What we truth tellers and realism seekers here on Earth 1 refer to as “healthcare,” “food and shelter assistance,” and “climate control regulations,” the Republicans over on Earth 2 in Congress, the Oval Office, and on right-wing media define as “waste,” “fraud,” and “abuse.”
The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” — which now goes to the Senate after Republicans recently passed it in the House by a single vote — cuts essential services like the SNAP program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), (formerly called “food stamps”) for people in need of food assistance. Approximately one in eight Americans receive nutrition assistance through SNAP; most are children.
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Donald Trump’s budget bill would also let him ignore the rule of law altogether
The measure would effectively mean no consequences if the administration ignored a court ruling.
Though the president and most congressional Republicans promised ad nauseam not to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in the current budget, surprise of all surprises, the House Republicans cut $600 billion to Medicaid and to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The bill makes significant reductions to Medicaid by imposing mostly unreasonable and unrealistic work requirements on many of those receiving benefits.
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They also reduced the availability of government-sponsored loans to middle- and working-class college students, thereby pushing deserving people out of earning a degree.
The Republican bill will also raise household electricity costs by cutting federal investments in wind, solar, and energy batteries, increasing the possible failures of many outdated energy grids. At the same time, the fossil fuels industry will continue to receive billions in subsidies. The bill also includes a reckless, dangerous, and environmentally polluting rollback of green energy tax breaks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
It also cuts “Meals on Wheels,” a vital lifeline program for seniors and people with disabilities who cannot always access healthy food.
Ayn Rand paints a world in which the evil and misguided takers — government workers, people who accept government assistance, and the working poor — wage war against the noble and heroic makers like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
While taking from the poorest and most needy, the bill provides a multi trillion-dollar tax breaks package with the majority going to the richest among us. The bill makes permanent the $4.5 trillion in enormous tax breaks for the rich, initially passed during Trump’s first regime.
The massive budget package adds $350 billion in new spending, with approximately $150 billion set aside for the Pentagon, which includes funding Trump’s new “ Golden Dome” defense shield. The remainder goes to Trump’s draconian and often illegal mass deportation and border security agenda.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that if this bill is passed by the Senate in its current version that 8.6 million fewer people would have access to health care coverage, and 3 million fewer people a month would have SNAP benefits. In addition, it will increase federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the decade, adding to the already out-of-bounds nation’s $36 trillion debt.
So, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional sycophants who branded themselves as conservative “populists” are most certainly extremely popular among the super-rich, but what about all the middle-, working-class, and poor people who voted for them over the promise of a better economic future: of higher wages in better US-based jobs; of better and more affordable healthcare, groceries, and energy costs? What about them?
All this is happening as Trump and Elon Musk fire thousands of public employees while Trump is raking in literally another fortune in sales of his worthless Trump Bitcoins and Musk is accepting billions of dollars in U.S. government grants.
Trump made million- and billion-dollar land and building deals in his recent travels throughout the Middle East. The government of Qatar also bequeathed him a $400 million luxury jet to serve as his new Air Force One, which by all indications will then be used as his personal castle in the sky if he ever leaves the Oval.
This sort of “populism” rather seems like a reverse Robin Hood, sounding as if it could have come from one of Ayn Rand’s novels or essays.
Rand has become the intellectual center for the economic, political, and social philosophy of Libertarianism, which constructs a bifurcated world of one-dimensional characters in her novels.
On one side, she presents the noble, rational, intelligent, creative, inventive, self-reliant heroes of industry, music and the arts, science, commerce, and banking who wage a noble battle for dignity, integrity, personal, and economic freedom, and for the profits of their labors within an unregulated “free market” Capitalist system.
On the other side, she portrays the “looters” represented by the followers, the led, the irrational, unintelligent, misguided, misinformed, the corrupt government bureaucrats who regulate and manipulate the economy to justify nationalizing the means of economic production by confiscating personal property, doling out welfare to the unentitled and the lazy, and in so doing, destroy personal incentive and motivation resulting in dependency. Ayn Rand refers to “welfare” as “unearned rewards,” while she argues for a system of laissez-faire Capitalism separating economics and state.
Ayn Rand bristles against the notion of collectivism, of shared sacrifice and shared rewards. Rather, she argues that individuals are not and should not be their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers; that one must only do unto oneself; that one must walk only in one’s own shoes and not attempt to know the other by metaphorically walking in another’s shoes; that personal happiness is paramount; and that one’s greatest good is what is good for oneself rather than for the greatest number of people.
In other words, Ayn Rand paints a world in which the evil and misguided takers — government workers, people who accept government assistance, and the working poor — wage war against the noble and heroic makers like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The doublespeak of “liberty” & “freedom”
The so-called “Libertarian” and Republican battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on the surface, but we have to ask ourselves as individuals and as a nation, what do they really mean by and what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?
We must, first, cut through the coded xenophobic, racialized, and classist language, for often when politicians use the words “poor,” “welfare,” “inner city,” “food stamps,” “entitlements,” “bad neighborhoods,” “foreign,” “culture of poverty,” they tap into many white people’s anxieties and past racist teachings of people of color.
Though 36.1% of SNAP recipients are white, the common perception and societal stereotype depicts black people and Latinx as using and abusing the system the most. In addition, the buzzword “personal responsibility” has now become the catch phrase to justify cutting benefits from people with disabilities, older people, and those who have fallen on hard times and need assistance.
Ayn Rand and many Republicans and their followers would rather blame poverty within our communities and low achievement in our schools on the “cultures” of those suffering from the social inequities. This “cultural deficit model” detracts and undermines us from interrogating and truly addressing the enormous structural inequities pervasive throughout our society, which these “Libertarians” and some Republicans would have us multiply if we were to follow their lead.
So-called “social issues” become wedge issues to attract people to a particular candidate. In the final analysis, though, when middle- and working-class people vote for these candidates, they essentially vote against their own economic self-interests.
Most government workers, in reality, are not the one-dimensional, corrupt, self-serving, hypocrites (advocates for “the people” while actually being ruthless manipulators), and “looters” of industry, art, and enterprise as Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk would have us believe. In addition, so-called “laissez-faire” (free, uninhibited, unencumbered, and unregulated) Capitalism is not the bromide for a prosperous economy, and freedom and liberty for the individual as Ayn Rand and Republicans argue.
Ragnar Danneskjöld, Ayn Rand’s so-called moral crusading pirate and symbol for “justice” in her novel Atlas Shrugged, quite tellingly expresses Ayn Rand’s true purpose when she put these words in the pirate’s mouth: “I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”
Hank Rearden, one of Ayn Rand’s “righteous” industrialists asks, “What man?”
Danneskjöld replies, “Robin Hood….He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I’m the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich – or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”
Well, Rand and Danneskjöld, the Republicans in Congress are making your wish come true at last!
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