Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

 February 25, 2025 The Federal Budget by Lynne Weikart Both Houses of Congress wrestle with passing a Budget Resolution - the financial goals for their budget, and their goals are deep cuts in Medicaid, which is health care for the poor. Congress refuses to discuss revenue; its focus is spending cuts.  There are two sides to a budget - the revenue side and the spending side. Before cutting spending, why not examine what can be done on the revenue side? Congress avoids discussing revenue because it wishes to extend the Trump tax cuts that expire at the end of 2025.  In FY2024, we collected $4.92 trillion in revenues. Republicans will not look at the revenues.  Let’s look at the revenues.   The expenditures were $6.752 trillion for a deficit of $1.83 trillion in FY2024. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), permanently extending the expiring Trump tax cuts would cost $4 trillion over the next 10 years or $400 billion per year. That $400 trillion is m...

  What most people don't know. Our federal government employees' salaries take up only a tiny proportion of the federal budget. Our spending on employees is relatively small. In FY2022, the federal government only spent $271 billion to pay 2.3 million civilian workers. In FY2024, our federal government spent $6.9 trillion. Do you really think cutting this tiny portion of federal salaries will make a dent in our federal budget? Our national budget is really just an insurance company with an accompanying military expenditure. The majority of spending is mandatory in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, not employees' salaries but payments to citizens. It's like insurance. This attention to our minuscule federal workforce is misplaced and disastrous for our citizenry because it takes away from the real problem, which is the extraordinary shift in wealth in this country from the working and middle class to the rich. The country's focus should be on the revenue s...

 January 25, 2025 " Atul Gawande, a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and former United States Agency for International Development official, took to social media over the weekend to sound the alarm.  "I ran USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US," Gawande said. "Citing some purported "examples," Gawande said the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a mpox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination ...

Trump held 8 of the 12 federal appropriation bills hostaged. These eight were Homeland Security; Agriculture; Commerce, Justice and Science; Energy and Water Development; Financial Services and General Government; Interior and Environment; State and Foreign Operations; and Transportation and HUD. For those who want a simple way of looking at it, here are the departments that were closed except that some federal employees were told to come to work even though they were not getting paid -  Department of the Treasury Department of Agriculture Homeland Security Department Department of the Interior Department of State Department of Housing and Urban Development Department of Transportation Department of Commerce Department of Justice More than 420,000 of the 800,000 furloughed had to come to work even though they were not getting paid. This included the air traffic controllers, coast guard, the FBI and border security. Even a few IRS agents were called back to work - no...