Gut 'Em, Rob 'Em, Leave The Carcass To Rot
Your Willie Sutton guide to the elite's road—and how to change the path.
Why You Might Want To Read This: Today’s post engages how cuts to government workers at the state and local level are **directly connected** to how the extremely wealthy gut the very core of what we hold dear, rob us and leave us rotting at the side of the road. It never hurts to keep connecting dots—obvious to some, not so for others because traditional media fails to do its daily job.
Let me start with my decades-old mantra worth repeating, passing on, pasting to the wall: we don’t have, and have never had, a public spending problem, or a debt problem, in the richest nation in human history. We have a revenue problem.
So, one side of the story you have been hearing is the cash shortfalls facing various local governments. Part of those are projected based on cuts Republicans are salivating to impose on Medicaid (while, of course, increasing the Pentagon’s budget to north of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS):
So, you might have read pieces like this:
State budget cuts alone will cost local governments nearly $140 million, according to Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League — a callback to the 2010s when state budget writers repeatedly leaned on local governments to solve the state’s financial woes.
Or this:
The cuts now force states to come up with funding from their own budgets – or shutter programs altogether, Perry said. States like West Virginia – where more than half the $19.2 billion annual budget for fiscal 2025 relies on federal funds – are particularly hard-hit.
Or this:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass unveiled a proposed $13.9 billion municipal budget for fiscal year 2025-26, which includes more than 1,600 layoffs and the consolidation of four city departments in an effort to eliminate a nearly $1 billion deficit.
Virtually NONE of these articles connect proposed cuts, on the one hand, to the microscopic tax rates for the very wealthy, on the other hand. It’s journalistic malpractice combined with ideological bias—most “journalists” believe in the so-called “free market” and are committed to the idea that the very rich deserve their plunder because somehow they alone have created the wealth of society.
You can find scores of these stories. These narratives forcasting how hard-working people, who make our communities run, will lose their jobs are happening before the chaotic, mindless tariffs conjured up by the fool-who-knows-nothing-about-economics-other-than-what-his-rich-daddy-handed-to-him set in—tariffs which will almost certainly mean less revenue to local and state governments because people will stop spending when higher prices really take hold (yes, this is truly dumb).
The narrative is the same when it comes to the hand-wringing about the phony debt crisis—which has been a decades-long scam underway long before the advent of Project 2025 (I wrote a whole book about this)—it’s the scam to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security by scaring people about a non-existent crisis.
The three graphics below tell you everything you need to know about how the very wealthy are gutting everyone else. By which I mean leaving you, and just about every reader here, holding the bag for a bigger bite, proportionately, out of your income and hurting you because you, and virtually everyone else, depends on a whole spectrum of local government services.
Since I regularly, with justification, shred so-called “journalists” who traffic mostly in gossip, don’t read and can’t think, I tip my hat to this rare instance of fact-based reporting from The Wall Street Journal which told us recently:
The wealthiest have gotten richer, and control a record share of America’s wealth. New data suggest $1 trillion of wealth was created for the 19 richest American households alone in 2024. That is more than the value of Switzerland’s entire economy.
It took four decades for the top 0.00001% of Americans’ share of total U.S. household wealth to grow from 0.1% in 1982—when 11 households made up that rarefied group—to 1.2% in 2023, according to an analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. [added emphasis is mine]
Though, to my point above, the vast wealth being siphoned in the pockets of the very few is never posed—and is not posed in this article—vis a vis the cuts to services the rest of us will have to live with.
To the nice graphics:
And:
And:
Not a single cut is called for—indeed, we can expand government for the people—if we embrace the wise philosophy of bank robber Willie Sutton (yes, to my readers: I quote this way too often because it’s regularly relevant): asked why he robs banks, Willie replied, “Because that’s where the money is”.
Last point: there is a lot of misdirected energy in politics right now about the age of elected leaders. To be sure, someone who can’t put a coherent sentence together because of advanced age or is medically incapable of showing up for work should not be in office.
But, far more important is figuring out what elected leaders stand for. Hakeem Jeffries is a “sprightly” 54 years old—but, from my vantage point, he’s an empty suit, delivering content-free slogans and standing for nothing other than accumulating power.
Small suggestion: if we want to support millions of people in our communities in cities and states, we could rally behind a wealth tax (starting at 2% and up to as much as 5%) to be levied on wealth above $30 million—and demand the pretenders-to-the-thrones in Congress or elsewhere get behind the idea, and advance it in every state especially those states where ballot initiatives are possible.
Stop with the constant endless theoritical debate of how to appeal to “working class” voters—here is your a no-brainer winner with voters. Everyone gets the idea that the very rich are robbing us. This tax would pass with strong majorities.
Here’s what each state would pick up in revenue, and this is on the low end because these are 2022 figures (thank you to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy for the numbers):
