The Epstein class is bleeding Social Security and Medicare dry

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I was telling you the other day about how the president, the Republicans and their allies are extracting wealth from the American people in three ways: illegal tariffs, illegal deportations and illegal war. I forgot to add tax cuts for the rich, which are legal but criminal, and here's why: Along with those three crimes, tax cuts for the rich are bleeding Social Security dry.

The Social Security trust said yesterday that, all things being equal, it will reach insolvency in six years' time, in the fourth quarter of 2032. Trustees said that the causes are a rapidly aging population and historically low birth rates, but also "a drop in immigration and the 'substantial effect' of President Donald Trump’s signature tax legislation," the Post said.

More than 56 million people depend on Social Security. They won't stop getting their money. "Insolvency" means Social Security won't be able to meet its full obligations. So benefits will likely be cut by about 22 percent, the trustees said, if the Congress doesn't take action first.

At the same time, the government released a report showing that Medicare is also facing uncertainty. It is expected to become insolvent a year later, in 2033. Medicare "projected that the hospital trust fund — typically referred to as Part A — will have enough revenue to pay all its bills only until 2033, after which it would also need to reduce benefits," the Post said.

Medicare did not assign a cause to its projected revenue shortfalls, but given that it's funded through payroll taxes, it's probably the same as Social Security's, with the impact of aging and declining birth rates being accelerated by mass deportations and tax cuts for the rich.

It's not every day that the government spells out so clearly who is doing what to whom. Current Republican policies are going to create conditions in which the sick and elderly will face a precarious future. Increased deportations and decreased tax revenues will result in less security for tens of millions. In other words, the Republicans are screwing America.

This might be obvious if not the right's endless scapegoating and the fact that reasonable people nearly always assume that Republicans act in good faith. The former is less subtle than the latter, but the results are the same. That White House putz Stephen Miller accused immigrants of theft. "The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don't belong here is the primary cause of the national debt," he said in March. House Speaker Mike Johnson is more cunning. He said Social Security and Medicare are facing insolvency because "entitlement spending" is out of control, leaving it up to his listener to decode what he means: that immigrants and other others are scamming real (ie, white) Americans.

Of course, the real scammers are the Republicans and their rich friends. And the real scamming victim is us. Inflation jumped to 4.2 percent this month, the highest it has been since 2023. The president's war against Iran is driving up oil and gas prices, which are driving up the cost of everything. (Goldman Sachs said it no longer expects an interest rate cut this year from the Federal Reserve. Instead, it's bracing for a rate hike to bring down inflation.)

Trump's tariffs have been a double-whammy scam. They not only raised prices but depressed wages, as firms cut into payrolls to protect profits. Make that a triple-whammy scam, as the government is preparing to refund importers for tariffs that the Supreme Court deemed illegal. That money will come out of our pockets. Indeed, tariffs might be a quadruple-whammy scam. Not only are we refunding importers, we are not going to see a penny of the money that those same importers charged us because of Trump's tariffs.

The scale of the scamming keeps growing. The president cleared the way for corporations to avoid paying billions in income taxes by claiming their earnings originated in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. The Times reviewed the documents of 500 companies, many of them household names. It found that at least $40 billion in income taxes have been avoided since the start of last year. Some of these companies, like Walmart, are the same importers who charged us a tariff surcharge, which we paid, and will receive a refund for the cost of those tariffs, which we will also pay. All this new tax-dodging is in addition to the old tax-dodging by huge corporations that were already paying nearly nothing in federal income taxes.

The Epstein class, as they're often called, is getting close to seeing their dreams come true. For more than a century, they have wanted to get rid of the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax (in the form of tariffs and other consumption taxes). The goal was pushing the cost of running the government off the shoulders of the rich and onto the shoulders of everyone else. But the way things are going, the Epstein class need not take the risk. They are getting virtually everything they want from the most corrupt president in history.

Indeed, the president himself is a model.

Trump's personal attorney is the top law enforcement officer in America and as such, Todd Blanche has made it so that neither Trump nor his family will ever be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. It is, according to the Times, an "unprecedented and enormously valuable public benefit for the president [that] has flown under the radar in Congress and passed into Trump's hands without much protest from members of his own party."

The final insult is perhaps the most sinister. The Congress just authorized even more of our money to be sent to ICE. It's to the tune of $70 billion and it's on top of the $167 billion ICE is already getting as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the same law that cut taxes for the rich. With that quarter trillion dollars, the government is going to deport more immigrants, thus bleeding Social Security and Medicare even more. Who is doing what to whom?

The Republicans are screwing America.

Yet they blame immigrants for the crimes they are themselves committing.

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