The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not.
As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
But we tend to cut taxes, not substantive spending. Which is going to saddle my kids with a mess.
Tariffs will not make up for this because tariffs are, beyond specific circumstances, a failed policy that harms your own economy and disproportionately targets your lower class. It threatens US exports, makes many US businesses non-viable (thus losing jobs), slows down economy by increasing the prices of even domestic goods. Combine that with a looming recession and Trump's insistence to take over the fed fiscal policy and enforce a political bond policy...
Crashing your economy does not help reconcile debts.
We really haven't. The effective tax rate on the wealthiest Americans has dropped from nearly 60% to about 20% since the 1960s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
> Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.
The Laffer curve is a wildly simplistic concept that's widely disputed, and every practical test of it (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment) has demonstrated that it fails. It's the right's equivalent of "let's try Communism again!"
My household runs a very nice budget surplus if I don't pay the mortgage, student loans, credit card bills, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. too. Huge balance in the account!
It's a few months later that the chickens come home to roost.
Cutting for the sake of cutting ignores what you are cutting. Cutting healthcare and education gets very expensive in the long run, for example, if you do enough damage. It is premature to declare victory when the knock-on effects are years or decades down the line. (As with not paying your mortgage; it'll be a little while before the pain hits.)