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Why Government Cannot be run like a Business [1]
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Date: 2025-04-01
The Greedy Oligarch’s Party (GOP) asserts government should be run like a business. They make a related contention tax cuts always pay for themselves, proving, they claim, government is fundamentally a drag on the economy. This makes government expenditures equivalent to what the business world calls “overhead costs.” As a comment by an investor on Seeking Alpha summed it: “. . . don’t forget government employees produce nothing.”
These claims rest on distortions, misconceptions, and outright lies.
The Real Aim
The GOP has long trafficked in distortions, but the greedy oligarch’s party has descended into bald-faced lying, especially about tax cuts and how government and the economy actually interact. It’s not just Trump’s baleful influence. This lying began with Reagan and accelerated as the Kochs and other billionaires grew more and more greedy and less and less tolerant of government’s “interference” in their heedless pursuit of profit at any cost to the public good.
Their many lies about government derived originally from distorting the effects of a tax cut. Historically only one tax cut may have paid for itself. That was the one by President Kennedy (enacted after his assassination by LBJ) which cut the highest marginal tax rate from 91% to 71%. It only “paid for itself” because after a short period, government revenues did rise again to make up the lost revenue. And there was a short term boost to the growth rate (small and quickly diminishing.)
This episode became the sole “proof” about tax cuts and the only basis for the so-called Laffer curve and Ronald Reagan’s insistence government was the problem, not the solution.
Remember, Reagan never exactly specified what the problem was that government was not the solution for.Turns out, the problem Reagan meant was how to get so much money into the hands of the oligarchs that they could buy the government outright.
Don’t miss this point: Reagan launched the Greedy Oligarch’s Party on its course of the rich, as Bernie puts it, wanting it all and being willing to seize it by any means necessary. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people stood in its way. Reagan’s constant refrain of “freedom” really meant the freedom from democratic government and thus for the rich to take whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, however they wanted to.
Musk is the proof of Reagan’s real intention. The Citizen’s United decision by the Supreme
Court shows this became the common goal of the Republican Party. MAGA is simply a ploy to mask the real intention all along.
Trump is NOT different from any other Republican since Reagan. THAT is why they go along with him.
Basis of the Laffer Lie
Tracing the increase in growth rate to the 1964 tax cut is arguable because of the increase in Vietnam War expenditures which happened at the same time. The boost to growth at the time also was affected by LBJ’s implementation of Medicare (1965) and it’s possible that last move, which drastically lowered the poverty rate among the retired, also made as much as or even more of an impact than the tax cut in boosting growth.
Please note that: Medicare likely made the real difference in growth, not the famous tax cut.
Healthcare is one thing the Nazi’s and the GOP disagree on. Hitlerian Germany knew healthcare made people more productive and better at things like making cars and war than sickly weaklings poisoned by lead in the water and pollutants in the air and soil. These jerks are not Nazis; they are just greedy despots too short sighted and too selfish to even think about their workers.
Bannon and Musk’s penchant for Heil Hitler salutes are just meant to make Trump feel good about knowing they regard him as the current führer.
Republicans hated and still hate Medicare and Medicaid, and while they love defense spending, they will never admit defense spending, by government of course, could contribute to economic growth. And that’s where the defense spending lovers err. They went along with the lie that government contributes nothing. That’s what has led to the latest Trumpist/Muskovite proposal to cut defense spending, hitherto unimaginable, by 8% a year for the next five years.
If there was any question about the Muskovite’s intention to render the US defenseless, if not maneuver it into a civil war or broken into pieces, this proposal should remove all doubt. If all government spending is only a cost, then it’s logical to target all types of expenditures, even the hitherto untouchable spending for defense.
Funny how a lie has its own logic.
And all this lying is because they are frantically trying to identify at least $4.1 trillion in “unnecessary” spending so they can hand a tax cut to the already filthy rich. No tax cut pushed by the GOP has had any such positive effect, even arguably, as the assertions they make today. Instead, tax cuts made since Kennedy’s have resulted in growing national debt and increased deficits, to the point that today just paying the interest on the debt exceeds the money spent on defense.
Trump and Musk are trying to blind the gullible by offering to “share the savings” with $5,000 for each family. Of course, they are sending billions to their family and those of their friends, and maybe a few thousand to you, if you are a taxpayer. Maybe enough to offset the tariff costs for a year but certainly not enough to offset the costs of lost government services. And if you pay no income taxes, no rebate check, buddy.
That means most of the MAGAs are going to be cut off from their “winnings.”
Government Costs Oligarchs Versus Saving for Us
The GOP shifts from distorting to lying when they claim that government expenditures are only a cost and government spending is only a transfer of wealth. They also lie when they claim government debt is only and always a drag on growth, and lie when they claim wealth only originates in the private sector.
Let’s look at some of those government expenditures and see what they cost.
As the GOP Senator from Louisiana said about his campaign to get Hepatitis B vaccines supported by the government, a $50 dollar vaccine prevents a liver transplant, if you can get one, costing $500,000 and then $50,000 a year for life for medicines used to keep the recipient from rejecting the donor organ. Similar savings accrue from many of the vaccines now nixed by the Muskovites. HPV and several types of cancer, for example. Measles can kill about one in a thousand children it infects and it can significantly damage some of the rest. Chicken pox leaves behind a virus that in later life can result in very painful, even fatal, cases of shingles. Polio, heaven help us if it escapes the very few places it remains thanks to USAID and other groups largely funded by governments, kills and cripples for life.
Even for Moscow Mitch that was a bridge too far.
These small government expenditures save huge amounts of money and cumulatively, millions of taxpayer’s lives.
We already see lifespan differences in poorly governed, poorly funded Republiocan-run states that “save money” on all kinds of “useless” expenditures like pre-natal care including vitamins, STI education and prevention, traffic safety, water and air quality regulation and so on. With FEMA and NOAA crippled, many of these same states will “save” money on disaster recovery, rescue services, and hurricane preparation and evacuations.
So let’s sum up the Greedy Oligarch’s Party platform since 1980, in snarky terms:
Flooding of course will come unpredictably with NOAA out of commission, and these same states will be able to avoid any blame because there was no warning and it was an act of god that no one could have foreseen or prepared for. The same can be said for forest fires and wild fires since money can be “saved” by cutting government enforcement of building codes and enforcing zoning setbacks from forests and other houses. This reduction in red tape will permit steep drops in the cost of housing and who, after all, could have expected poor zoning and slack code enforcement could have resulted in so many electrical and gas fires and so many homes built in such a way as to burn so readily and be placed so deeply into woods and hillsides filled with so much flammable materials. Such fires have to also be acts of god similar to hurricanes and floods. And as proclaimed acts of god, insurance firms can avoid payouts and save even more money. All this ending of government spending “saves” an immense amount of money and will surely result in record growth in the states making such savings and surely for the US as a whole. Farmers of course will be thrilled by saving money by government no long spending on useless things like conservation, water quality and supply, animal safety and herd biohazards such as bird flu, or on food safety, health reporting and all the other government regulations that have kept them from experiencing the free market in all its glory. And with the “made in the USA” stamp hogtied to the Tesla/Musk/Nazi/Trump/MAGA brand, foreigners will flock to their local stores to buy American made stuff.
I am sure I am just touching the surface of how much they believe how useless government spending is and government workers are. One can just imagine if instead of cutting defense spending, we simply abolished the Army, Navy, Air Force. With Putin on our side, surely the Chinese would never think of invading Taiwan and intimidating S. Korea, the Philippines and Japan. I doubt Trump even knows Guam, American Samoa and the US Marshall Islands even exist. As long as we have Canada, Greenland and the Canal, that’s all we need, though how he will take these without an Army, Navy or Air Force escapes me at the moment.
I suspect Trump might want to keep his Space Force around since he started the thing. He’ll just have to find out how to contact the folks he fired who actually made and designed the nukes he no doubt wants to arm them with. I’m not sure though, given its track record, any astronauts will want to take rides on one of Musk’s rockets, especially since he’s abolished any and all safety or other quality regulations and nixed the enforcers.
All this will surely make the American economy boom. Or explode. Boom, explode—same thing, right?
Money in the people’s hands makes the economy boom, as the invention of Medicare and Social Security showed. Money in the Oligarch’s hands, on the other hand, makes the economy explode. Reagan had the Savings and Loan collapse with his abolition of government regulators. Bush II collapsed the banking system by the same move. Trump is now setting up another collapse by gutting government in general. All this in order to shift wealth to those already rich beyond comprehension—so they could buy out our democracy.
The solution is obvious: Business must be regulated by government toward the greater good of all. And that requires reducing the monetary power of Oligarchs, drastically. Democrats need to return to Eisenhower’s marginal rate of tax of 91% on incomes above, say, a million dollars a year. That alone would go farther in solving a host of our problems—which are fundamentally due to selfish Oligarchic domination—than any other single action.
Removing their ability to buy government (and the media, and “research” tanks, and political parties and candidates, and judges and so on and on) is key. That would really get money out of politics—because if we don’t take their money away, they will surely take our freedoms and earned benefits away.
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