LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS?

Common Dreams contributor Whitney Tucker buries the lede.

Communities nationwide depend on federal aid to build and support basic public infrastructure and to help every resident access what they need for their and their family’s health, well-being, and success. By slashing this aid, the House Republican bill would badly harm our communities, and that’s a bad deal for all of us.

Her salary depends on lobbying for more public assistance, and that "bad deal" makes more sense when so viewed.

State and local governments would be forced to slash funding for programs that people and communities rely upon every day. The harms done would include more crowded classrooms, even fewer families able to afford child care, new parents lacking the help they need to feed their babies properly, malfunctioning water facilities, and less in funding for homelessness services and substance use treatment.

No state would be spared. High-population states like California and New York would see very large dollar cuts of up to $170.9 billion and $144.7 billion, respectively. Less populous and more rural states, meanwhile, would feel deep pain relative to the size of their budgets. For example, the cut of up to $8.3 billion in federal funding for West Virginia over ten years is roughly 1.5 times the size of the entire state budget in fiscal year 2024.

The harm from these service cuts comes in addition to the millions of people from whom the bill would take away health coverage, food, and cash assistance if they don’t meet onerous work requirements.

Predictably, she's also got something positive to say about hiring more revenooers, under the misapprehension that they will audit the tax returns of high net worth individuals more assiduously.

It's all special pleading, and it elides the basic point, which is that the states being adversely affected don't generate enough commerce to support the services the voters would like, or they are seeing that punitive taxation of productive people pushes them out.

For what?  Ineffective schools?  The silly idea that water is not a commodity?  The closure of the psychiatric hospitals?

The Congress might not recognize reality.  Debt ceiling or no, the day will come when the bond traders will buy Treasuries only at a deep discount.