The Cloward–Piven strategy is winning in the USA
“The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it“

A lesson that the Left know in their innermost core but which the Right continue to be clueless or blase about. It’s why it took the Fourth Labour government in 1984 to undo the clunking State machinery created by the First Labour government.

Same deal in the USA, where the Congressional GOP is not picking up the baton from Trump and running with it:

So far, it has managed to send just five bills to Trump’s desk for signature, a slower pace than any Congress in modern times. Five. And none of them delivered on Trump’s agenda.

None of the departmental shutdowns, like USAID and the Department of Education, nor the spending cuts identified by DOGE, or the spending cuts ordered by President Trump (like the recent defunding of NPR and PBS), will amount to a hill of beans if Congress does not pass legislation that cements in these changes. Even with the tens of thousands of Federal employees who have been let go and the NGO funding and other grifting that have been cut by Trump, leaving all the machinery in place just means the Democrats can rapidly empower all this the next time they’re in power.

They created these things and they funded them and by the GOP often cooperated in the creation and they certainly are doing so now in the fundiung. But this is not new news:

Nor is this comparison with the Democrats:

When Democrats controlled Congress at the start of Bill Clinton’s, Barack Obama’s, and Biden’s administrations, they cast votes on tax hikes, Obamacare, and Biden’s massive spending splurge – with no GOP support – knowing those votes would likely cost them their majorities in either the House or Senate. But they were smart enough to know that once you get a law on the books, it’s nearly impossible to get it off, and that they’d eventually regain control of Congress.

So, Clinton’s tax hikes paved the way for more tax hikes. Obamacare is still the law of the land. And even Republicans are acting squeamish about Trump’s plan to simply cut domestic spending back to where it was before COVID

Admittedly it’s easier to increase spending than cut it, but the US is rapidly approaching a point of no return on debt (if they’re not past it already) with it standing at almost $37 trillion (up from $22 trillion when I wrote my first post on this topic in 2019), rising at the rate of $1 trillion every 100 days.

Yet the only spending ideas that the Congressional GOP has come up with is this wheeze:

The question is whether Congress, in considering a budget reconciliation bill extending the [2017 GOP tax cuts], should adopt a “current policy baseline” or a “current law baseline.” The “current law baseline” — the standard way most legislation gets scored — assumes the [tax cuts] provisions expire on Dec. 31 and that extending them will cost upwards of $4 trillion, including interest costs. The “current policy baseline” assumes the [tax cuts get] extended — on the grounds that Americans should not face a massive tax increase next year — making the cost of an extension $0, at least on paper.

This is a gimmick to avoid cutting spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already modelled this and seen that it points to more debt and (eventually) higher interest rates, and even though it’s not a dynamic model that tries to account for increased economic growth caused by tax cuts – they’re not allowed to do that because it’s speculative – even such would not claim that such would pay for all the tax cuts.

It may get booted anyway if the Senate parliamentarian rules that it’s not consistent with existing rules like the “Byrd rule” on budget reconciliation, which states that a budget provision can be stricken from a reconciliation bill “if it increases, or would increase, net outlays, or if it decreases, or would decrease, revenues during a fiscal year” outside the budgetary window. Admittedly that rule can and has been beaten in the past via tricks like “sunset provisions” and other things that allow spending and tax cuts to expire. The latter was done by the GOP with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which is what’s causing the current fight), and by the Democrat Party with things like the 2021 “Build Back Bankrupt” Act which hid a large chunk of its cost of $5 trillion.

And that’s yet another example of GOP fecklessness in preserving or creating machinery more valuable to their opponents than them; even if this wheeze did pass or – god forbid – the GOP decide to pass this by abolishing the legislative filibuster, it would leave the door wide open for the Democrat Party the next time they’re in power.

Better for Congress to do what it has failed to do for decades: put on its big-boy pants and finally get serious about lowering spending. Given all the government giveaways under the Biden administration, lawmakers have a target-rich environment where they can generate the savings necessary to pay for a permanent TCJA extension — provided they have the spine to do so.

The Left certainly are correct when they point at the Right’s constant mewling for tax cuts by pointing out that they’re too gutless to match them with spending cuts, knowing it might lose them Congress (of course the Left have their own blind spot, which is that they don’t accept that the USA can’t tax itself out of this either).

As this writer said back in 2021 of the comparison between the GOP and the Democrat Party, repeating the point made in the first article quoted about current events :

When it matters, Republicans look around and say, “Oh no we can’t do that, we’d lose a man. The Democrats would take seats.” They are virtually a majority for the sake of being a majority. They just want to polish it up, put it on the shelf, and look at it.
…
To put it simply, Republicans approach politics like America fights wars: They don’t want to lose a single man. Democrats, on the other hand? They look at politics like the Russians looked at Stalingrad: The congressman in front votes now; when they fall the next man gets elected and he will vote too

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The Economics of It:

The politics of it: