Category Archives: Politics

The Very Presidential Cage Match

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After several seasons of rehashed dialogue and tired plot twists, the Trump Show has finally hit its stride with a UFC cage match on the South Lawn. This is exactly what many of us have been waiting for: a leader who understands that presidential “dignity” and “decorum” are for losers. In the new America, our values are best exemplified by a steel cage, blaring walk‑out music, and the promise that someone will be bloodied on your favorite streaming service.

The crassness of the event doesn’t cheapen the office; it celebrates its crassness. Why pretend this place is about solemn duty when you can turn it into a premium fight venue with better production values and higher viewer ratings than most State of the Union addresses?

Critics keep asking, “Where’s the dignity?” But this is the dignity. This is exactly what it looks like when a country decides that cruelty is strength and restraint is weakness. You didn’t really think the culmination of that story arc was going to be a thoughtful speech in the East Room, did you? Please. We’ve all seen the trailer. And believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Upcoming seasons of the Trump Show promise to make Homelander look like a Boy Scout with a publicist.

So get used to it, pansy‑ass liberals. Get used to a president grinning beside a cage, a crowd baying for blood, and a flag fluttering garishly over the spectacle put on for your entertainment. Trump promised greatness and he delivered in the form of a giant fight cage on the once‑hallowed White House lawn. In a way, it’s the most honestly revealing thing this president has ever done: no pretense, no paper‑thin decorum, just the rabid attention he craves and the crass spectacle we were eager to see.

Trump Believes

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Classic newswriting practice discourages the use of subjective words like “believes,” “thinks,” and “feels” because they imply an inner state of mind that cannot be independently verified by reporters. Instead, journalists are generally advised to rely on neutral attribution verbs such as “said,” “stated,” or “told reporters.” When distance or skepticism is warranted, words like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “suggested” can signal that the outlet is reporting an allegation or interpretation rather than endorsing it as fact.

Yet in normal political coverage, “believe” is frequently used. Writers routinely say things like “Democrats believe” or “the mayor believes.” That isn’t normally a problem. Used this way, “believes” stops short of endorsing the belief as fact while still capturing that someone is expressing more than a single, isolated quote; it gestures at a broader worldview.

In the context of Trump, however, many otherwise reasonable norms become problematic. When the word “believes” is used to characterize assertions made by Trump or his administration, it becomes subtly misleading. Trump strains or breaks many norms, including the use of the word “believes” to describe his frequently shifting claims. If reporters use the word “believes” to suggest a coherent worldview, that framing is often inaccurate in his case.

Describing statements by Trump and his administration as sincere “beliefs” does more than attribute an inner mental state or suggest a worldview; it risks conferring a kind of moral and epistemic dignity. A belief can be wrong, even wildly wrong, but it usually suggests some sincerity, some continuity, and some relation to evidence as the believer understands it—some sense that, if the world looked different, the belief might eventually yield.

None of that is typically true with Trump. Few of the disingenuous claims he spouts at any given moment can be legitimately called beliefs, apart from some of his most openly spiteful or ideologically consistent ones.

To many readers, “Trump believes” often feels not merely imprecise but almost perverse. It sounds like a credibility upgrade, a quiet promotion from “he says this” to “this is how reality appears inside his sincere inner life.” Even when the rest of the sentence and the surrounding reporting are fully critical—fact-checks, counterevidence, context—the verb itself grates, because it conflicts with the reader’s core assessment: that Trump does not believe in the ordinary sense so much as deploy statements. In that frame, “believes” is not a neutral label; it is an inaccurate and undeserved benefit of the doubt.

The problem is compounded by how small words are processed as we read them. Readers rarely stop on “claims,” “says,” or “argues.” These are background verbs that their brains skip over. But “believes” stands out. It draws attention to itself because it imports psychology. This may help explain why journalists use it; it can subtly signal interpretive authority and make a piece feel more insider-informed.

Because “believes” stands out, once you notice its misuse in regard to Trump, it tends to keep surfacing. Each instance can leave the impression that the writer or outlet is softening or normalizing Trump’s unrelentingly false claims and arguments.

It is unfortunate that, like many things strained by Trump, we can no longer take for granted the otherwise benign use of a word like “believes.” News writers should be far more careful about describing claims by Trump or his administration as “beliefs.”

An Honest State of the Union

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My Americans: the state of my Union is strong. Strong like never before. Frankly, it was pathetic before — weak, sad so sad — but now it’s tremendous. Nobody’s ever seen anything like what I’ve done. People said, “Oh, that Trump, he’s all talk, just rhetorical style some called it.” And now they say, “Sir, America has never been as strong as it is under your leadership.” They’re right. It was a Biden disaster before, but in just one short year I demolished the broken administrative state and rebuilt it into a beautiful new Trump-branded America. It’s like my new White House ballroom. Have you seen the plans? It’s going to be a thing of beauty for all my wealthy donors to enjoy.

No one appreciates it. No one says, “Thank you, Sir, for fixing America.” But that’s okay — as long as I’m raking in the money. People ask me, “Sir, how did you do it?” Easy. I cut all that useless red tape. Gone! Environmental protections — gone. Worker protections — gone. Public education, well, almost gone. We’re working on it. Now our great Trump business leaders are making record profits and dividends, the biggest in history. Maybe in the world, if we’re being honest.

Still, they’re not all playing ball. Not yet. But they’re coming around. And the fake news corporations, the shady law firms — they’re learning, believe me. They either do what’s right for America or they suffer. Oh, they’ll suffer. I’ve got many tools, many ways I could make them do the right thing. But I’m too nice some say. Viktor Orbán — ever hear that name? Strong guy. Very smart. I like strong leaders.

But all those moochers? Not so much. We’re taxing them like never before. I just call it “tariffs,” and they cheer. “Sir, make China pay!” they yell. Marketing genius, believe me.

Our so-called allies — same story. They’re not mooching anymore. I keep them spinning in circles. That’s the art of the deal. Like my old friend Mohammed Ali. Fast Mo I called him. I keep them guessing and that keeps them paying. We can’t think of them as allies. They’re competitors. Or marks really if you are smart like me.

And what about immigration? Nobody gives me credit for the incredible job I’ve done stopping the invasion. I’ve rounded up more rapists and murders than even exist. More even than President Roosevelt. Think about that. We frankly pay way too much to house them in top-of-the-line warehouses. Some call them warehouses but they’re far more than these scum of the Earth deserve. The Supreme Court says I’m right — and when they don’t, I just ignore them. I’m the President not them, and I have all the power to do anything I want.

I’d like to introduce some special guests tonight. They came here illegally — work visas, supposed green cards, whatever. But my ICE — I call it “my ICE,” ICY ICE is Nice! — they rounded them up. They’re here tonight as an example. Stand up, Manuel, Sophia, and little Concha-whatever. Let everyone see those beautiful ICE shackles. I wanted to paint the chains gold but they told me “Sir, that is too good for them.”

So tonight we celebrate what we’ve built: an America that looks in the mirror and says, “Maybe I don’t like what I’ve become, but at least I’m strong and I have more billionaires than ever.” America is finally strong like never before thanks to me. And we’re just getting started. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet as they say. With your help, or without it honestly, I’m going to fix this crooked, broken election system that claims I lost. I’m not going anywhere — because frankly, this is the only thing that’s keeping me out of prison.

With Great Power Comes Great Vulnerability

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You might feel powerful cruising around in your luxury car, but you’ll quickly defer to the first guy in an old beater that decides to run you off the road.

Wealth and power certainly bring with them lots of advantages. In fact great wealth and power bring so many advantages that it’s hard to grasp, let alone sympathize with, the incredible vulnerability and weakness they bring with them.

We have always understood that the greater your wealth, the more you have to lose. What we don’t understand as clearly is that the more you have to lose, the more timid and compliant you become. In ways even the compulsive greed of the wealthy can be understood in part as needing ever more buffer to alleviate their anxiety over losing what they have already acquired. The more they acquire the greater that anxiety becomes and the more they need to feel secure – a self-perpetuating cycle.

As that wealth grows, so does vulnerability and risk aversion. The phrase “I’ve got nothing to lose” is a very scary one. But in the greater society “I’ve got too much to lose” is even scarier.

Rich people are paradoxically more controllable and manageable then poorer ones. They just have too much to lose to make any waves or stand up to more powerful forces, no matter how corrupt. If you want to control someone entirely, enrich them with enough money and power to make them easy to bring to heel.

This applies not only to individuals but to corporations any other entities that amass wealth and influence. Donald Trump has demonstrated clearly that powerful interests are both the strongest weapons for a dictator to control and the easiest to force into compliance. The rich and powerful who should be most capable of protecting democracy and standing up to corruption are the first to abandon democracy and become thoroughly corrupted.

It’s probably futile to expect the rich and powerful to risk anything at all for the greater good. Ultimately the only answer to this and a host of other social problems stemming from great wealth inequality is a wealth cap that prevents anyone, individual or corporation, from becoming both dangerously powerful and easily corruptible by Trump or any other despot.

I Cannot Exaggerate Exaggeration Enough

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Although numbers vary day to day and poll to poll, about 97% of Americans support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes. About 52% support deporting immigrants who have committed nonviolent crimes. Only 32% support deporting all immigrants who entered illegally, and a vanishingly small number support expelling legal immigrants.

News and political commentators often cite these kind of numbers to point out that people simultaneously support the deportation of criminals but not the harassment of legal immigrants. But this sheds little light on the huge disconnect in public opinion over the wholesale rounding up immigrants by the Trump Administration.

I submit that the missing puzzle piece of our understanding is the role of exaggeration. In fact I cannot exaggerate the awful power of exaggeration enough.

The fact is that undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens. They are 4 times less likely to commit nonviolent crimes and 2.5 times less likely to commit drug-related offenses. These numbers hold firm across all geographical boundaries.

But when Trump talks about immigrants, he hyper-exaggerates the level of crime in that population far beyond what the data supports. To hear him talk, one would think that immigrants are running amok and causing mass havoc.

This incredible level of exaggeration, well beyond anything the actual facts support, creates the essential disconnect in our brains that allows people to both conclude that while they support legal immigrants but want to see “all those criminal illegals” deported.

Look at it this way. Just to take a number for illustration purposes, let’s say 5% of illegal immigrants are criminals. Trump makes it sound like 90% are criminals. Even if we are skeptical and fair-minded and allow for some exaggeration, we conclude that let’s say 25% are criminals that should be deported.

So when the actual number is 5% and Trump skews our perception to “feel like” it’s something on the order of 25%, what happens? We naturally expect and demand to see 25% arrested and deported. But there are not 25%, so to show it is meeting expectations the government rounds up and deports a whole lot of innocent immigrants in order to demonstrate it is doing it’s job to keep us safe. It must round up a whole lot of good, honest immigrants to satisfy the false perception it has created. We expect no less.

Using gross exaggeration to create unwarranted expectations is used, particularly by Trump, in a lot of other areas as well. Take Social Security as just one other example. The actual administrative overhead of managing our Social Security program is about 0.6%. This is a fantastically low amount of overhead that private companies and even non-profit organizations cannot come anywhere close to matching.

Yet to listen to Trump, you would think, even allowing for his characteristic hyperbole, that the Social Security system is at least somewhat bloated with waste and inefficiency. So say a 5% cut to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse might seem like a reasonable, measured, and warranted cost control measure. But if one made such cuts it could in reality only come from reducing legitimate benefits.

That is the power of exaggeration and it is perhaps one of the most destructive weapons that Trump wields wantonly with complete abandon. It dramatically affects how we perceive immigration, Medicare, Medicaid, tariffs, and most everything else that Trump chooses to rail about.

We need to call out Trump more strongly and more often for exaggeration, as well as others who grossly exaggerate, and not simply accept it as a personality characteristic or a legitimate rhetorical style.

Recognizing the destructive power of exaggeration is a first necessary step toward arriving at more sane and fact-based public policy.

And THAT is no exaggeration.

Trump Is Not a Joker

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Trump is not a joker, he is The Joker.

In the Batman Universe, the Joker and the Penguin are two iconic villains. But while both are criminals who seek to “take over” Gotham City, they are nothing alike in their tactics and goals.

Oswald Cobblepot, commonly known as The Penguin, is a petty criminal who craves legitimacy. He dons his ostentatious tuxedo in order to appear successful and respectable. He runs crooked but relatively small time businesses to amass money for a run for mayorship, winning him the respect he craves. He makes business deals with other crooks, he suborns police and politicians, and unscrupulously undermines any opposition. But he does build alliances, stands by his allies, and honors his commitments. Upon becoming mayor, while stealing public funds, he still does his best to run a stable government that appears legitimate and respectable.

Some might think that this describes Donald Trump to a tee. But it is far too generous. Donald Trump is no Penguin. He has far more in common with The Joker.

Like the Penguin, the Joker also sometimes takes control of the mayor’s office. But unlike Penguin, Joker takes glee in inciting crazed lunatics to storm City Hall. He doesn’t crave honest respect like the Penguin but takes far more satisfaction from terrorizing people who are repulsed by him into fawning over him. Joker does not care about maintaining the traditions and decorum of his corrupt office, rather he revels in making a mockery of them. He doesn’t care about quiet stability but rather seeks the constant attention produced only by the most garish and capricious displays of power.

In our real world, so similar to comic books, we do see real-life Penguinesque dictators and we also see Joker style dictators.

The Penguin style dictators are our businesslike kleptocrats. They are represented by the likes of Putin, Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu (early), Chavez (debated, early), Abacha, Mbasogo, Nazarbayev, Aliyev, and Mugabe. These dictators, at least early on, attempted to run their countries as profit-driven enterprises serving them and their cronies rather than the people. They maintained just enough stability to maximize wealth extraction and to hold power.

The Joker style dictators are the unstable or negligent leaders. They include Pol Pot, Mobuto (later) , Chavez (debated, later), Amin, Bokassa, Nkurunziza, Gaddafi, Kim Jong-un, Hussein, Milosevic, and Turkmenbashi. Unlike the Penguins who are motivated mainly by self-enrichment and long-term survival, the Jokers are driven by ideology, paranoia, and shocking exhibitions of personal power. They do not attempt to maintain stability but rather allow or even revel in chaos. They do not attempt to conceal their corruption, instead they flaunt it as defiant evidence of their strength and power.

I listed all these names to convey the reality that dictators are not uncommon and that many are not even as “responsible” as Penguin or Putin. Many are truly Jokers, irresponsible, damaged, sociopathic, and even insane people who have taken power but any means.

Jokers have captivated followers and taken control in many, many countries and the United States is not immune. Donald Trump clearly has much in common with The Penguin, but increasingly more in common with The Joker. Like Mobuto who started out as a Penguinesque dictator, expect Trump to descend even further into full-on Joker insanity every day that he holds office.

And one thing we know from the comics is that no one survives long in service of, or even in proximity to, The Joker. So don’t hold any false illusions that once becoming mayor or president, a Joker will produce anything but even greater chaos and destruction, let alone bring anything but ruin upon you.

What are Deficit Hawks Thinking?

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At every budgeting cycle the Republican deficit hawks work themselves into a frenzy of concern about budget deficits. To remind you, the annual deficit is the amount our government has spent beyond what it has taken in that year. Implicitly included under the umbrella of deficit is the debt, which is the credit card balance we owe for all past unpaid deficits.

Certainly debt and deficits are liabilities and it would be great if we could avoid them completely and spend only what we take in, but we realistically cannot operate without dipping into our credit card sometimes. The contention arises around how to control spending in order to avoid crippling credit card payments.

To reduce our credit burden, both parties strive to increase efficiency and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Beyond that, Democrats generally aim to raise revenue from the wealthy and corporations, and (to a far lesser extent) reduce military spending, while protecting and expanding social programs. Republicans mostly push for cuts to social programs, while increasing tax cuts (only for the wealthy), and opposing new taxes (only on the wealthy), while maintaining or increasing defense spending.

Democrats assert that the rich and powerful do not pay anything near their fair share and can afford to contribute far more, while Republicans assert (incorrectly) that the rich and powerful deserve even more money that will supposedly then “trickle-down” to help poorer people.

Not many appreciate that the concept of a “trickle-down” economy did not originate with Ronald Regan who put it forth as a credible economic principle. It was originally a satirical joke made by Will Rogers back in 1932 to mock then President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression in giving more money to rich people.

I’m going to forgo a lot of additional argumentation and simply skip ahead to the conclusion that Republicans are simply wrong on both the merits and the ethics of their budget logic, and rather try to understand their thinking.

I’m going to put aside sheer greed and self-interest as uninteresting. My interest is in how well-meaning people can come to support Republican policies.

First and perhaps foremost, Republicans believe incorrectly that rich people and corporations deserve (are entitled to) more money because the rich deserve it and can make the best use of it. Second, they love a strong military because either they are fearful, love having the biggest guns, love war profits, or are just afraid of looking weak on defense. Finally, they believe that regular people deserve nothing and should either get rich or die quietly without bothering anyone.

These biases result in the following internal logic. A) we must give as much as we can to rich people, and B) we must maintain or expand the military, so C) the only way we can accomplish both is to siphon away money from the 99%. This is accomplished by finding new ways to tax or increase costs for regular people, by destabilizing and pillaging the social security fund that they paid into, by compromising or withholding their healthcare, and by deregulation that shifts the cost of doing business from rich corporations to ordinary communities.

To extract wealth, they continue to perpetuate the joke of trickle-down economics. The term may be discredited, but the concept still underpins their worldview. They extract wealth by grossly downplaying the amount of money being spent on the military, and by exaggerating the cost of social service programs (see here).

And they have elucidated no limit whatsoever in just how much more the rich and powerful deserve. In fact the expressed American value is that personal wealth should be unlimited. Therefore, their goal of decreasing the debt and deficit can never be achieved no matter how much they extract, no matter how much damage they do, no matter how many people they impoverish, the rich can and will never have enough under the logical framework they have constructed.

Thus is the folly of their worldview, their rationalizations, and their policies. Their concern about the debt and deficit may or may not be genuine, as is their belief that the rich should receive even more. But to achieve both, the vast majority of people have to suffer. The end result of their thinking can only be incredibly harmful, unsustainable, and unethical budgetary policies enacted under the pretext of responsible deficit reduction.

Cook Your Frog Slowly

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In my last article I talked about How We Liberals Destroyed Democracy. I was not saying liberals were wrong to push for social change. But I was making the argument that we made the tactical error of miscalculating our pressure. Or, to put it in a more fanciful way, I have no problem with cooking the frog for dinner. But if you want to end up with tender, juicy frog legs you have to cook it slowly. Turn up the heat too high too quickly and the skittish jumpy frog bolts. You’re left holding only an empty pot, and that’s on you.

I wasn’t giving the normal advise we seem to hear from most every other pundit writing for major publications. In one form or another, their sage advise is essentially “give conservatives what they want and they’ll like you more.” Their wisdom is a little like advising frustrated parents that if you just tell your kids to eat McDonalds Happy Meals every day then they’ll finally listen to you.

I was rather saying, be smarter. Be more patient. Be more strategic, more methodical, more incremental. Cook your frog slowly so that it does not jump out of the pot. To illustrate this further I want to segue into another topic I love to talk about as well, and that is self-driving cars.

In Cars Have to Go, I argued that mankind simply cannot sustain our current system of private car ownership. If we are to survive, cars as we know them have to go. Short of reducing the need for private transportation, for example by redesigning our cities, our only hope is automated fleets of shared vehicles.

And beyond just saving energy and resources, try to think through of all the other advantages a complete self-driving fleet would provide. You would not have to own, maintain, and insure your own car. You could simply call for one anytime. Our driving infrastructure could be far more efficient and cost-effective. All traffic control could be dispensed with if self-driving cars coordinate traffic flow safely and efficiently amongst themselves. No more problems of compromised, drunk, or distracted drivers. No more speeding or running red lights. Automated cars don’t suffer from road rage. No more possibility for vehicles to be used as weapons of mass murder. The social benefits are incalculable and innumerable.

But rather than go on about the benefits reengineering private transportation, where I want to go is the strategic issue of how to get there. How do you boil this frog? If you promise all these dramatic changes, as I am doing here, you run the risk of causing your frog to bolt. My feeling is that Elon Musk, by overhyping self-driving cars, has done harm to the long-term goal I embrace. He made the frogs all panic and jump.

Far smarter and more effective still would have been to get to self-driving fleets quietly and systematically, by offering incremental benefits that anyone and everyone would welcome at every step.

Just to give you a flavor, you start with lane departure warnings. Keep your kids safe. We are all OK with that. Then Smart Cruise. What? The car will slow down and follow a slower vehicle, yes please!

Hmm, self-parking? OMG yes. I hate parking. I want that!!

Wait, my new car can also go off on it’s own to find an open space in a parking garage or at the airport so I can catch my flight and then come pick me up when I return? Where has that been all my life???

And I also have the option of unpacking my car in front of my house and then sending it off to find street parking all by itself? I want that too!

Now if only anyone in my extended family could summon my car if they need to use it too, that would be so cool… wait they can??? Hmm then maybe we should all just go in together on one shared car…

People would generally love and welcome every incremental improvement along the way and find themselves welcoming the natural progression to self-driving fleets. But if you try to pressure them into contemplating a radically different future with self-driving fleets, there can be no surprise when they panic and jump right out of that pot.

In my book, Pandemic of Delusion, I talk at great length about how we can gradually move people from any position A to any other position B. But you have to do it gradually. Push too hard too fast, and impenetrable defenses will arise to block your way.

Liberals should have learned that the hard way recently, and I truly hope that there is still a sure path for both for democracy and for self-driving fleets to accomplish dramatic change through patient, incremental steps.

And equally importantly, success requires restraint to recognize when your frog is optimally cooked and stop there. Too often advocacy groups become institutionalized and they lose any ability to turn down the heat even after the frog starts to fry and burn. But that’s another discussion!

How We Liberals Destroyed Democracy

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The title of this article is intentionally provocative. But for good reason. Democrats should at least consider their shared responsibility for destroying our democracy. I’m not trying to be fair and balanced and comprehensive here. I and others have opined ad nauseum about the flaws and dangers of conservative thinking. But in this article I wish to focus on the role of liberals.

Regardless of what we will admit to ourselves or to others, the Supreme Court immunity ruling and the subsequent reelection of Trump has effectively ended our long noble struggle to hold on to our democracy in America. I don’t believe it is hyperbole to acknowledge that we are now firmly, and probably intractably, marching along the path to becoming just like Russia, a brazen kleptocracy flaunting a thin facade of democracy.

And whether they will admit it in that way to themselves and others, half the country is effectively OK with that. It would not have been their first choice for our fate, but they would rather live in a dictatorship than continue to tolerate the excesses, real or perceived, of many democrats, at least of those driving the agenda. I predicted this based on game theory a while back (see here).

To be fair, conservatives have largely tolerated if not embraced a stunning amount of social change since the 1960’s and even before. The end of slavery was social change, women gaining the vote was social change, a sweeping host of equal rights practices was social change, interracial marriage was social change, women entering the workforce and arguably taking half the jobs in the country away from men was social change, the changing expectations of men in the home and in society was social change, accepting gay pride parades and gay marriage was social change. Those are just the broadest reminders of the incredible social change that conservatives tolerated if not always embraced.

But democrats weren’t satisfied. They pushed too hard, too aggressively, too gleefully on social, race, and gender issues mostly. I would suggest that the critical point at which their incessant pressure turned dark and counterproductive was the cancelling of Al Franken. It continued with a cancel culture that vilified everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Matt Damon. It took the form of policing gender pronouns, rallying behind gay wedding cakes, drag queen story hour, transgender surgery, bathrooms, and military service. The entire year leading up to Trumps election I watched liberal women on MSNBC fixate on women’s issues and overtly tell men they should support us or shut up. The list goes on and on and on.

So don’t tell me that democrats are purely the victims here and conservatives are the bad guys. I revile much or even most of what conservatives stand for, but democrats kept making more and more extreme demands until the point at which conservatives said, I’ve had enough of even trying to make this marriage work, I’m out.

One can continue to insist that all those demands were just and right. But even granting that, one must at least question the tactical wisdom of how we went about fighting for them. One can argue that regardless of the provocation and pressure, upending our democracy is a self-destructive and disproportionate response. True enough. But if liberals are capable of any self-examination they must consider their own hubris and lack of restraint in forcing this response.

In the media today there is a lot of coverage of democrats gleefully saying “I told you so” to conservatives in reference to the disastrous actions of Trump. But perhaps conservatives are also justified in saying “I told you so” to the democrats who have been so incessant and extreme in their long history of cattle-prodding conservatives into ever more unpalatable concessions without any apparent expectation of the extreme blowback that was virtually assured to come… and now has.

National Defense and Social Security Myths

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Most of us Americans figure we’re pretty well-informed about the realities of our national economy – at least in the big picture. Here are the Top 5 budget categories that you’ve probably seen cited everywhere by most every expert and trusted source:

  1. Social Security: $1,354 billion
  2. Medicaid (also NIH, CDC, FDA and more): $889 billion
  3. Medicare: $848 billion
  4. National Defense (direct budget only): $820 billion
  5. Unemployment (and most family and child assistance programs): $775 billion

Lists like this are usually invoked in order to provide support for a particular (false) mainstream narrative.

Mainstream Narrative: National Defense spending is not where we should be concerned. Rather it’s those big social entitlement programs that are the real problem, and the most worrisome of all is Social Security. In fact, we need to take immediate drastic action to prevent Social Security from bringing us to economic ruin!

But bear with me while I call that narrative into question.

First, that National Defense number of $848 billion is far too low. That only includes certain budgeted expenses. It does not include Supplemental Funding (which pays for most of our wars). Veterans Care and Benefits, Overseas Contingency Operations, Additions to the Base Budget, Interest on War Debt, and many other separately allocated costs.

To understand how misleading that is, imagine trying to convince your spouse that your gambling budget is only a very reasonable $200 per night. But that is just your betting limit. You neglect to include your Vegas hotel, limo rental, meals, bar-tabs, payments on the debt incurred by your previous losses, lost work, and additional payment for any “special deals” that you just can’t pass up.

Similarly, if we tally up all the buried line items that should fairly be included under National Defense spending, the total cost is far higher. The actual figure depends on which items you choose to include, but a conservative total of about $1.7 trillion is what my AI-assisted research came up with. No matter how you cut it, a more honest accounting puts National Defense spending well above Social Security levels. It should be number one by a large margin on any honest list.

Also, military spending has incredibly low stimulative value. While it provides some jobs, it does not stimulate secondary growth as does say a bridge or a building. It is essentially “lost” economic value except for the relatively few who extract wealth from it. But I digress. Maybe I’ll expand on that in a future blog article.

In any case, that addresses the first half of the false narrative, the deceptively low figure cited for military spending. Now let’s shift to the other half, Social Security spending. The figure of $1.3 trillion spent on Social Security is arguably just as misleading as is the figure for military spending.

People paid into their social security fund. Virtually all of that $1.3 trillion is money that is simply being paid to people who invested into it. There is only a relatively small deficit which amounted to $41.4 billion in 2023. That deficit was entirely paid out of the social security trust fund; excess revenue that was set aside in previous years to cover future shortfalls.

Now, those of you who are sophisticated about these things might say – wait a sec. Social Security is not like a savings plan where individual contributions are set aside. Instead, each working generation must fund the benefits paid to the retired generation.

But I contend that that explanation is another part of this false narrative. Regardless of how it is managed, Social Security is for all intents and purposes a savings plan. And isn’t that how all savings banks work? None of them literally put your money away in a lockbox. The money you deposit is used to fund withdrawals by others. When you eventually decide to withdraw your savings, that money will in a sense come from those future depositors.

To provide another analogy, what would you say if you went to take out your savings from your local bank and they tried to explain to you that they don’t have enough revenue coming in to give you back your money? You see, they say, it’s really not a savings plan as much as it is a pay as you go plan. You’d say that’s not acceptable.

We should not be manipulated into thinking of paying into social security as paying for others current benefits, but as paying for our own future benefits. But we tend to buy into the former perspective because we’re worried the funds won’t be there for us. That’s another part of the false narrative.

While it is true that, if we make no changes, Social Security will become “insolvent” in 2033, that is intentionally made to sound more scary than it is. It only means that at that time we’ll have to reduce benefits or increase revenue. It doesn’t all just collapse like some Ponzi scheme.

In fact, it isn’t that hard to “fix” Social Security. Just in the last few years there have been multiple bills proposed to keep Social Security solvent through the population wave. These include the Social Security Fairness Act, Biden’s 2025 budget proposal, and the You Earned It Act. All of these were voted down.

These legislation, and the many that preceded them, were not voted down because they would not work. They were voted down precisely because they would work. Just as with the border crisis, too many lawmakers don’t want to fix it. They want to keep fear mongering about it failing, and they cannot do that if they actually were to fix it.

Even worse, for some legislators it is more like their management of the Post Office. Their interest is in seeing it fail. They wanted the Post Office to fail so that their private business donors could profit from this business. Similarly, their big donors desperately want to get their hands on all that social security money. To those Privateers, Social Security funds are like Blackbeard’s Lost Treasure Hoard.

If President Bush’s full-court press to privatize Social Security had not failed in 2005, all of our Social Security funds might be invested in Bitcoin futures right now. Don’t think for one moment that the Privateers have given up on getting their hands on Blackbeard’s treasure.

If I sound conspiratorial, I’ll admit partially to that. While I don’t believe that a Capitalist cabal of billionaires sits around smoking big cigars and plotting the pillaging of our Social Security trust fund, I do believe that these efforts arise naturally as an emergent collective behavior borne of a lust for profit.

As did those before us, we need to wisely continue to resist these efforts to siphon wealth from the general population into the hands of the few. Toward that end, here is my alternate narrative that I hope you will consider.

Alternate Narrative: Those in power strive to bury, obfuscate, and minimize our level of military spending for many reasons, but mostly just so the population will not push back against it. One method they use to distract from military spending is to compare their fake accounting against social spending numbers, numbers that are also at times misrepresented. Social Security is both their most shiny object to distract us from their levels of military spending and the greatest prize for Privateers who want to control those funds. For our own sake as well as our posterity, we need to resist both excessive military spending and the privatization of critical social services.