and they don’t like it.

Another thing about following shitty Democratic consultants’ advice is that they’re constantly taking the game to the Republican candidate’s home turf. On a huge number of issues — healthcare, ICE, school funding, school lunches, among others — these consultants advise candidates to split the difference between Republican policies and what people really want. One example I saw today was Amy Klobuchar detailing how two Minneapolis residents were shot in the back by ICE and then concluding: this is why we must reform ICE. This just leads to Republicans saying, well, perhaps, a few reforms here and there are called for. This is blah on white bread with a tiny smear of mayo. People do not want masked secret police wilding on the streets. Making sure they have bodycams that they’ll inevitably turn off, one “reform”, is bullshit and everyone who’s ever had contact with shitty cops knows it. “Abolish ICE” is the position that Democrats who want to win elections should adopt.

The Republican consultant writing this memo is worried because he knows that Hong’s policies are things that MAGA doesn’t want to deliver. He would much rather call Hong a commie full of airy-fairy ideas in a blizzard of 30 second spots. He can’t, in part because “leftist” Democrats reach the electorate via social media and door knocking, and in part because Hong obviously knows how to work and take care of her kid. Hong’s not here to play the “hide out and run ads” game, and the consultant’s boss is going to look like a bozo if he doesn’t have some response to why kids can’t have free lunches in Wisconsin like they have in Minnesota. So this consultant is going to have to step up his game if Hong wins the primary — he’s going to have to do more than donor service. Fortunately for him, Republican donors want to win at all costs, so they’ll probably allow Tom Tiffany to tell a few lies that violate the MAGA orthodoxy. (“We’ll have free lunches, but we’ll rig it so that only white kids will get them.”)

Unfortunately, the Democrats’ consultants don’t have this luxury. They know that their grasp on donor money isn’t as tight as Republicans’. If the candidate they’re advising won’t be a Republican lite, then the donor money will go to a real Republican, and they’ll be out of a job. That’s why they advise anyone who’s listening that Francesca Hong is a dangerous option, and Democrats better be askerit of her because she’s almost certain to lose. If only Hong would support means-tested free school lunches, then her election would be virtually guaranteed, they’ll tell us with a straight face.

Only the Republican consultant has the freedom to say that she’s more likely to win, which is the truth.

Let’s take as trip way back in distant time to the GW Bush Administration. Bush and Republicans pushed through major federal tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Simply put, George W. Bush was the first U.S. president to take the country into war and cut federal taxes during that war.

From Politifact and Paul Krugman:

Yes - we increased taxes during the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Bush cut taxes during the Iraq War and Afghanistan.

Fast forward back to current day and Trump’s Folly^TM (the Iran War).

US used ‘virtually all’ long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say

The U.S. Army has reportedly used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during America's five-month war with Iran.

Military Times • Reuters

And:

Nearly 80% of interceptors for a key missile defense system depleted, sources say | CNN Politics

The US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its interceptors for a key missile defense system as senior US military commanders are warning that the Pentagon’s munitions stockpile is “dangerously low,” according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

CNN • Zachary Cohen, Jim Sciutto, Haley Britzky

Here’s Adam Kinzinger:

Regarding munitions:  The thing is, the US has plenty of munitions. Just not the high level standoff ones.  Those are meant to hit high value targets then allow planes with cheaper munitions to come in.  But he’s risk averse and only using the top level stuff for EVERY target.  

Is risk aversion

— Adam Kinzinger (@adamkinzinger.substack.com)
2:27 PM • Jul 26, 2026

It’s the strategy of an administration that is insecure, incompetent, anti-expertise and that thinks it manly to show off the ”shiny” stuff. Of course, if you can even call it a strategy, it’s a stupid one.

Phillips O’Brien lays it all out in a recent Substack (extensive read due to its importance):

Do Not Forget That Wars Demand Money

I Doubt The US Can Afford To Escalate And Fight A Long War, Even If It Wanted To

Phillips P. OBrien

Wars are obscenely expensive, usually costing far more money than people can imagine before they start. Finding such funds usually requires a combination of hard work and brute force.

I was struck by this question because the cost of Trump’s War is usually overlooked in the strategic discussion of whether Trump can or should escalate, and whether such a decision might turn Trump’s war into a longer-term conflict. In actuality, the question of how this war can or should be financed needs to be addressed first. One of the determining facts which will determine the length of this war could be that the USA is far more under the gun financially than it was at the start of any war in its history. That alone might prevent the US from escalating or lengthening the war—even if Trump wanted to do both.

If I may, I would like to go back to one of my favorite pieces of the year so far, which struck some people as a little out of left field. It was how in geopolitical and economic terms, we may have forgotten what it was like to deal with a real financial crisis.

…

The argument in the piece was that over the last 20 years we have had one way to deal with any crisis, be it the 2007-8 financial meltdown, the Covid pandemic, etc., and that was through massive deficit spending. We could, and did, throw masses of money at any problem. At the same time, the US fought its long War on Terror, which lasted through the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. All of this borrowing helped get the USA (and the rest of the world) through these crises, but of course it came with a time limit. We have been incredibly lucky (in the short term) over the last twenty years in that for much of the time interest rates were exceptionally low. At some point the borrowing has to stop, and I do not believe people understand this and are prepared for it.

The omens are already somewhat ominous. In a nutshell the US is trying to fight this war having already accrued a national debt bigger than it had at the end of World War II and with interest rates at relatively very high levels—a double whammy it has never faced before. And the US is already struggling to sell the debt, before the increased costs of this war have been figured in.

Here is a chart that I had created comparing the relative state of the US federal debt now and at the start of other recent wars (on top), and then the interest rates at which the US government could sell ten-year bonds at those times.

The reality is that National Debt of the USA (as a percentage of GDP) is more than twice as large as it was when the War on Terror started in 2001 and almost three times as large as it was when the Vietnam War started.

…

Things are further complicated by the fact that already we have no idea what this war has already cost. The administration has been claiming recently (July) that the costs of the war has been $37.5 billion. However that is undermined by two facts. First, the Department of Defense is requesting a supplemental bill for an extra $67.1 billion and the DOD a year ago received a large supplemental appropriation of $150 billion which is supposedly has not spent.

Just a guess, the $37.5 billion figure used by the Pentagon just covers the cost of munitions expended in the war. The real figure would be multiples of this.

In other words, the costs of this war in six months are already steep and would explode if the war metamorphosized into a long-term war with US ground troops going into Iran.

…

So add it up and what do we see? It might be that even if Trump wants to escalate the war that he simply cannot. There would be no way to fund it without leading to higher borrowing costs and even then it might never have the political funding to begin with. People should be talking about this more than they are. 

Now, let’s look at funding our federal government over the years.

• Top Marginal Individual Tax Rates. During what many would call the heyday of economic and middle-class growth in this country, from 1945 - 1979, the top marginal federal income tax rate (assessed on the wealthiest earners in our society) averaged 81.7%.

  Reagan started bringing the tax rate down in 1980, and from the end of his term, from 1987 - 2025, the top marginal federal income tax rate (assessed on the wealthiest earners in our society) averaged 36.5%.

• Corporate Taxes. In 1945, corporate taxes supplied about 30% of total federal revenue. Today, corporate taxes supply about 9% of federal revenue.

• Borrowing and National Debt. While Republicans accuse Democrats of being “tax and spend”, Republicans are clearly in the camp of “borrow recklessly and spend”.

  Since WWII, of the 5 Presidents who actually decreased the annual federal deficit over the course of their terms, 4 were Democrats and one was Republican (Eisenhower, who in today’s worlds would actually be considered a Democrat). Of the 9 Presidents who increased the annual federal deficit over the course of their terms, 3 were Democrats and 6 were Republicans.

_________________________

To summarize:

Republicans have repeatedly reduced taxes on their donor class - the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

In place of those tax revenues, we have borrowed money to the point where it is becoming difficult to sustain and service our national debt (in essence, we are bankrupting our country and our military budget and reckless wars ar a major part of that).

In the course of several months of Trump’s^TM Folly, we are running out of our best and most expensive offensive and defensive weapons.

Trump, Hegseth and their cronies are clearly incompetent and have purged expertise from the miliary and replaced it with sycophantic supporters.

What more could go wrong that already hasn’t?

Country Joe and the Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag

It’s past 1 AM Central and NBC just called the Michigan primary for Abdul El-Sayed. It looks like he’ll pull it out with about a 2% margin, at least.

I look forward to Kay’s take on this whole thing.

As everyone who writes on this blog constantly writes, primaries are hard to poll. The polling showed that AES was going to win this running away. Instead, it was fairly tight. That’s a lesson for the next set of primaries, and the general.

“Vote blue no matter who” will certainly be tested in this race.

Rep Max Miller, alleged wife beater, keeps up his stellar performance as biggest asshole around:

Republican Rep. Max Miller's ex-wife responds after Miller publicly shared nude images of their 2-year-old daughter on the internet:

"At least one of those images could be considered Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) because the daughter's genitals appear to be visible."

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social)
3:58 PM • Aug 4, 2026

In case you haven’t been following this case, Miller has responded to accusations that he threw scalding water on his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, like this:

Rep. Max Miller: "My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her…If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?"

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com)
2:49 PM • Aug 2, 2026

Um, this is how — they were in the “honeymoon” phase of the cycle of spousal abuse.

After taking his sweet, sweet time, Emily Moreno’s dad decided to stick up for her. Details here, but I thought Pitchbot encapsulated it:

Rep. Max Miller’s repeated abuse of my daughter and granddaughter makes him unfit for public office. Thank you for your patience as I awaited results from the focus group before releasing this statement.

by Sen. Bernie Moreno

— NY Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social)
7:11 PM • Aug 2, 2026

Miller said yesterday that he’s staying in the race. To that I say: drip, drip drip.

I don’t know shit about Ohio politics, and I’m sure Kay is busy getting the vote out in Michigan, so while our resident Ohio expert is busy, I went to Wikipedia and looked it up. My friends in Christ, it is a R+5 district in the Cleveland suburbs. Completely winnable, especially in this political environment with a candidate who’s clearly in trouble. And, there’s what appears to be a decent Democratic candidate, Brian Poindexter. Though the positions on his campaign website are certainly not the product of a DSA focus group, he has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, which is a usually a good sign. Here’s his bio from the WFP endorsement:

Brian Poindexter

Poindexter won a contested primary, so good luck to him, and I hope Max Miller’s ex-wife takes him to the cleaners.

Ther are so many things wrong with this it’s hard to know where to begin (gift link):

From the article (bold emphasis mine):

I’ll focus on the two most salient points.

First, While Blanche wrote that he is ending the “weaponization of Government” slush fund for J6 criminals (and other Trump-adjacent malefactors), people who actually know the law have pointed out that the “settlement” requires the signature of both parties to be modified, so Blanche’s letter likely has no legal effect.

From CNN:

The problem with Blanche rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund order is that it wouldn’t seem to necessarily fully kill off the fund.

As the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy has explained, the settlement’s terms (see our annotation here) state that it could be “modified only with the written agreement of the parties.” That would include Trump.

So while Blanche has rescinded a separate order he wrote that actually created the fund under the terms of the settlement, the settlement itself still exists — and could seemingly be enforced.

In fact, Cornyn and Blanche basically explained all of this during an exchange at Blanche’s confirmation hearing in mid-July, before they agreed to greenlight his nomination.

When he started pressing Blanche, Cornyn asked whether the settlement agreement had been modified by the parties, including Trump. (It hadn’t, Blanche said.) Under Cornyn’s questioning, Blanche admitted that even if he verbally promised to fully kill off the fund, the settlement remained an “enforceable document,” and Trump could file a lawsuit seeking to enforce its terms.

“There’s no guarantee that he or one of the other plaintiffs might [not] raise that issue by way of a lawsuit and — a breach of contract lawsuit in the future,” Cornyn said.

Senator Cornyn chickens out

Blanche claimed that, because the fund would have been ended, “the results of such litigation, whatever it would be, wouldn’t be a revival of the fund.” And Cornyn dropped the issue.

But McCarthy wrote that that’s not the full story.

“Absent such a modification agreement, however, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is still viable and could be revived at any time, despite Blanche’s insistence to the contrary,” McCarthy said.

And even some supporters of the anti-weaponization fund suggested Blanche’s document could just be rendered moot.

“Can be undone after Tuesday,” Republican lawyer Mike Howell, who applied to serve on the “anti-weaponization” fund’s board, wrote on X late Sunday. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund is great.”

Blanche and his allies could argue that the new document would make it politically impossible to revive the fund — because it would look so bad and could draw lawmakers to pass legislation killing it off. But there are no guarantees.

Also:

Second, as Andrew Lawrence points out, there is no such thing as “tax immunity” (much as there was no such thing as Presidential immunity from criminal acts until the “conservative originalists” on SCOTUS unilaterally and unoriginally decided the Constitution magically granted Presidents immunity without it actually being, well, in the Constitution):

the next president has a duty to the country to prove that “tax immunity” is a completely made up thing that doesnt exist. they need to do this through intense prosecution to signal to future leaders what will happen if they try this

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew.bsky.social)
5:12 PM • Aug 3, 2026

From the News-Times:

Based on the historical record, there is no known precedent in modern U.S. history for a president, elected official, or ordinary U.S. citizen receiving a settlement that broadly bars the IRS from continuing existing audits or tax examinations in the way reported for President Trump in 2026. Multiple tax law experts interviewed by the Associated Press, ABC News, and others described the agreement as extraordinary, highly unusual, and possibly unprecedented.

Ok. enough. You get the picture.

So, Senators Tillis and Cornyn (BTW, both practicing lawyers), supposedly free from the yoke of Trumpism due to retirement/electoral defeat, were either outsmarted by Todd Blanche (hard to believe) or simply used Blanche’s meaningless letters as cover to cave to Trump. Again.

Addendum: Even Tricky Dick himself, Richard Nixon, heretofore perhaps the most corrupt President in our history, didn’t try to give himself immunity for taxes owed (and it was a lot of back taxes - over $432,000 worth plus penalties/interest).

This is corruption of the highest order. It must be hung around the neck of every sitting Republican Senator and every U.S. Senate candidate.

Some Democrats are speaking up:

Dems in Uproar Over Clear Loopholes in New Trump IRS Settlement

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has stifled the Republican revolt—and still managed to save Trump.

The New Republic • Hafiz Rashid

This is corruption of the highest order. It must be hung around the neck of every sitting Republican Senator, every Republican U.S. Senate candidate, and, frankly, every other Republican officeholder who is silently complicit in supporting Trump.

“No one - NO ONE - in the history of the United States of America has ever been immune from audit or from paying back taxes owed. Until now. Until Donald Trump, with the support of Republican Senators. Even crooked Richard Nixon paid back taxes plus interest after getting audited and caught. And when Trump gives himself immunity, it means we all pay more and can afford less.

There is only one way to end the most corrupt administration and congress in history - vote them out and elect the party that will immediately pass laws to end this pillaging of our country.”.

The Beatles - Taxman

Josh Marshall linked to a piece on The Bulwark about data centers. It’s a pretty straight-news overview of why Democrats are amplifying the issue, but the subhead of the piece (“Here’s why it’s a risky issue”) gives up the game. Here’s the graph where things go sideways:

The link to “overstated” goes to an Atlantic piece behind a paywall so I didn’t get it all. The “less water” link is a CBS News piece saying that most water use is farming, watering lawns and flushing toilets, not data centers. I’m very skeptical of the jobs piece, which tries to show that a significant number of IT jobs are created by data centers. The tax revenue question is whether the city or town or county where the data center is located is so thirsty for the supposed boon of having a data center that they dole out tax breaks.

What’s missing is, of course, the “E” word: electricity. These data centers use a staggering amount of it — the one being built near Cheyenne, WY will use three times more electricity than the entire state. That kind of electricity use costs consumers, and they’re right to be mad. Never mind everything that the Bulwark’s links don’t mention, such as the damage done by blasting, and the wrecking of water supplies, both of which were documented in AOC’s recent trip to north Georgia.

Yes, on occasion, outlets run by former Republicans like The Bulwark print good stuff. But a site staffed by former Weekly Standard employees and led by Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol is going to side with Mitt-Romney-Republican “good for business” positions over positions adopted by anyone even slightly to the left of center in the Democratic Party. The piece quoted above is a case in point. The danger here is that sites like The Bulwark suck up money and attention that could go to media that would actually amplify Democrats who say things that aren’t acceptable to recently converted Democrats who were essentially kicked out of the Republican Party.

Part of the reason sites like the Bulwark are so successful is because their publishers and staff are plugged into the DC power structure and its corporate donor class. So it’s no coincidence that the Bulwark prints a “let’s not go too far on data centers” piece the around the same time that Politico publishes this:

Justin Pearson is a member of the Tennessee House, representing a Memphis district, where Elon Musk’s X has recently been forced to remove 69 gas turbines that were illegally powering their four data centers there. I guess you’re a “Luddite” if you want data center developers to follow the law and not poison your constituents.

There are a lot of issues around AI that go far beyond data centers, but most of it boils down to people being sick and tired of tech billionaires getting rich on their backs, while making their lives measurably worse. This is a rich vein of anger that Democrats need mine, deeply. To do otherwise would be political malpractice. So, once again, the never Trumpers’ desire to take over the party is at odds with the best interests of both the party and the public at large.

PSA: I spent most of today helping Mrs. Wypoxic with insurance claims related to her office burning down (and up). We are making progress and, thankfully, Mrs. W is mostly over her shock and grief and back at running her successful business that she loves…

On a side note, we are also getting a not-really-needed lesson in U.S. insurance industry capitalism. The insurance company is actually doing a good job of responding to us and paying claims as we submit. However, we are stuck on claims for our vehicle which was parked in the garage under the building. Of course, our insurance company is looking to “subrogate” all or some of our claims. Subrogation is the act of one insurance company trying to find someone else at fault for an event (like an electrical fire that burned down an office building) so they can go after the at-fault party’s insurance carrier to get paid for the claims they are paying to us. Given the parties involved, that might take months or years. In the meantime, our totaled minivan slowly decomposes due to fire, smoke, water and mold. And us? We just wait.

I’ve seen a few pieces lately lamenting how terrible the Michigan primary has been. Here’s an example from Paul Campos at LGM.

I’ll leave the on-the-ground reporting to Kay, but as TBone posted in the comments last night, it appears that part of the reason that El-Sayed might win tomorrow is that Schumer and Gillibrand pressured McMorrow to drop out. Maybe if they would have kept out of it, Stevens or McMorrow would have prevailed. Best laid plans and all that…

My simple observation is that this will get uglier before it gets better. There’s a fight to be had here. We’ve got a group of the party that thinks if we just hold on and beat Republicans in 2026, and Trump in 2028, we can go back to making donors happy and doing some small incremental improvements. There’s another, smaller, group that thinks that we need major reforms. The former group, the institutionalists, have decided that they don’t want to have a fight out in the open. Instead, they’re wanting to have their donors air-bomb their opponents with negative ads. It’s ugly, and it turns people off, and many of us just want it to be over.

Unless and until the institutionalists decide to fight for what they want — the 2015 status quo — and do it out in the open, we’re going to continue to have these ugly fights. Most people do not want what the instutionalists want. They don’t want to keep giving Israel money, they don’t want only tiny incremental improvements in social programs, they don’t want a bloated defense budget that sucks up all the money we could use to better the lives of average Americans, they don’t want a bunch of billionaires living tax-free lives while the rest of us have a lower standard of living, and they don’t want a set of Republican judges telling us “no” whenever something slightly progressive escapes Congress and is signed into law by a Democratic President. The institutionalists want a slightly-better-than-status-quo future that most of the Democratic base doesn’t. Therefore, the Democratic base has decided to throw them out in the rare cases where a better alternative is offered. This process is ugly. We should get used to it, because it’s going to take a long time for things to change.

I’m volunteering with Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign and reading about this race or El-Sayed is disconcerting because how it is being portrayed is so far from reality.

It reminds me a little of when I was an Ohio delegate to the DNC in ‘08 and national political media focused almost exclusively on “PUMAS” when there about 11 of them there in Denver and no one was paying them any attention. I confronted an AP reporter about it, told her she was misleading her readers with her insane focus on the SINGLE PUMA delegate from Ohio and she got really mad at me. I make friends everywhere I go.

Despite what you may see on cable tv or social media, Abdul El-Sayed focuses mostly on health care in his campaign - understandable because he’s a physician and was the health director for Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s second focus is money in politics, but almost no one in media wants to talk about that so no one asks him about it.

There is one good interview with El-Sayed - David Remnick of the New Yorker interviewed El-Sayed for the New Yorker podcast. Remnick is smart and a good listener and possesses the background and context to do a good interview. He’s also operating in good faith - no gotchas or clever tricks to promote his own career and no conducting a cross examination. Just real questions. A cross examination is a poor way to get people to talk - it deliberately elicits yes or no answers. The saying in law is a cross is where the lawyer testifies. When you listen to an interview that is actually about the media person talking you are listening to a poor imitation of a cross examination. It’s a specific legal tool used for a specific purpose in a trial. Every dope in media wasn’t supposed to model their interviews on it.

If I had to characterize these two candidates, Stevens and El-Sayed, I would say Stevens is a government nerd and El-Sayed is a science nerd. Both of these people grew up in households with plenty of resources. Both of these people attended good public high schools - “well resourced” as they say in public school circles. Both of these people attended selective colleges. If Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed had been in high school together they would have been in the same group - the honors classes and 15 extracurriculars group.

The interview begins with Remnick describing an encounter El-Sayed had with Bill Clinton in 2007. El-Sayed was the student commencement speaker for his undergrad graduation at U of M. Bill Clinton was the commencement speaker. Clinton approached El-Sayed after the ceremony and complimented El-Sayed’s speech and asked him what he was doing next. El-Sayed told Clinton he was headed to NYC for med school. Clinton seemed surprised and told him he should consider politics.

And thus Bill Clinton is actually responsible for all of this - kidding, I’m kidding.

Anyway, listen to the podcast, it’s only 35 minutes and you’ll get a real sense of who this dude is - I think you will like him.

The campaign is in the home stretch and they’re feeling pretty good although there plenty of caveats (primary polling is notoriously bad) and no one is taking anything for granted. This morning they are tracking the youth vote using the University of Michigan’s excellent voter and elections information shop, which focuses on the youth vote and is free and publicly available.

“Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again!” - George W Bush on September 17, 2002 in Nashville

Mangled as it was, W could have been speaking about the legacy media and a fair amount of U.S. citizens being credulous about Trump’s repeated ridiculous BS statements about putting Trump’s Folly^TM - the Iran War - on hold.

Just for the record.

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Trump is like the Court Jester whispering into the King’s ear, but in this case, it’s a voice in his head speaking to his lizard brain.

A few observations/questions:

1. Have we ever seen this? A “stop-and-start” war based on the whims of a clearly mentally-ill malignant narcissist? Short answer: No - we have not.

2. Have we ever run a war via the social media account of one person? Is that even legal? Short answers: No and No.

3. The guy’s brain is broken. Seriously. He literally keeps going back to the same old trope - “I’m stopping the war because I’ve been asked by others to do so” - time and time again. Like we can’t figure out it’s a bunch of BS. But he has few other “go tos” that will serve as an excuse for his ignorance, uncertainty, TACOness, financial/energy market manipulation, and God-only-knows what else he bases these decisions on.

When will Democrats and the legacy media clearly call this BS out? When will a critical mass of the media state bluntly and directly and consistently that we cannot believe ANYTHING Trump says because he is a pathological liar? Short answer: Never.

The Beatles - The Fool on The Hill

South Dakota had its first primary runoff in like 100 years. Larry Rhoden, the incumbent governor who replaced Kristi Noem after she went off to kiss Trump’s ass and get the reward she deserved for that, won the runoff easily. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Rep Dusty Johnson put his hat in the ring and got walloped in the original primary. Second, Toby Doeden, a nutcase from Aberdeen, basically kept the crazy Trump percentage and got beat badly in the runoff. Here are the numbers:

Doeden actually lost votes — the more voters heard about him, the less they liked him. Part of that was some anti-semitic tweets that surfaced. Doeden spent something like $4 million of his own money for his campaign, and he produced a bunch of “I’m just a swell, nice guy” commercials, but people around here know a skunk by its smell.

I’m not here to give Republicans in South Dakota the blog equivalent of a participation trophy. They suck, they’re doing a terrible job running the state, and they should be replaced by Democrats. Still, they at least have an inkling that the people they elect might sometime do something that could be consequential in their lives.

Contrast that with Republicans in Colorado, where Victor Marx, their absolute nutter of a candidate for Governor, is on a grifting and lying tear. Kyle Clark, great journalist at Denver’s Channel 9, is like a dog with a bone with Marx, covering all of his nonsense. Some recent stories:

Kyle also isn’t afraid of asking questions about Marx’ ridiculous religious claims (unlike most national reporters, who won’t touch religious nuttery with a 10-foot pole):

In my view, the Colorado Republican Party is far closer to the trajectory of the national Republican Party than the South Dakota Republican Party. They want to hear sweet lies from an obvious con man. They want to see someone whose choice is violence, who finds ways around campaign finance laws to line his pockets. Essentially, they want to have a minister in charge. Trump is kind of the head priest of the Republican Party, heathen that he is. He occupies the same corrupt position as the leaders of many Christian churches, he’s been credibly accused of molesting kids, and his followers worship him.

The only way this can be beat is if Democrats do what Kyle Clark does: stop worrying about the whining and crying of the hard core Christian Nationalist Republicans and call these fuckers out. Everything out of their mouths is bad faith. It does not need to be “considered respectfully” or “have valid feelings acknowledged.” It’s nonsense, and can be labeled as such.

Looks like the reflecting pool saga hasn’t proceeded as planned for Trump, MAGA and Pirro:

US drops charges against Olympian in Reflecting Pool damage, citing flawed work

Justice officials announced they are dropping charges against a former Olympian after the Trump administration admitted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool damage was caused by flawed work.

USA TODAY • Amanda Lee Myers and Dinah Voyles Pulver

Bluesky poster Chris Geidner has it right:

jeanine and michael are basically mocking trump here.

s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social)
10:56 PM • Jul 31, 2026

The amazing thing is this is DOJ’s and Pirro’s rationale in their filing dropping the case is a bunch of crap. Anyone who pays attention knew before they called the Grand Jury that it was a botched job (although to be fair the MAGA bubble might be hermetically sealed so tight that these bozos don’t know even though they do pay attention). Pirro just doesn’t want another humiliating defeat.

Predictably, Trump was pissed off:

Trump blasts DOJ for dropping reflecting pool vandalism case

On Friday, July 31, the DOJ said "flawed installation" rushed for America 250 celebrations caused damage to reflecting pool. Trump say his DOJ is wrong.

USA TODAY • Emily R. Condon

Obviously, DOJ dropping charges - and admitting damage to the Reflecting Pool prior to David Hearn bending down and merely touching already damaged goods - exposes Trup’s blatant lie.

He almost admits it in this TS screed (“there may have been some contractor difficulty”) but b/c he’s Trump, a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist, he can’t quite go all the way and admit it (“but the major damage was caused by VANDALS”)

I have but one question to ask of my country: Will the media use DOJ’s words about prior damage and contractor fault to bluntly and explicitly call out Trump for lying?

Yeah - that was rhetorical, wasn’t it…

Beyoncé and Shakira - Beautiful Liar

I got an email from an Ohio reader who has read my blathering for a long time, suggesting I go back to working on and writing about issues like education or child care or voting rights, and leave off the (very real and substantive) split in the Democratic Party on foreign policy, which is controversial and makes some people (probably him) mad. Basically, “I liked it when you did that and I don’t like thinking about this other thing you care about, so go back into the box I put you in”. I like this person (well, less so now) and so I tried to explain how that reads to me in a private response, and now I’m explaining the same thing here.

Women in the Democratic Party (or the Left – DSA Leftists are just as bad) are not responsible for holding up Party unity. We’re not the busy worker bees watching the group weather and calming squalls while the menfolk discuss The Big Thorny Issues. We’re not obligated to do unpaid work on or write about whatever consensus or conventional Dems think is an acceptable, practical issue “we can all agree on”. We can change our opinions and pursue our own interests, and people can get mad about it and we can continue anyway.

It’s important for people to recognize because this expectation comes out of how women are socialized, and also, frankly, out of how women are still treated in the Democratic Party. We’re the cooperative community builders. We don’t make waves, we build bridges! Except sometimes we don’t want to, that feels like an unfair burden that men don’t carry and really constraining. Here’s the thing – maybe we’re exploring something new only because of our own interest, not its value to the Democratic Party or the collective or your particular cycle-driven political project..

Women do most of the scut work in this Party. I would suggest just trying to be aware  whether insisting they continue to do exclusively that work is sexist, because I think it is.

It’s been a while since I had a Mexico update, and yesterday there were some important developments in the case of the murder of the mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán, Carlos Manzo, on November 1, 2025. This murder resulted in a full-court press by the Mexican government, both by the security services and in creating a Plan Michoacán, which was a comprehensive effort to create an alternative to becoming a member of the cartels by pushing education and other social programs. The latest development is the arrest of a man who goes by the alias of “R1", a leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). He joins 30 other arrests made since the murder of Manzo. The arrest was announced by Omar García Harfuch:

Omar García Harfuch, Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, a.k.a. “Batman”

Moving on, one of the issues that President Claudia Sheinbaum is facing is “los chapulines” — “grashoppers” — the name for politicians who are hopping on the Morena bandwagon to try to capitalize on Sheinbaum’s popularity. The latest chapulín, Marina de Pilar Ávila Olmeda, Governor of the State of Baja California, was the subject of a leaked conversation where she was heard bargaining with US officials to resolve a visa issue. One of the techniques the US uses to intimidate and co-opt Mexican officials is to revoke their visas. Del Pilar’s actions are an embarrassment, but they’re unlike the actions of the governor of Chihuahua, Maru Campos, who housed CIA and other US agents in her state and let them run operations there. Campos is still under active investigation and may well face charges of treason.

Moving on to more fun stuff, Claudia went to the final of the World Cup. She tends to travel commercial, but in this case, her flight was cancelled, so she had to travel on an official plane. Claudia did not attend any World Cup events in Mexico. She gave her ticket to a young woman who loved soccer, and Claudia attended fan events in Mexico City with other fans who couldn’t afford to go to the games. I thought this video was interesting — it’s her arrival at her hotel in New York.

As long-time readers of this blog know, Claudia does not have an official security escort. Her security is handled by a dozen personal aides who have multiple roles (when she works a rope line, they take the many different items that Mexicans hand her, like cards, pictures, and other memorabilia). I listened to a podcast that said that her security had to tell the Secret Service that la Presidenta would be interacting closely with the Mexicans who were greeting her. If you watch the video, you can see some very uptight-looking Secret Service agents trailing behind la Presidenta. The guy in the olive shirt with a beard is one of her personal aides.

Claudia presenting the World Cup trophy to Rodri, who’s apparently a big deal. The guy at the far right is the King of Spain, Felipe VI, the tallest monarch in the world.

Claudia is a for-real soccer fan. Her Instagram this month and last was full of her cheering for El Tri, the Mexican national team. The rest of it, as usual, is opening hospitals, passing out pension cards, and shaking hands, fearlessly and joyfully.

Ok. This is… NUTS.

Trump blames governor, not Iran, for Minnesota cyberattack

President Trump said he does not believe Iran is responsible for a recent cyberattack on water systems in Minnesota, as has been reported.

USA TODAY • Joey Garrison and Thao Nguyen

Background:

Cyberattacks on Minnesota water systems investigated as officials warn about Iranian hackers

Authorities say cyberattacks targeted over 30 water systems in Minnesota earlier this week. The source of the attacks is being investigated, but they came amid warnings that Iranian hackers have been focused on such systems.

AP News

So Trump is blaming the people running Minnesota for attacking (or at least allowing someone else to attack) their own water systems.

Seems unlikely, no? Well, then there’s this:

Trump says he'll 'ask Putin' about Russia helping Iran target US bases in Middle East

Trump was questioned about the reports shortly after President Volodymyr Zelensky said on July 25 that Moscow has been providing Tehran satellite imagery of U.S. and Gulf military installations throug...

Yahoo News

I guess asking his own intelligence agencies isn’t his first choice. Putin first, America… whenever. Maybe his intelligence agencies could help him out:

Russia is sharing valuable electronic intel with Iran, officials say, as U.S. war drags on. But Trump insists that Putin gave him his word that Russia wouldn't help Iran this way.  www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

— Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social)
12:34 AM • Aug 1, 2026

Seems as if Trump has already decided That Russia providing targeting information that has likely led to the deaths and injuries of U.S. service member is no big deal.

Okey dokey.

Let’s remember this instance in Helsinki, Finland in July of 2018 of the President of the United States choosing between his own team and the “enemy”:

Trump sides with Putin over U.S. intelligence during remarkable press conference in Helsinki

"I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today"

CBS News

Hmmmm. Just throwing this out there:

Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

Ok. maybe it’s not quite treason. But it’s hard to think of ANYTHING more impeachable than consistently supporting your adversaries (Russia), and enemies with whom you are literally at war (Iran), over the people you’re supposed to represent and the elected officials/government servants who are working to protect the residents of this country.

Unless those elected officials/government staffers are themselves treasonous or seditious, in affairs of state, you support your entire team, not your opponent(s).

At some point, every Dem candidate and every Dem/progressive media org should be asking their Republican election opponents if they support Trump choosing foreign adversaries over patriotic Americans. If taking Putin’s word for things over American intelligence is actually “America Last” instead of “America First?”

Eagles - Lyin’ Eyes

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and . . . then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Social Security is perhaps the most popular government (i.e., socialist) program in the U.S. today. It is also the program that - perhaps - touches more people than any other besides, well, income taxes. Per a Pew Research Center article, “79% of U.S. adults said Social Security benefits shouldn’t be reduced in any way – a view broadly shared across ages, racial and ethnic groups, partisan affiliations and income brackets.”

At a July 27, 2024 campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Trump bluntly stated, “I will not cut one penny from Social Security or Medicare,".

Of course, he lied about Medicare (the OBBBA passed by Republicans in 2025 increases the federal deficit, which can trigger automatic Medicare spending cuts under an existing law called the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act of 2010) and he likely is lying about Social Security as well.

According to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund - which pays retirement and survivors benefits - is projected to deplete its reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032. At that point, continuing payroll tax revenue would be sufficient to pay 78% of scheduled OASI benefits. However, if the retirement and disability trust funds are considered together (the combined OASDI trust funds), reserves are projected to be depleted in 2034, after which 83% of scheduled benefits could be paid from ongoing income.

Whelp! Not what the American people want, right?

I recently came across an article in Bloomberg opinion by Kathryn Anne Edwards (behind a paywall but I will excerpt parts below) about how to “Fix” Social Security. The title of the opinion piece is “Social Security Reform Can Be Achieved in Six Words”.

Edwards writes (bold emphasis mine):

There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll narrow it down:

• “…except for the 6% who earn above that amount.” Let’s be clear. Republicans in Congress and the Trump Admin are protecting the top 6% of U.S. earners at the expense of the remaining 94% of workers. For Republicans, it’s taxes for the worker bees but not for the bosses.

• “Besides, the classic longstanding conservative argument against Social Security is not that benefits are too generous.”. Actually - This Is. Not. True. The Republican adjacent Cato Institute wrote: "Social Security is pure welfare, not an individual savings program." And prominent Republicans continue to call Social Security and “entitlement”, implying that it is not earned or deserved.

• “…but that they are a waste of savings given what workers could gain from investing in the market.”, and “instead of accepting a lifetime, inflation-adjusted guaranteed income…”. Investing in the market is risky. Yes - stocks trend upwards over time, however, the stock market doesn’t always go up, and there are several periods since its inception when stock indexes have taken years to return to previous highs (there have been several instances where it has taken 5 years - and up to 15 years - for stock indexes to recover).

  Additionally, Social Security IS essentially a “defined contribution pension” for workers. In order to have an “inflation-adjusted guaranteed income”, the Trust Fund MUST be invested in low risk financial instruments.

•  “Social Security is insulated from the wealth gains the stock market offers.” Correct. See my previous bullet-point argument. The stock market offers wealth gains and - sometimes - wealth losses.

One more point. Even if we get rid of the income cap on payroll taxes for Social Security, we won’t be taxing the majority of income to the top 6%. Because those in the top 1% - and even more so for the top 1/10 of 1% - get much, if not most, of their income from non-salaried sources such as stock options, stock awards, and dividends/interest on investments.

Example: While a wealthy heir who relies on interest/dividends and who doesn’t ever need to work - won’t receive Social Security (you actually need to contribute into the program to receive benefits) - they still rely on the “benefits” of living in our society and, IMHO, should contribute into the Social Security system for others who do the actual work that allows them to skate by.

In fact, there is a saying - “Buy, Borrow, Die” that allows the ultra-wealthy to avoid both capital gains AND Social Security taxes:

• Buy – Accumulate appreciating assets, such as stocks, real estate, or ownership in a private company.

• Borrow – Instead of selling those assets (which would trigger capital gains taxes), borrow against them using securities-backed loans, margin loans, or lines of credit. The loan proceeds are generally not taxable income under U.S. law because loans must be repaid.

• Die – When the owner dies, many appreciated assets receive a "step-up in basis" under current U.S. tax law. This means the tax basis is generally reset to the asset's fair market value at the date of death (or an alternate valuation date if elected for estate tax purposes). As a result, unrealized capital gains that accrued during the owner's lifetime may never be subject to federal capital gains tax if the heirs sell shortly after inheriting the assets.

So let’s include all income in Social Security taxes for the top centi-millionaires and billionaires.

Edwards ends her opinion piece with this sentence:

Here’s my slightly adjusted take:

Scrap the cap, close the gap, make sure the privileged have our back.