To the Editor,
I read with great interest your editorial “Where the rubber meets the road” in the March 19th paper. It reflected an admirable focus on reducing our national deficit and debt. This is a thing the Musk DOGE program is pretending to do as it fires tens to hundreds of thousands of federal public servants using form letters that lie about the service records of these employees as an excuse. These lies, readily disprovable, are not faring well in courts when evidence is presented.
But that is not the point of this letter, because these firings are just performative cruelty that will have little to no impact on the deficit (shortfalls of income this year) or debt (the accumulated shortfalls of income on which the country pays interest). The real money in the federal budget is in the military portion, entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and servicing the debt. If you actually want to reduce the deficit by program cuts, those big ticket programs are where you need to do it.
The other way to reduce the deficit is by increasing income, which means increasing taxes. Trump and the GOP Congress are planning on another round of large tax cuts that mostly favor the wealthy and corporations, much like the massive tax cuts they passed in 2017/2018 that increased the deficit enormously, made the rich richer, while delivering no benefit to our country.
This game is not new. The Reagan “supply side” tax cuts led to rapidly increasing deficits and debt. President Clinton worked with a GOP Congress to reduce spending and increase revenues, which, along with a booming economy, resulted in budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration. President George W. Bush blew that bipartisan accomplishment up by passing enormous tax cuts that again ballooned the deficit.
So, please, let us not pretend that Trump and the Republican controlled Congress are actually trying to reduce the deficit and resulting debt. Believe their actions, not their words, and when they pass the next round of big tax cuts for the wealthy their actions will tell us all we need to know.
Regards,
Neil Gillies
Neil Gillies
1005 Skaggs Run Road,
Baker, WV 26801
304-897-6297
