I’m in New York City this morning having arrived here at the Cornell Club about 12 hours ago. I was out of the air condition cab and had to walk about 10 feet to the air-conditioned lobby of the club and I must say I was surprised at how how hot and humid it was for that few seconds that I was outside. It was a good reminder of just how muggy it can get in the summer here in New York. I have to walk from the club at 44th and Fifth Avenue to the W.R. Grace building at 42nd St. near Sixth Avenue normally that’s a pretty easy walk but I must admit based on my five seconds on the street yesterday. I’m wondering whether I will get mugged between here and there given that the relative humidity stands at 90% at 8am. And I don’t mean mugged in terms of held at knife point or gun point, but rather having to wear a business suit and sweating through it while I get mugged by the humidity of the city.
I will survive my brief affair with humidity this morning, but as I watch the devastation in central Texas caused by the recent flooding, my thought goes to the fact that the Republican Party and specifically the MAGA movement is mugging the people of the United States with all of the political nonsense that they are perpetrating. We are in a moment where all too many people are rallying behind the notion of cutting expenses by the government under the guise that they are eliminating waste and fraud. There’s plenty to be said about the harm being inflicted upon the neediest Americans through cuts in Medicaid and the SNAP program, but I will set those aside for purposes of this story and talk instead about the harm being inflicted on all Americans, and especially the very people who the Republican Party and the MAGA movement represent. While I am sure that there are counties in America that have an even higher percentage of support for the Republican Party then Kerr County. Kerr County has a strong rate of political participation with about 71% of the potential electorate voting. The county leans decidedly Republican and supported Trump in 2024 by almost 77%. They similarly supported the Republican candidates for Senate (Cruz) as well as Republican congressman (Roy) and a whole array of state and local politicians. I think it is fair to say that this Texas Hill country County on the Guadalupe river has fully bought in to the Republican, and indeed the MAGA, program. That all implies that they are fully in support of the One Big Beautiful Bill that just passed Congress and was signed into law by President Trump. I’ve said for a long time that I cannot understand why these sorts of middle Americans have gotten behind this sort of Republican agenda when they are the Americans who will most likely suffer the harshest consequences of the ham-handed budgetary cuts that this movement so anxiously pursues. Now the County and the world can see the impact of this mistake and count it in lives lost, especially the lives of the children lost.
Trump and Governor Abbott are already falling all over one another both falsely claiming that none of their cuts to NOAA or FEMA can possibly be blamed for the devastation from the floods or the loss of life they’ve inflicted…or the paltry response for support and rebuilding efforts so far. After all, those funds are needed to bulk up ICE and the border patrol to protect Texans and other Americans from all the bad things brought by unchecked illegal immigration, right? Who needs critical infrastructure …until you do. Who needs federal or state disaster relief …until you do. Who needs scientific research …until you do. Over the past ten years we have heard a lot about infrastructure investment, Trump talking about it and then did nothing about it and Biden certainly tried to do a lot of it and succeeded to an extent only to get slammed by Republicans for doing it at all and causing Democrat profligate inflationary pressure. The problem with American economics education is that it teaches most Americans just enough about economics to be dangerous. The issues of infrastructure and inflation are just such an example. Any time you make a fiscal expenditure, someone can scream about the risk of inflation. It’s true that fiscal spending is an economic boost and by stimulating the economy too much you can cause inflation to rise, but you can also broaden the economic base and improve general prosperity and welfare in a way that can more than adequately absorb the stimulus and stabilize the inflationary pressure that might have resulted. The role of government and the need for taxation is to provide collective benefits to the population that they are smart enough to realize that they need and want. Not everyone crosses a given bridge, but an enlightened electorate understands that most bridges serve an important infrastructural purpose for the economy and that its in their broad economic best interest to vote to build a bridge whether they themselves cross it or not. The bridge keeps the wheels of the economy rolling and allows the businesses that rely on transportation of their goods and services or the agencies of government that need to get from here to there to perform their jobs efficiently. If you refuse to vote to build a bridge because it will pump money into the local economy and cause the price of groceries to rise, you have a very good chance of biting off your nose to spite your face. You will actually hurt the local economy directly and the broader economy somewhat directly and certainly indirectly, and you may well lessen the welfare of your community or even your own family today or tomorrow. That all may just be too complicated for some voters to fathom, but in theory that’s what we have representatives for. They are supposed to spend the time understanding that and even explaining it to their constituents.
And there you have the reality of how America is getting mugged by Trump, the Republicans and especially the MAGA faithful. By putting political partisanship ahead of what government is meant to do for its people, these representatives have either willingly or been forced to knuckle under the yoke of Trumpian MAGA politics to the detriment of their own welfare. Most of the devastation happening in central Texas right now is falling on the heads of the very people who got on board and voiciferously voted for the Republican and MAGA agenda. Cut taxes to eliminate critical federal agencies and staffing. Cut taxes and rid ourselves of waste and abuse in such a slipshod manner that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, only this time many babies were instead thrown out with the floodwaters. Cut taxes and defund FEMA so that the strong and self-sufficient Americans can do for themselves regardless of how the climate is being allowed to undermine their very way of life. Oh, and also cut taxes to defund all that silly medical and scientific research that may well have saved their or their families lives at some point down the road…the road that has no bridge over the river anyway…