Trump/GOP Extend Tax Cuts for Billionaires; Try to Pay
for It by Cutting Sesame Street and Your Healthcare
Fall 2025 - For those of you who still may believe that Donald Trump and the GOP have your best interests at heart, you may want to think again. In the first major pieces of legislation passed by the 2025 GOP Congress, those tax and rescission bills did the following:
- Extended Mr. Trump's 2017 tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and large corporations and
- In a vain attempt to pay for those tax cuts, eliminated funding for federal programs that help the rest of us.
- And despite White House claims to the contrary, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, taken together, the sum of these actions will increase our federal debt by $3.4 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
 (Image of Monopoly Man from pinterest)
Let's also not forget that these types of tax cuts have not proven to stimulate the economy, even though that is the rationale the Republicans have been trying to sell us for over forty years. What these tax cuts have proven to do, though, is to make the wealthy even wealthier.
As for the details of this recent fiscal activity, plus some of the additional cuts that the GOP Congress and Mr. Trump's (illegal? and incompetent) Department of Government Efficiency have made, here is what we have been able to glean from multiple sources:
- Estimates that we have read state that, on average, the well-off are expected to gain over $12,000 per year over the next 10 years (the mega-rich will do significantly better, particularly those with large stock portfolios), while everyone else will roughly break even. Some middle class families may benefit by $1,000 per year, while most poorer families likely will come out worse off.
- Subsidies for your health-care coverage are being reduced, thereby causing an increase in the premiums many of you pay
- Budget reductions to the Center for Disease Control will affect the CDC's ability to prepare for, monitor, and respond to health threats and disease outbreaks
- Cuts to EPA staffing and budget threaten the cleanliness of the water you drink and the air that you breathe
- Medicaid funding is being reduced, which will result in illnesses going untreated and, eventually, a reliance on more expensive emergency room care (that the rest of us will pay for) when those illnesses reach a critical state
- Programs that provide food assistance for poor children are being reduced. Hungry children do poorer in school, not to mention the moral aspect of these reductions, as found in the Judeo-Christian Bible's teachings to feed the hungry
- Funding for PBS is being eliminated. How long will the children's programs you and your kids have grown up watching be able to continue?
- Funding for some pediatric cancer research is being eliminated, others are being reduced
- The Meals on Wheels program, which provides food assistance for the elderly, is being scaled back
As we stated above, these reductions (to what we believe are mostly worthwhile expenditures), won't come close to paying for the cost of the tax breaks largely accruing to the millionaire and billionaire class.
At times like this, we also remember that both George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and that, during the final 2-3 years of Mr. Clinton's Presidency, the federal government actually ran budget surpluses!
 (Mr. Clinton ran budget surpluses - image from Clinton Library)
Numerous studies at that time projected that, assuming things didn't change dramatically, our national debt would be eliminated by 2010. (It's also interesting to remember that, at about the same time, private citizen Donald Trump was proposing to raise taxes again on rich people like himself in order to pay down the federal debt even faster.)
Of course, things DID change dramatically: George W. Bush and his GOP Congress reduced taxes on the rich in the early 2000's, thereby driving up the annual deficit. In addition, their reluctance to regulate financial derivatives led to the 2008 Great Recession, which further caused our national debt to skyrocket.
Add to that the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cuts and the 2020 Covid recession, and you end up with a national debt 7 times that which President Clinton left us (~$38 trillion by year-end 2025 vs. ~$5.5 trillion at year-end 2000, per U.S. Treasury data).
When you look at all these facts, it does make one wonder why so many people claim the GOP is more fiscally responsible than the Democrats, doesn't it?
(For a more detailed discussion of our national debt, see our old article, "The National Debt and Federal Fiscal Policy". Or drop us a line and we'll be happy to discuss it with you.)
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