If They Cut Everything Our Taxes Pay For, Why Are We Still Paying Taxes?

No public services, just vibes and war.

Trump’s latest budget is being sold as “big and beautiful,” which is fitting, since those are two things it absolutely is not. If anything, it’s big the way a wrecking ball is big, and beautiful the way a tax audit is beautiful. What it really is, underneath the branding and the bluster, is cowardly. It’s a bill that shreds safety nets, kneecaps the middle class, and then hands what’s left to the wealthiest Americans with a bow on top.

This budget doesn’t just cut government spending. It erases the idea that the government exists to care for people at all. Nearly a trillion dollars slashed from Medicaid. Planned Parenthood defunded. Food assistance hollowed out. Education gutted by 15 percent, with support for teacher training, rural schools, and homeless students stripped away. Student loan forgiveness is scrapped. Gender-affirming care for trans people under Medicaid is banned outright. Cancer research, NPR, Head Start, clean energy initiatives—gone, or slashed into irrelevance.

And yet somehow, magically, the Congressional Budget Office says the bill still adds $2.4 trillion to the national debt. Huh?? That should feel inexplicable to us. The thing that exposes the whole performance for what it is. Because if you’re cutting everything that helps people, and still ballooning the debt, you’re not budgeting. You’re looting. Or really bad at math.

Where is the money going? To permanent tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. To bonuses for ICE agents and Border Patrol. To military contractors, fossil fuel companies, and billionaires who don’t need another dollar, let alone another deduction. Which raises the question: what are our taxes actually paying for?

Because if we’re no longer funding healthcare, education, housing, food, or the planet, and instead just paying to subsidize billionaires, detain immigrants, and make Elon Musk slightly richer, then what is this? It’s not a society. It’s a heist.

And it’s not even a new one. This is just the latest version of the GOP’s Santa Claus Theory, dreamed up in the late 1970s by conservative operative Jude Wanniski. His strategy was simple. If Democrats played Santa by giving voters programs like Social Security and Medicare, Republicans needed to become the Santa of Tax Cuts. Not actual help, just the illusion of a gift. Cut taxes, mostly for the rich, pitch it as a present for everyone, and then, when Democrats are back in power, demand austerity and scream about the deficit.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a textbook case. It eliminates taxes on tips and overtime, expands a few deductions, and raises the SALT cap, while quietly handing trillions to the wealthiest Americans. They’re calling it generosity. But for most of us, it’s theft.

And let’s be clear. There’s nothing fiscally conservative about passing a budget that leaves millions worse off and still manages to cost trillions more.

So I’ll ask again. If you’ve defunded everything my taxes were supposed to pay for, why am I still paying them?

Because it doesn’t feel like I’m funding a country anymore. It feels like I’m paying a monthly fee to be humiliated by people who whose definition of leadership is to lie.

This budget isn’t beautiful. It’s cowardly. It’s a love letter to billionaires written in the blood of working people.

But here’s the part I want you to tell you that they really don’t want you to know. They are losing. Voters are noticing. Trump’s budget isn’t just getting backlash from Democrats, it’s sparking a civil war inside his own party. Even Elon Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.” And across the country, voters are pushing back hard.

Americans are waking up across the country. In Wisconsin, where Trump won in 2024, voters turned around and handed a landslide victory to a progressive Supreme Court candidate, despite Trump and Musk pouring millions into the race. In Nebraska, of all places, Democrats flipped the Omaha mayor’s seat by 14 points. Illinois saw a full-on municipal sweep, flipping 222 out of 280 races blue. Even in South-Carolina, Democrats just had a landslide this week.

These aren’t flukes. They’re a movement. A signal that even without the White House, progressives are winning one school board, one city council, one Supreme Court seat at a time.

So no, I won’t stop paying attention. And I don’t want you to stop speaking up. And I definitely won’t stop imagining something better, because that’s what they’re most afraid of.

They can cut the funding. We’ll keep building the future anyway. And if this year is any indication, we’re not just dreaming of a better world. We’re winning it.

Tell me something that is giving you hope right now!!

x Liz