On the menu today: Today’s newsletter is like a mullet. Business up front, party in the back. First, the “Big Beautiful Bill” and its tiny step in the direction of entitlement reform, and the kinds of steps our elected officials could take if they really wanted to dramatically reduce the deficit. Then, Karine Jean-Pierre’s got a book coming out, and she promises that this time, she’ll tell you the truth. Also, an update on little Greta Thunberg and her deadline to save the planet.
Cutting the Deficit: It Can Be Done
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s Morning Jolt, I was informed by a reader that, unless you have a plan to seriously reduce the deficit (estimated at $1.9 trillion this fiscal year), then you have no standing to criticize anyone else for failing to do so — even if they pledged to do so on the campaign trail, won election to public office, and this is, you know, their job.
President Trump, in his address to Congress on March 5: “In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years — balance the federal budget. We’re gonna balance it.”
One of my recurring points is that you cannot eliminate a $1.9 trillion deficit by cutting discretionary spending when the U.S. federal budget’s total discretionary spending in 2024 was $1.8 trillion. If you’re not willing to make changes to our entitlement systems, you’re not serious about addressing this problem.
Yesterday’s Jolt mentioned that, in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans want to enact some basic spending restrictions to Medicaid — reconfirming eligibility for enrollees, reducing federal payments to states whose Medicaid program covers illegal immigrants, imposing part-time work requirements, and adding a $35 copay for certain services. (If you’re like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and can’t remember which program is which, Medicaid is “Poor People Care,” Medicare is “Old People Care.”) The editors of National Review defend this aspect of the BBB this morning.
The Congressional Budget Office says the bill would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $723 billion over ten years. Let’s assume that averages out to $72 billion per year.
For all the controversy surrounding any proposal to “means test Social Security,” most people don’t realize that Social Security benefits can be reduced if you’re earning above a certain income level when you are between age 62 and your “full retirement age.” From the Social Security Administration:
If you are under full retirement age for the entire year, we deduct $1 from your benefit payments for every $2 you earn above the annual limit. For 2025, that limit is $23,400.
In the year you reach full retirement age, we deduct $1 in benefits for every $3 you earn above a different limit. In 2025, this limit on your earnings is $62,160. We only count your earnings up to the month before you reach your full retirement age, not your earnings for the entire year.
In other words, we’re already established the principle that if you’re making a lot of money, the U.S. government has the right to reduce your Social Security benefits. Now we’re just haggling about what that threshold ought to be.
From the Concord Coalition: “According to [the Congressional Budget Office], the top 20 percent of households, which is roughly equivalent to individuals earning more than $95,900 per year, received 12 percent of Social Security and Medicare benefits.’’
If you eliminate Social Security and Medicare benefits for those in the top 20 percent, you save $640 billion to $1.2 trillion over a ten-year period, or $64 billion to $128 billion.
Would this be extremely unpopular? Yes. Would this be cutting benefits for the elderly poor? Not in the slightest, because this would only affect those in the top 20 percent. If you’re making $95,900 per year or more in your sixties, it’s reasonable for the government to expect you to cover more of your living expenses than someone who is not collecting income, or is collecting significantly less income.
Remember, if nothing changes, in 2035 — one decade from now! — everyone on Social Security gets a 17 percent cut. Right now, about 66 million Americans collect Social Security. By 2035, that number is projected to be about 78 million.
There’s also a strong argument that the Social Security benefit system overestimates inflation in its cost-of-living adjustment. In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that adopting chained CPI would save Social Security about $150 billion over ten years. (Keep in mind, that was before the Biden-era skyrocketing inflation.) For what it’s worth, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the savings of this move as $350 billion over ten years.
The Medicaid reform in the BBB gets us $72 billion per year. The “chained” consumer price index saves us $15 billion to $35 billion per year. The earnings cap for Social Security and Medicare saves $64 billion to $128 billion.
But wait — do you know how much money we can save by not expanding the current $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes to $40,000? $981 billion over ten years! Let’s assume that by not making this change, that’s another $98 billion per year in tax revenue coming in that we otherwise wouldn’t have?
Do you know how much we can save by continuing to treat tips as income? $340 billion over ten years!
Together, those five changes have saved $283 billion to $367 billion each year.
For perspective, DOGE estimates it has saved $180 billion so far this year.
Beyond entitlement reform, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget offers users an option in a fix-the-debt-yourself game. Among the options are medical-malpractice reform (saving the U.S. government $40 billion over ten years), allowing private plans to compete with Medicare ($360 billion over ten years), banning state Medicare matching gimmicks ($830 billion over ten years), rescinding Inflation Reduction Act climate tax credits ($780 billion over ten years), and repealing and replacing student-debt cancellation ($320 over ten years). Enact all of those, and that’s another $233 billion per year or so.
I can get to about $600 billion in cuts per year, or $6 trillion over a ten-year span. That wouldn’t eliminate the deficit each year, but it would reduce them dramatically.
But we’re not going to do much of that, because our lawmakers are convinced somebody else will deal with the problem of the debt later.
We had all better hope that the bond market agrees, and that the increasingly dire warnings of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci are incorrect.
For $29, Karine Jean-Pierre Will Stop Lying to You
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is barely mentioned in the pages of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, spurring some speculation that she was an important, unnamed source in the book. Either way, Jean-Pierre has decided she intends to tell her own story, for $29, coming to a bookstore near you on October 21. And she’s beginning by declaring that she isn’t a Democrat anymore, in a book entitled, INDEPENDENT: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.
In a country obsessed with blind loyalty to a two-party democratic system, Karine Jean-Pierre, former White House press secretary to the Biden-Harris administration, shares why Americans must step beyond party lines to embrace life as independents.
Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an independent lightly. She has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden. In 2020, she joined Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris’s chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary. She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term, and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.
We’re getting a “tell all” book from the one White House official whose job was to inform the public about what the president is doing, and how he’s doing. The woman who stood at the podium, constantly looking down at her big thick binder, and who kept insisting how everything at the White House was going great, now wants to give us a “look inside a broken White House.”
I assume the working title was, For Four Years, I Lied So Much, My Pants Burst into Flames.
As Rich wrote last month, “She wasn’t the most important part of the conspiracy. In Mafia terms, she wasn’t a mob boss or even a mob lawyer, but a mob spokesperson, who loyally and eagerly embraced her role.”
Apparently, now it can be told that her former colleagues in the Biden White House never liked her:
Another former official said that Jean-Pierre had begun working during the Biden administration with a New York-based publicist and had copied that person on official emails before some of Jean-Pierre’s White House colleagues intervened.
“Everyone thinks this is a grift,” the first former official said of Jean-Pierre’s book project.
As Biden’s press secretary, Jean-Pierre’s halting, ineffectual briefings exasperated reporters and routinely offered material for the Republican Party’s main account on X. She frustrated colleagues throughout the West Wing for focusing on raising her own profile, while leaving the hands-on management of media relations and the White House press shop to other aides.
Axios reports, “One former White House official who worked closely with Jean-Pierre said that she ‘was one of the most ineffectual and unprepared people I’ve ever worked with. . . She had meltdowns after any interview that asked about a topic not sent over by producers.’”
Remember how we kept pointing out that Jean-Pierre was terrible at her job? And remember how almost everyone outside the conservative media sphere averted their eyes and pretended she was just a standard-issue White House press secretary?
Finally, a line I wish I had written, from Politico’s Ben Jacobs: “Excited for the audiobook of this, which will be read by John Kirby.”
ADDENDUM: Back in January 2020, little Greta Thunberg appeared at the Davos Summit and warned that we had eight years to save the planet.
We’re five years into that eight-year stretch, and Thunberg is now off on a boat sailing to Gaza, aiming to defy an Israeli blockade. Thunberg is insisting that denouncing Israel and supporting the crowd chanting “from the river, to the sea” is completely consistent with her environmentalist views: “When we see the genocide in Gaza, of course, there are some very obvious links, that ecocide, environmental destruction is a very common method used in war and to oppress people.”
You know how teenagers get really into something, borderline obsessed, and then a few months or years later, they’ve lost interest and moved on to something else? It is every teenager’s right to explore new interests, but it also is strong evidence that you shouldn’t set public-policy priorities based upon the often-fleeting passions of adolescents.
Also, if we’re five years into an eight-year window to save the planet . . . is Thunberg acting like there’s just three years left to save the planet?
Oh, and finally, Thunberg has a new fan . . . the notorious Andrew Tate, accused of rape and human trafficking, who declares, “I support Greta Thunburg. She’s given up the climate scam and is attacking a REAL issue. Respect the pivot.”
Greta Thunberg fans, you should reevaluate your choices if you find yourself on the same side as Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate fans, you should reevaluate your choices if you find yourself on the same side as Greta Thunberg.