Public spending by Marc Batko, 11/23/2025

Public spending, infrastructure, survival of the poor and survival of the middle class,
jobs dystopia, housing dystopia, tax havens, the tax avoidance industry,
state failure, market failure, neoliberalism, and exploding inequality are twelve elephants
in the room.The state serves capital and made itself poor by giving trillions to Wall Street banks.
In our economy of indebtedness and enrichment, the state runs away from feeding,
housing and healing its citizens. Corporations run away from paying fair taxes as
though education, maintaining roads and public functions were not their responsibility!

Bad economic theory leads to bad economic policy, rebel economist Steven Keen
explains. A country without deficits is a country without a future! Deficits do not
curb private investment and do not cause low economic growth! On YouTube, we
learn from David Pakman that the supply of labor falls when a draconian immigration
policy scares harvesters from working on the fields and the demand for labor falls
when taxing the world and AI cost-cutting cause plant closures and devastated
communities from Ohio and Pennsylvania to Texas and California!

The Big Ugly bill is Trump’s war on migrants and the poor. Food banks and school
lunch programs lost $1 billion in 2025. Pell grants were cut enormously along with
medical research, Medicaid assistance for 40 million poor, Meals on Wheels, Head
Start, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, rural hospitals, community financial
assistance, and FEMA.

What a year! Trump and Musk were certainly wrecking balls or Reverse Robin Hoods,
dismissing 400K federal workers in February, ending USAID that distributed $35 billion
in food and medical aid and employed 10,000 in 2024, closing the Department of Education,
and shriveling after school programs, the IRS, the Department of Veterans Affairs,
the Department of Housing, the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA!

Security comes when our language is convivial, when democrats are not called “crazed
lunatics” and leftists are not dehumanized as “terrorists” or “vermin.” Anti-militarism,dialog,
compromise, and cooperation must be learned after the last 80 years of scapegoating, endless
wars, regime changes, colonialism, and imperialism! The uni-polar world becomes the shared
multi-polar world!

China could be respected and praised for bringing 800 million out of extreme poverty and for its
technological expertise seen in smart phones, high-speed trains, electric cars, flying cars and
computers. According to Professor Jeffrey Sachs, China has not invaded another country in
2200 years. Existence means co-existence from a Confucian perspective!