Dollar general
Distracted by everything that doesn't matter. America. 2025.
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he’s doing his bit to expand the average American’s vocabulary. While the Department of Education is on the chopping block, we two weeks or so became acquainted with kakistocracy, or “government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.” Um, you mean people like RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Tulsi Gabbard, among others? Absolutely.
Today, it’s autogolpe, or Spanish for “self-coup.” That’s when “a political leader, having come to power through legal means, stays in power illegally through the actions of themselves or their supporters.” Check. Next week? We’ll probably be getting a crash course in kleptocracy, although that horse fled the barn about nine years ago.
People way smarter than me are penning tens of thousands of words daily about the relentlessly haphazard destruction of the world’s great experiment in democracy. When I set aside the obvious reasons for why Trump and (unelected) Vice President Elonia are doing what they’re doing—money and power, with a side of white supremacy—what interests me is the reaction of the citizens who support them. Because it says everything about the country’s warped sense of reality.
Peek at any of the dozens of posts on LinkedIn this week bemoaning the wiping out the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and there’s inevitably someone who chimes in with something like: “Good. Why spend billions overseas when we have so many problems at home?”
It’s a decent sound bite, and the reason Trump, Musk, and others lie incessantly about the work of agencies like USAID. One example: Trump claimed USAID was spending $50 million on condoms for Hamas, a figure he later doubled. The real number is zero, and the New York Times’ Nick Kristof drolly noted: “Hmm. Male condoms cost the US government 3.3 cents each, so that would be three billion condoms. By my calculation, for Hamas to use up that many condoms in a year, each fighter would have to have sex 325 times a day, every day. That might wipe out Hamas as a fighting force more effectively than Israeli bombardment.”
Indeed. But aside from the strategic stupidity of immolating the country’s soft power, the real question posed to Trump supporters should be: “Why not go after the actual sources of government spending?”
That’s not to say efficiencies can’t be found everywhere, or that “saving” around $40 billion a year should be sneezed at, even if that’s only about 1% of the federal budget. But, as economist Paul Krugman likes to point out, the US government is basically “an insurance company with an army.” If you were to list federal government spending on everyone’s paycheck so we could see where our dollars go, we’d get something roughly like this:
Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs: 25%
Social Security: 21%
Defense: 13%
Interest on the national debt: 8%
Veterans' benefits and services: 4%
Education: 3%
Transportation and infrastructure: 2%
Scientific research: 2%
Foreign aid and diplomacy: 1%
Justice system, environmental protection, agriculture, etc.: Whatever’s left
The problem for anyone bleating about the need for spending cuts is obvious. They don’t want Medicare, Medicaid, or healthcare touched, and the same goes for Social Security. Military spending has long been sacred, and the country has to pay interest on its $36.2 trillion in debt. So, what’s left? All the stuff that represents an investment in the country’s future, from education to research to environmental protection.
The conversation that really needs to happen surrounds the first few line items. The US spends more per capita on healthcare than any developed nation, with worse outcomes. Even conservative think tanks know one thing to be true: having some form of single-payer, universal healthcare (most likely from expanding Medicare to cover all Americans) would save around $450 billion a year, or ten USAIDs.
It would also remove the burden on employers to provide healthcare coverage: the average cost to an employer of providing health benefits to a single person is around $8,400 a year and $24,000 for a family—and that’s on top of whatever employees pay. If that cost was removed from both sides, how much could be redeployed to retirement savings to ease the Social Security load? Or plowed back into the economy as spending?
Trump likes to announce bat-shit crazy stuff like the US turning the Gaza Strip into a beach resort as a way of distracting from what’s really going on (autogolpe!). Gutting USAID or banning transgender college athletes—literally fewer than 10 out of 530,000 students—similarly distracts from the kind of reform that’s really needed, and the ever-expanding list of nefarious actions taking place in plain sight.
That this country desperately needs deep, fundamental change is beyond dispute. And, like many things about Trump, his unhinged actions are usually grounded in a sliver of truth—which is what allows him to be branded as “misleading” rather than simply “lying.” That distinction matters for his supporters, even if the rest of us know what’s up.
One other thing that now similarly seems beyond dispute is the utter inadequacy and inability of the Democratic Party to rise to this moment. It’s failing to understand the gravity of what’s under way, led by people too wedded to the idea the opposition is a rational actor and the American system will hold.
So, in the meantime, we stagger on, with a big chunk of the population cheering the knifing of USAID as a “criminal organization” while the real problems remain unaddressed. It’s like a guy complaining about inflation and immigrants stealing American jobs as he sits in front of his 80-inch Chinese-made flatscreen TV, blowing $1,000 a month on the lease for his tricked-out pick-up truck.
Hmmm. Yep, we’re screwed.
Note: The image on this post is by Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post, via Getty Images.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.