This past week, the mainstream media has suggested strongly that the Democratic Party has lost its way and doesn’t have a leader. That’s been more than obvious ever since the fall election and raises a simple question – Why?

I think the answer to that question lies in a line of a country song – “Let’s get back to the basics of living.”

The Democratic Party has been far too concerned about issues that aren’t important to the vast majority of the American people, while the Republican Party has been immensely successful in reframing basic issues in ways that avoid the underlying problems and appeal to negative stereotypes, often involving issues that get people upset and fearful, but really don’t affect all that many people.

The furor over transgender athletes is a good example. People are worried about the unfair physical advantage possessed by biological males transitioned to women and how such transitioned individuals shouldn’t be allowed in women’s lavatories. According to the NCAA, out of 510,000 athletes competing at the collegiate level, there are fewer than ten who identify as transgender. As a practical matter, I seriously doubt that biologically-born males would go to all the trouble and difficulty of transitioning to women merely to obtain a possible advantage in athletics.

In addition, no one seems to be making a furor about the size and weight disparities among male athletes or female athletes. That’s just accepted. Some sixty years ago, I swam competitively on the collegiate level. Except for the divers, I was the smallest and shortest man on a team that won the New England championships year after year. Today, that physical discrepancy is even greater, but no one even considers it, even in football where 180-pound receivers and running backs are routinely tackled by 300 pound plus muscular behemoths. I have a granddaughter who’s six feet tall and who played volleyball. Of course, she had an advantage over shorter women.

Likewise, has anyone really considered the actual construction of women’s public restrooms? They have individual stalls, with latches/locks. Yes, theoretically there’s always a possibility of an assault, but it’s minuscule, compared to the altercations among women.

Yet a few trans women in academic/school sports are considered a national political issue, while few politicians are seriously addressing the decline in the academic achievements of students? Except to bewail it, or act as though money alone will solve the problem.

And, then there’s the federal deficit. The Republicans have capitalized on the “waste and fraud” issue, citing comparatively minor – and highly unpopular — federal programs. All governments have programs that partisans can claim as waste and/or fraud, but truly wasteful programs don’t constitute a significant fraction of federal spending.

But by claiming massive fraud and indiscriminately cutting federal employees in all agencies while also cutting programs unpopular with the far tight, Republicans have shifted attention from the basic question of what programs are truly unnecessary and how to fund government responsibly. Fundamental questions are largely, if not totally, avoided, particularly why corporations and massively wealthy individuals get away with paying minimal or no taxes to support the governmental structure that allows them to amass their billions.

According to a study by Pro Publica, American billionaires, on average, pay between one and four percent on their actual income in taxes. Some have paid less than one percent for years. In addition, the bulk of their actual income is hidden and/or deferred.

The average middle-class family pays 14% of their income in federal taxes and five percent in state income taxes (except in a handful of states with no income tax).

The Republican/billionaire strategy is effectively based on blaming the federal deficit and increasing federal debt on Democrats (despite the fact that much of it was incurred in GOP administrations) and upon “wasteful” programs. The Republicans have also successfully cut funding to the Internal Revenue Service so that the agency has been unable to pursuit wealthy tax cheats and avoiders.

The basic issues are simple. What federal programs do we need to assure better lives for all Americans? How do we fix immigration so that we get the best of the would-be immigrants?
How do we ensure internal and external security? What is the most effective, fair, and practical way to pay for those programs?

Right now, the Republicans are defining the issues to suit the ultra-rich, while blaming all the financial woes on admittedly liberal excesses, but not bothering to mention that those excesses comprise a tiny fraction of total spending.

The Democrats continue to spread themselves too thin, especially on issues irrelevant or distasteful to the majority of Americans, while failing to come up with a strategy to address basic concerns.

And most of the United States is suffering from the failings of both parties, failings that will continue unless and until the Democrats come up with leadership that addresses the real problems and effectively calls out the billionaires’ game plan – because the Republicans will continue what they’re doing until stopped.

Just as the so-enlightened voters of Utah have fallen for the tax cut scam, so it appears will the MAGA masses following the lead of Trump and his sycophantic followers in the U.S. House and Senate.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, the Republican-dominated Utah state legislature has passed minuscule tax cuts (1/10 of one percent) each year for the past five years and appears likely to do so again this year. The poorest families would receive a tax cut of $24 a year, middle class families $174, while millionaires would get thousands in tax cuts. At the same time, the legislature increased tuition rates at all state colleges and universities roughly $300 per student per year and cut university and college budgets by tens of millions of dollars while student enrollment in Utah is still increasing.

Also, following the lead of Elon Musk, the legislature has, in the last few weeks, also mandated a further cut of $60 million in higher education for the 2025-26 school year and created a committee charged with further reducing college and university budgets.

While Utah’s rate of sexual assault is the ninth in the U.S. (only eight states have higher rates), legislators cut back funding dealing with that problem, and only made minimal increases for primary and secondary education, despite the fact that Utah has on average the largest class sizes in the nation.

On the federal level, Trump and Musk are pursuing the same sort of policies. They’re destroying middle class jobs, both among federal workers and in the civilian economy, to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and justifying those cuts by saying that private industry will create more jobs.

Really? Musk’s takeover of Twitter (or X) resulted in mass layoffs. Trump still delights in firing people, and Bezos’s policies don’t give workers time to eat and go to the bathroom.

There are a few old sayings that apply, such as “leopards don’t change their spots,” or “if it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t,” or “look before you leap,” but the Republicans don’t seem to recall any of them, preferring to glory in insignificant tax cuts for the masses, and major handouts to the rich.

Last Friday, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance browbeat Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the oval office and and attacked him for being ungrateful, as well as blamed him for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What Trump, Vance, and the MAGA Republicans (who all fell into line behind Trump like the good little sycophants they are) seemingly forget is that the Russia/Ukraine conflict has never required the U.S. to put troops in the field, unlike all the other wars in which we’ve been involved. Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians have never asked for troops, only for weapons and equipment.

Trump (et al) also ignored the horrific acts continuously perpetrated by Russian troops, not to mention the prolonged drone attacks on civilian populations, and kept claiming that Zelenskyy wasn’t properly grateful. Shortly after that, CNN aired a montage of more than thirty separate occasions over the past three years in which Zelenskyy offered lengthy public thanks.

As usual, Trump made a raft of lies and misstatements, as is his wont, but when Zelenskyy attempted to set the record straight, that apparently offended Vance. No matter that both the British Prime Minister and the French President had to correct Trump as well when they met with him.

To date, Ukraine has lost 46,000 soldiers in combat, with 380,000 wounded, and suffered 40,000 civilian casualties, including 12,000 documented deaths, of which at least were 600 murdered children. In addition, Russia has illegally kidnapped nearly 20,000 children.

Russian military death claims total 85,000, and the Russian casualty figures are at least 500,000 and could be as high as 875,000. If I wanted to be purely mercenary about it, I could point out that we made a very good investment in supporting Ukraine, just because of the military and economic burden our aid imposed on Putin, all without costing an American life.

All Trump and the Republicans are concerned about are dollars, but the total of U.S. military aid sent (as opposed to that appropriated for possible use) to Ukraine amounts to some $120 billion, while European governments have supplied $140 billion – figures very much at variance with those incorrectly claimed by Trump.

But Zelenskyy clearly wasn’t subservient enough to Emperor Trump. But why should he be? He’s speaking on behalf of a nation that’s suffered roughly 60,000 deaths and half a million casualties from a Russian invasion, while Trump is demanding that Ukraine surrender to a despot so that the U.S. can save less money than it wastes annually (according to Trump), while claiming the U.S. is sending far more assistance that it actually has.

All this suggests that we’ve got an ignorant bully in the bully pulpit.

Governments owe certain services and infrastructure to their people, such as highways, impartial laws and courts, civic order, defense against invaders, and open and affordable communications systems.

Historically, the United States was one of the first nations to emphasize a national postal system. Among our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin was firm in his determination that the United States should have a postal service. He even served as Postmaster General before there was a United States.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution mandates that Congress establish post offices and post roads. One of long-standing aspects of the Post Office and its successor, the Postal Service, has been the mission to provide mail access to all Americans, not just to people in cities or people who are physically or economically convenient to serve, but the vast majority of Americans.

While the Postal Service should be as cost-efficient as possible, cost-efficiency shouldn’t be its primary mission. Maintaining service to all Americans should be. That was why the post office and post roads were an essential part of the Constitution.

This background seems to have been forgotten. Amazon can use the Postal Service on Sundays to deliver packages for what I suspect is below the actual cost, using cost structures that I’ve critiqued previously for their unreality, and now Trump is talking about privatizing the Postal Service, enabling that “private” successor to gouge the public and provide less service.

We can run huge deficits for national defense and all manner of other “necessary” services, but comparatively small deficits for postal service are apparently taboo… which says a great deal about people and politicians, particularly about Republicans.

With all of the headlines about the actions of Trump and DOGE trying to cut out “wasteful” jobs with a chainsaw, so far, at least so far as I can tell, no one seems to have given much thought to the secondary and tertiary impacts of those cuts.

A relative of mine was let go last week. He wasn’t a federal employee, nor was he a lobbyist. He was a technical writer for a publishing services company, and he was laid off because one of the company’s larger clients was the Veterans Administration.

What Musk, DOGE, and Trump clearly fail to understand is that, in a great many instances, contrary to popular belief, it’s cheaper for government agencies to contract out services than to do them with government employees.

And even if it’s not, adding additional workloads on agency personnel to accomplish tasks previously contracted out is either going to slow down everything, actually increase costs, or reduce the amount of work done, if not some combination of all three, particularly if the agency is also cutting back on personnel.

Not only that, but the savings from cutting federal employees are limited. In 1960, federal employees were 4.3% of all US workers; today, they amount to only 1.4%. Zeroing out the entire federal payroll would save $271 billion a year, a mere 4% of the federal budget.

I’ve run a Congressional office, and several offices at EPA. I’ve also been a consultant working for some of the largest corporations in the United States, and the greatest waste I’ve seen has largely come from unwise Congressional mandates and laws.

First off, there’s the practice of “earmarking” where Representatives and Senators add or direct appropriations to pet projects in their state or district. A number of organizations and members of Congress have documented such earmarks, and those documented over the last ten years that I’ve been able to total amount to more than 10,000, costing more than $50 billion. And those were the ones I could easily find.

Far more serious are the instances of manipulation of defense funding for local economic development. I can remember the F-7 [The gutless Cutlass] mess from when I was a Navy pilot, because older pilots were still talking about the fact that Congressman Jim Wright (later Speaker of the House) dragged out production of the F-7 so that Chance-Vought would be able to deliver the far superior F-8, which massively increased the cost of the last F-7s, just in time for them to be retired.

More recently, in 2023 the Navy discovered that the so-called advanced littoral combat ships built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity. The Navy decided to retire nine out of the ten ships built, because of the astronomical repair costs, telling Congress that would save $4.3 billion that could be used on other ships and systems. Various congressmen got involved, citing the 2,000 jobs that would be lost. In the end the Navy was only allowed to retire four ships and $3 billion more was allocated for repairs. – for ships originally budgeted to cost $220 million each and which eventually cost over $500 million each – before the $3 billion in repair costs.

Then there are the massive cost overruns associated with the F-35, and the Ford class of aircraft carriers, not to mention the cost of maintaining 750 military bases around the world, a number of which in the U.S. could likely be closed without adversely affecting military readiness – except they won’t be closed because various members of Congress will oppose closings in their states and districts.

But Trump and Musk want to funnel more funds to the armed services, while cutting the civilian logistical base, at a time when the military is having trouble retaining personnel.

None of this makes much sense.