A week or two ago Republicans in Congress got the Democrats to agree to some minor spending tweaks in order to punch through the debt ceiling. Last week Republicans passed a defense authorization bill that NPR called "The politicization of the National Defense Authorization Act," because it included a bunch of provisions to stop the non-binary-ization of the LGBT-adjacent Pentagon.

Then Ellen Brown in "The Federal Debt Trap: Issues and Possible Solutions" worried about the waste-fraud-and-abuse in the Pentagon's $886 billion budget. And I was reading another expert who averred as how both spending cuts and tax hikes were needed in the federal budget.

Of course, all this is just rearranging the deck-chairs on that iceberg-adjacent ship. Let's just look at the major items in the federal budget for FY 2023, from usgovernmentspending.com (BTW, I count foreign policy, foreign aid, and veterans benefits as adjacent to National Defense. So should you):

Federal Pensions         $1.4 trillion
Federal Health Care    $1.7 trillion
National Defense        $1.2 trillion
Federal Education       $0.3 trillion
Federal Welfare          $0.6 trillion
All Other Spending     $1.1 trillion

Total Fed. Spending    $6.4 trillion       

Federal Deficit            $1.6 trillion       

See where the money goes? In Social Security and federal employee pensions, in Medicare and Medicaid, in National Defense. Even the dreaded Welfare is only half a trillion, give or take a hundred billion.

Where are all the green energy tax breaks? And all the DEI stuff to give us a truly modern non-binary army? Good question.

Today, we should understand, ever since ObamaCare, new government programs are all about manipulation of regulations and cunning expansions of the administrative state that are kept carefully under a blanket where congressional staff and corporate special interests and devoted activists snuggle each other for the greater good. And don't forget, Oppressed Peoples, it's all free!

If you want to do something about The Deficit, my idea is that you privatize Social Security. You privatize Medicare. And bully the billionaires into funding Medicaid instead of dark money activist skullduggery. Oh, and wind up NATO and tell the Europeans to get themselves a European demos if they want to swing their weight in the world.

But that's impossible, because all the geezers like me would destroy any politician that meddled with Social Security and Medicare, and no Deep-State-adjacent elitist is going to propose any change to our foreign-policy-expert-approved foreign policy.

Guess what, geezers: if the middle class all saved for retirement and end-of-life health care with our own money in our own Fidelity and Vanguard accounts we would probably end up with a bigger pension and a bunch of money left over for our children.

Okay, turn on your secret decoder ring; this is secret! Don't tell the Democrats that if they agreed to a reform of Social Security and Medicare -- so that the middle class got their pensions and end-of-life care outside the federal budget -- Democrats would have TRILLIONS EVERY YEAR freed up to bend the arc of history towards justice for the Oppressed Peoples. Okay, turn off the secret decoder ring right now, before any of our Democrat friends gets curious.

Frankly, I'm done with ruling classes and their snuggly blankets. Instead let's just review the past few hundred years.

In the beginning, the head of state didn't care about the people. His feudal lords looked after things, usually by letting the poor sign up as slaves when things got tough. Mind you, if there was a Great Famine as in 1315 and half the people starved, oh well. Or if there was a Black Death, as in 1345, and half the people died of the plague, oh well. Still, with the existential danger of higher wages, the rulers passed laws to stop the poor moving about in search of good jobs.

But when cities began to grow, the poor became a problem, so the Brits passed their Poor Laws, to make the poor the responsibility of the local parishes. That was convenient for the rulers, because kings and courtiers had other things to do. But there were still too many of the poor moving about, so they started shipping the waste population to the Americas.

Then came the Virgin Birth of Our Democracy, where everyone could vote, and the world changed. Now the rulers got interested in the poor, because they could buy their votes with Programs. Today they encourage migrants to move about, but plan to take cars away from the middle class in case they should move about and kill the climate.

Maybe we need a new Constitutional Amendment:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of movement, or the right of the people peaceably to move about in personal transportation.

But nothing will change until the day dawns when the rulers can't win power by bidding for votes with Other People's Money.

And I can't wait.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Public Domain