By Ben Bisbach
Mabel, MN
I work for an agricultural services company that, among other things, contracts with the USDA to administer certain USDA programs for farmers. When the Musk/Trump administration enacted their funding freeze, they blocked reimbursement to my company of about $70,000, for services we have already performed. $70,000 might not sound like a lot to the billionaire duo running our country, but for us, it’s a make or break amount of money.
Its obvious that the federal government could be more efficient, but Musk’s approach is so sloppy and arbitrary, its like cutting off your arms to lose weight. Add in the promise of massive new taxes on food, energy, cars, cloths, and raw materials, and you see consumer confidence falling, inflation expectations rising, and hopes for any more interest rate cuts fading away.
But it’ll be you and me who suffer from degraded services and a more dysfunctional economy. The billionaires making these decisions for us will be just fine.
If the “Department of Government Efficiency” wants to have credibility they should look at the tens of billions in federal contracts that Elon himself has with the government. Or, imagine if they took a look at the tax code. They could root out all the deductions, credits, and other mechanisms that corporations and the ultra-rich use to avoid paying taxes. Remember when Trump’s tax returns leaked, and we learned he didn’t pay income tax for 17 years? For normal people that sounds like fraud, but it was a perfectly legal loophole that he used. We could fund a lot of services and pay off a lot of debt by finding and closing those types of loopholes.
Instead Trump and Musk think its regular people who should make the sacrifices.
They say the only option is to take a chainsaw to agencies like the VA, post office, national parks, weather service, Dept. of Education and Department of Agriculture. To cut billions from cancer research. To gut Medicaid, which huge numbers of rural workers rely on for health insurance.
I think they’re lying to us.
I reached out to our U.S. representative, Brad Finstad, to try and get some answers. He proudly touts his support for rural America, and his website shows him standing next to a tractor. But his office hasn’t bothered to get back to me yet. Has anyone had any luck getting a response from this guy? His social media shows him doing events, but they’re never disclosed to the public. He seems afraid to defend his actions to his own constituents.
I wonder why that is?
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