Drowning, Raiding, Starving: The Price of Billionaire Politics

Trump’s fake tax cuts, ICE terror raids, collapsing food banks, and Musk’s messianic cosplay are killing us, literally.

Good morning! Trump says he just gave America a “big, beautiful tax cut.” Economist Justin Wolfers would like a word. Because what Trump is actually doing is what he’s always done: handing billions to billionaires while sticking the bill, plus interest, onto working families and calling it freedom.

Take a look around while Trump pats himself on the back. In Texas, families spent the Fourth of July drowning. The Guadalupe River rose twenty-nine feet in forty-five minutes, sweeping away tents, campers, and entire families in the dead of night. No warnings, no sirens, no alerts, because Trump and his Republican pals gutted the National Weather Service to “save money” for their billionaire donors. After all, what’s the point of forecasting flash floods when you can fund another yacht for a campaign donor?

Wolfers points out the simple truth: Trump’s “tax cut” isn’t a cut at all. It’s a time bomb disguised as a gift, one that blows up the deficit while letting the ultra-wealthy stuff their pockets and leaves the rest of us to pay, again and again. How? Because when Trump slashes taxes without cutting spending, he’s not actually cutting taxes, he’s kicking the bill down the road, racking up debt that will have to be paid by someone, someday, with interest. That “someone” isn’t Trump or his billionaire donors, it’s you, your kids, and your grandkids, who will pay in the form of higher taxes later or the quiet theft of higher interest rates now.

Debt like this drives up interest rates, Wolfers explains, because the more a government borrows, the riskier it looks, and the higher lenders push rates to protect themselves. Those higher rates don’t just hit government bonds; they ripple through everything: your mortgage, your car loan, your student debt, your credit card bill, your small business loan. If rates go up half a point because of this debt bomb, that’s thousands of dollars a year sucked from your family budget just to cover interest payments on the same house, the same car, the same groceries you were already scraping to afford.

And about those groceries? Trump’s tariff tantrums are taxes in disguise, slapped onto imports, passed on to you at the checkout lane, draining your wallet while you’re too busy worrying about next week’s bills to notice who’s robbing you. Trump brags about “fighting for the working class,” but the reality is that under his “big, beautiful bill,” the top 0.1% will walk away with an extra $7,000 a year while the poorest 10% lose $2,500 real dollars ripped from families living paycheck to paycheck.

This is a con dressed up as a tax cut, a scam that feeds billionaires while the rest of America foots the bill, with interest, while shopping for eggs that cost 40% more than they did last year.

While families in Texas are left to die in the dark and the working class is left to pay the bills, ICE is staging paramilitary raids in Los Angeles, targeting Hispanic communities with no regard for the Constitution. A federal class action lawsuit against Kristi Noem, DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol lays it bare: no warrants, no due process, just stormtroopers in tactical gear tearing families apart in the dead of night under the banner of “law and order.”

The lawsuit details ICE agents rolling up in unmarked SUVs, blocking cars in traffic to demand papers, pulling people from their vehicles at gunpoint, and detaining them without probable cause simply because they “looked Hispanic.” Agents ransacked homes without warrants, rifling through children’s bedrooms while families were forced to watch, terrified, and powerless. In one case, ICE raided an apartment complex at 5 a.m., banging on doors with rifles drawn, forcing families into the courtyard in their pajamas, refusing to let them call lawyers, and separating children from their parents as agents checked IDs. Guards denied some detainees food and water for hours; they moved others without notice to distant detention centers to prevent legal representation; and many were left in overcrowded, freezing cells, with the lights on 24/7, no blankets, and no phone calls allowed.

The cruelty isn’t incidental; it’s the operating system. Terrorize Hispanic neighborhoods, deport as many people as possible regardless of due process, and call it a “numbers game” to impress the boss in Washington while the cameras roll. The lawsuit makes clear that this is exactly what’s happening: ICE agents are under pressure to meet Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, a policy goal that values body counts over justice, quotas over human rights, and shattered families over due process.

Agents raid apartment complexes at dawn, rifles drawn, forcing families into courtyards in their pajamas to check papers and split up children from parents. They pull drivers from their cars at gunpoint in traffic, detain them without warrants simply for “looking Hispanic,” and ship them off to overcrowded, freezing detention centers where lights stay on all night and calls to lawyers are denied, because every headcount helps Miller’s spreadsheet and Trump’s campaign rallies.

Fear is useful: it keeps communities quiet, it keeps neighbors from speaking out, it feeds the lie that immigrants are the threat while billionaires loot the country. And all the while, the same politicians cutting lifesaving flood warnings and slashing food aid are feeding billionaires another round of tax breaks to fund yachts and private jets, while selling voters the fantasy that brown families in East LA are the real threat to America.

And if you think the disaster stops there, let’s take a trip to your local food bank. You know, the place people go when they can’t afford groceries because their wages haven’t kept up with the rent, the car payment, and the medical bills. Food banks are bracing for a tsunami of need as Trump’s GOP slashes over a trillion dollars from SNAP and Medicaid. The same people celebrating “fiscal responsibility” are the ones blowing up the deficit and leaving food banks to figure out how to replace six to nine billion lost meals annually. Spoiler: they can’t. As one food bank leader put it, “There is no world in which I can imagine we double ourselves, into perpetuity.” But Republicans can imagine it, because imagining is all they ever do when it comes to hunger. Hunger, after all, is someone else’s problem, preferably someone brown or poor, ideally both.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, in a burst of messianic delusion, announced on X that he is launching the “America Party,” a third-party venture designed to save the country from, well, Republicans and Democrats, but mostly Republicans, but also maybe Democrats, depending on the hour. It’s hard to say exactly what the America Party stands for beyond “Elon Musk is smarter than you,” but if you squint hard enough, you can see it’s anti-tariff, anti-regulation, pro-business, anti-illegal immigration but pro-high-skilled visas, and mostly pro-Elon. He claims it will apply “extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield,” which, translated from Muskspeak, means “I will use my billions and my social media platform to annoy Trump, split the MAGA vote, and see what happens.”

Is it a serious threat? Who knows? But remember, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by a single vote, and in a system already on the brink, even a few percentage points peeled off by a billionaire’s vanity project can change everything.

And let’s be clear: the irony here is rich enough to drown in. This is the same Elon Musk who backed catastrophic cuts to NOAA and USAID, gutting the agencies that track hurricanes, prevent famine, and distribute vaccines worldwide, cuts that have almost certainly led to thousands, if not millions, of unnecessary deaths globally, from floods that no longer carry warnings to cholera outbreaks that no longer receive aid. The man who helped strip the world’s safety nets now wants to brand himself as America’s political savior, riding in on his X app to rescue a democracy he’s spent years destabilizing for clicks and tax cuts.

If nothing else, Musk’s America Party is a perfectly American spectacle: a bored billionaire deciding democracy is his next toy, running on a platform of fixing problems he helped create, while the working class pays the price.

This is what American politics has become: families drowning in Texas while the weather service is defunded; families raided in the middle of the night while ICE expands unchecked; families going hungry while food banks scramble to do the impossible; billionaires celebrating “freedom” while collecting another round of tax cuts they don’t need. And into this chaos comes Elon Musk, ready to save America by throwing a third-party Molotov cocktail into an already burning system.

Trump ran on “personal responsibility.” It’s time he, and the entire Republican apparatus enabling this cruelty, took some. This is a country bleeding out while billionaires toast themselves on yachts, and working people drown, starve, or get deported.

This is the America they are building. It’s up to the rest of us to decide whether we’re going to let them finish. Carpe Momentum!