The GOP Murder Budget
The Big Beautiful Bill is a contract to commit murder.
To be alive is to be connected. This is true for all life. To be alive is a constant gain or loss of connection. Loss without gain is death.
This is not my idea:
Plato, “Kindness, in its purest form, arises from an authentic connection to the essence of existence. It is not a transaction, but rather a manifestation of our innate interconnectedness.”1
Jesus, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34-5)
Bateson, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?”2
Einstein on humanity, “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”3
Strong social connections
– leads to a 50% increased chance of longevity
– strengthens your immune system (research by Steve Cole shows that genes impacted by loneliness also code for immune function and inflammation)
– helps you recover from disease faster
– may even lengthen your life!4
On the other hand, in Camus’ story of The Stranger, Meursault’s level of disconnection creates a sub-human monster and death. Broken connections, isolation, and loneliness lead to increased mortality and death.5,6 Solitary confinement is close to a form of torture, with serious consequences for neurological health.7 “Prisoners who have spent any time in solitary confinement are 24% more likely to die within the first year after their release from prison, compared with prisoners who never experienced solitary confinement”.8
To say somebody or some action is evil sounds so archaic, almost medieval, irredeemable, and so over the top. Evil “is the worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable”.9 There are many people and actions that are horrors, but not evil if “Genuine evilness is defined as intentional detachment from and destruction of human co-existence.”10
Given this definition there are people and actions that are clearly evil to the core. The GOP Murder Budget is such an instance. This is not trump’s budget. This is the whole Republican Party, MAGA, and f47 budget. The Murder Budget contains a great deal of evil, but two examples suffice.
First, I do not know about your rep but mine, Andy Biggs, would rather let food rot than feed more than “40 million people, including some 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities. He walked away from a 50-year commitment to ensure that low-income children in every community — in rural Alabama, in North Dakota, and in New York City — have access to the food assistance they need to grow and thrive.”11
Second, one in four Arizonans is on Medicaid. Andy Biggs voted to remove medical insurance for about 750,000 of them.12 Most of this state is incredibly empty. Loss of Medicaid will mean closures of rural hospitals and a concomitant loss of rapid response, emergency care, and helicopter transport for people in dangerous jobs and hazardous areas of the State.
The whole point of any budgeting process is to map out and to build connections. That’s what they do. A budget says this pot of resources, whether it be dollars, time, effort, or any other resource will be shared and allocated to connected and recognized recipients. All political budgets are constrained, and almost all have a cost in deaths. That’s a hard fact of life.
This budget is not constrained by limited resources. This budget is constrained solely by greed and maintenance of the white, male, American hierarchy. This budget intentionally detaches from and destroys human co-existence. This budget does not have a cost in deaths. This budget flat-out murders people so the scavengers can get their hands on yet another dollar. This budget is a 1000 pages of shearing connections, repeating over and over again; “I’ve got mine, too bad about you”.
This country was never perfect, but we might have been creeping towards a better place. We had killed “trickle down”. We were building out, rather than up. We were on the right side of many, but certainly not all, of the global issues. Maybe we were making progress on the core of blatant racism. In four months, with f47 as captain leading the GOP in general, and Andy Biggs in specific, as crew, we have lost the light. We travel in the dark. We have “lost the bubble”. We no longer know left from right, up from down, front to back. Our moral compass has tilted and can no longer show the direction to travel. Losing the bubble in a submarine, or a plane, always ends badly. That is just as true for a Nation.
There is hope. No kings day is coming up. (https://www.nokings.org/ ) or (https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/773579/ ) or (https://indivisible.org/ )
It is going to be big, I hope. Every revolution is won initially by the peasants. There are just so damn many of them. He is losing more and more every day. And, maybe, even the tariffs are gone. As a peasant, I hold to hope.
1) https://batesoninstitute.org/gregory-bateson/
4) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9483694/
5) https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.html
6) https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/
7) https://journalistsresource.org/home/solitary-confinement-research-primer/
8) Singer 2004,185 quoted in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/
9) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354305057269
11) https://azpbs.org/horizon/2025/04/how-cuts-in-medicaid-will-affect-arizonans/