Elon Musk is displaying a lot of chutzpah as he attacks President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” for being a “disgusting abomination” that will dramatically increase the nation’s indebtedness by trillions of dollars. As leader of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, Musk had the chance to do some serious work at making the federal government more efficient and less costly, but, instead, he indiscriminately hacked away at programs and agencies and, in the end, made government less efficient and likely more expensive because of DOGE’s drastic, arbitrary staff reductions.
Nevertheless, Musk’s characterization of Trump’s tax legislation is apt. It is, indeed, a disgusting abomination that slashes spending on medical services and feeding programs for the poorest of our citizens while giving another huge, debt-increasing tax cut to the richest Americans. What Musk got wrong was to think that most Republicans in Congress and the White House actually care about budget deficits and the national debt. They have not really cared for a very long time.
David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a book about his disillusionment at finding that most of his fellow Republicans and the president himself were not all that serious about dealing with the deficit and debt. In fact, the only president able to balance the federal budget in recent decades was Democrat Bill Clinton. The surplus that Clinton achieved was quickly squandered by his Republican successor, George W. Bush, who gave a big tax cut to the wealthy.
While both Barack Obama and Joe Biden were able to make modest reductions in the debt, Trump, in his first term, drove it up, just as he is trying to do now.
It is long past time for American voters to disenthrall themselves from the fiction that Republicans at the national level are thrifty penny-pinchers. If Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals, at least they make some attempt to balance that spending by raising taxes on those most able to afford it. Republicans, in contrast, are a spend-and-spend-more party and are proving it again with Trump’s big, beautiful abomination.
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