Billionaires Will Kill for a Tax Cut

Trump's war on government is already sending children to their graves.

by Richard Conniff

A funeral home from March, 2020, during Trump’s last great venture in public health (Photo: Bryan R Smith/Reuters)

Hurting other people often seems to be the point for Donald Trump, in a tie with fattening his own bank account. Both motives combine, happily for him, in the current Republican rush to slash essential federal programs as a way to justify extending tax breaks for the rich.

The Trump urge to hurt has been evident for decades. And yet, every time, it comes as a shock to the senses. I’m thinking, for instance, of the needless cruelty of those early emails blaming individual federal workers targeted at random in mass firings: "The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest." But it has gotten much worse, from the crippling tariffs on some of the poorest nations on Earth—and the poorest American grocery shoppers—to the masked agents snatching legal immigrants off the streets and into prison, in full knowledge that they are innocent of any crime.

Sometimes, though, just hurting people isn’t enough. Trump and his billionaire pals have lately demonstrated their willingness to kill people in pursuit of their tax cuts. What they want, of course, is to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the rich and widened economic inequality. Trump didn’t make any secret of this during the campaign. “You’re all people who have a lot of money,” he growled to the fat cats at one Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. “I know about 20 of you and you’re rich as hell. We’re going to give you tax cuts.”

He also promised to “pay off our debts,” a lie. The last round of Trump tax cuts increased the national debt by $2.3 trillion, including interest payments. The next round would tack on another $4.5 trillion—a disastrous plan when Trump chaos is already driving global investors to abandon America as a safe haven.

But Republicans, who pretend to care about fiscal responsibility, are pushing ahead with the tax cut. So they have stood by mutely—or in open approval—of reckless, swaggering cuts to essential programs in pursuit of fake savings. Those cuts have targeted programs that matter to ordinary people, particularly the poor. This is where the killing comes in.

You might quibble that “killing” is too strong a word for merely ending programs that keep people from dying. But the administration is ending these programs so fast, with so little regard for consequences, that it is like pulling away the safety net from people already falling off a burning building. UPDATE: Even the Microsoft billionaire and world health philanthropist Bill Gates recently used the “K” word in blaming Elon Musk for shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): "The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one," he told the Financial Times.

AND CHILDREN? YES, MOSTLY CHILDREN

Nick Kristof had a disturbing column last month in the New York Times, about how many people will die—and have already begun dying—as a result of Trump’s abrupt abandonment of the critical U.S. role in public health internationally. The estimated dead—1.7 million from the sudden end of HIV treatment, another 500,000 from dropping support for childhood vaccinations in developing nations, 550,000 from cutting off food aid, 290,000 from ending malaria prevention, 210,000 from ending tuberculosis programs—add up to 3.2 million people killed in the first year alone.

Some Congressional Republicans apparently thought this was good for a laugh. They posted a spoof video of Trump, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk dancing the coffin of the USAID through an African village. Seeing it for the first time, I kept thinking, wait, no, someone must have hacked the account. But as I write on April 18, almost three weeks later it’s still there. (May 19 update: Still there.)

Youtube has since taken down the video.

To get beyond mere statistics, Kristof also recited the individual tragedies of some of the first to die, among then Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl in South Sudan infected from birth with HIV. Just weeks after Musk gleefully shuttered USAID, Deng sickened and died because she could no longer obtain her medicine. The savings to U.S. taxpayers? Twelve cents a day.

THE AIR WAS SO BEAUTIFUL IN THE 1950s

It’s harder to estimate how many people will die here at home because of this administration’s assault on our government. Let’s start with one example. Just last month, Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, announced plans to junk a host of environmental regulations, including a Biden-era rule aimed at reducing smokestack soot, mostly from power plants. That soot contains fine particulate matter, also known as PM_2.5 pollution, which gets into the human bloodstream and penetrates the lungs. The EPA had based the soot regulation on evidence that it would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths per year—mostly from lung diseases, asthma, and heart attacks—and avoid 290,000 lost workdays. The health benefits would have outweighed costs by 77 to 1. Because the federal government picks up almost half of U.S. healthcare costs, the federal budget itself would have shared a big chunk of the $46 billion a year in savings.

Zeldin’s evidence-free rationale for rolling back that rule and dozens of others had nothing to do with his job protecting public health and the environment. Instead, he thought it would “reignite American manufacturing" and put “energy dominance … at the center of America's resurgence.”

With the same disdain for environmental protection, Trump this month exempted 47 coal-fired power plants from complying with new standards that would have significantly reduced the mercury, lead, nickel, and arsenic pollution they put into the air. The EPA had projected compliance would have avoided 57,000 lost workdays, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, and up to 1,200 premature deaths per year. Instead, Trump’s decision will enable the filthiest coal-fired plants to stay in business longer, causing more Americans to sicken and die.

It may not seem like much—4500 American lives here, 1200 there—unless of course it happens to your family, friends, or neighbors. And Trump has a track record in mass mortality. His botched handling of the covid pandemic, and particularly his attacks on face masks, vaccines, and public health science, contributed to the deaths of more than a million Americans. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 234,000 of them died needlessly because they went unvaccinated. A new poll suggests that 36% of Americans lost a loved one.

ORDERING UP INFECTIOUS DISEASES

The killing this time has already begun. It started in Texas and New Mexico, where measles, a disease we can easily prevent, has so far killed two unvaccinated children, ages six and eight. It’s also the suspected cause of one adult death. More deaths are likely to follow. The bungled response to the outbreak by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, is rapidly turning it from a regional to a national emergency.

After allowing the outbreak a weeks-long head start, Kennedy, who has admitted profiting from antivaccine lawsuits, finally got around early this month to endorsing the MMR vaccine as “the most effective way” to prevent measles. (In fact it’s the only way). But he did it with just 14 words buried near the end of a 252-word Twitter post. Then he followed up with an endorsement of two nonsense alternative remedies.

Robert F. Kennedy with a Texas family mourning a daughter lost to measles.

Both endorsements included a separate type of endorsement—photo ops of Kennedy bestowing faded Camelot glamour on the antivax parents of the two dead children. (He did not repeat this ghoulish exercise for the families of two children who recently died of whooping cough, another deadly disease now making a major comeback because of Kennedy-brand vaccine hesitancy.) The measles outbreak has meanwhile spread to eight states and at least 768 known victims, almost all unvaccinated.

But measles and whooping cough are just the beginning. Trump and Kennedy are dismantling almost anything to do with protecting public health. Last week, for instance, Kennedy fired the CDC’s cruise ship sanitation inspection team, though we’ve already seen ten norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships this year. “This doesn’t save the federal government money,” says Katelyn Jetelina at Your Neighborhood Epidemiologist (her italics). “The team is funded through fees paid by cruise companies.” It just scares sensible people off cruise ships and makes life more dangerous for everyone.

For your reading list, a novel about the once and future meatpacking industry

In the same spirit, Kennedy has fired thousands of FDA staff and cut back on food and drug safety inspections. Do those inspections matter? Last year, a Listeria outbreak in a Boar’s Head meat plant in Virginia hospitalized 60 people who had innocently eaten liverwurst sandwiches. It killed 10 of them. Expect more news like that just ahead, says author Deborah Blum in The New York Times:

Many experts now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer. If too many precautions are removed, then there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be. It takes only a brief look back at the 19th century to realize what that means.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pitching in, moving to speed up production lines in pork and poultry plants and replace many federal food and safety inspectors with employees on the company payroll.

TRUMP TO ALABAMA: GET A BOAT

In truth, Trump and his billionaire cabinet are unraveling the U.S. government so fast and on so many levels, it’s impossible to predict which cuts will kill people first. In recent weeks, for instance, the administration has fired the National Dam Safety Review Board and canceled the lease for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Risk Management Center in Colorado, which works to keep dams and levees nationwide safe. It’s also laying off safety workers at the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages dams in the American West.

At the same time, it’s cutting staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which warns of the extreme weather events that can cause dams to fail. It’s also gutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which responds to such emergencies. Early this month, the administration ended a program— said to yield $8-13 in benefits for every dollar spent— to make buildings in disaster-prone areas safer. Then it cut off funding to help communities develop flood prevention measures.

All this is happening despite a sharp increase in extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, and wildfires. Last year, NOAA counted 27 billion-dollar disasters, which killed 568 people and altogether cost $183 billion. The rapidly worsening effects of climate change (now a banned phrase) mean more such events will occur in coming years, and, in the absence of protective measures, they’ll be deadlier, too.

“It’s not about efficiency at all,” Eric Halpin, a retired federal dam and levee safety official, told Politico’s E&E News. “They’re creating room in the federal budget. What are they creating room for? It looks like it’s for tax cuts.”

How can you stay safe ifyou happen to live below one of the nation’s 92,500 deteriorating dams (average age: 64)? It’s worth thinking about because there have already been 14 major U.S. dam failures so far in this century, caused by poor maintenance, lack of inspections, heavy rainfall, and flooding. For now, you can search the National Inventory of Dams website, to identify dams in your area with a high “Hazard Potential Classification.” I tried that for one state, Alabama, and got this result:

Beware that the inventory is being migrated to a less user-friendly site—”efficiency” again—and it’s unclear whether anyone will be left in the federal government to inspect dams and update the information. The result: Alabama and many other states will be about as prepared and forewarned as the 2,208 people who died in the 1889 Johnstown Flood.

In 2016—so, so long ago—Donald Trump proudly boasted, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” It was like he wanted to try it. Now we know that the killing will happen not just on Fifth Avenue, but on streets and in homes all over America and the world.

The big question: When will voters finally recognize, based on his performance, that Donald Trump’s continued employment is no longer in the public interest?

UPDATE May 17: Here’s a useful article, “Which Cabinet Member Will Kill the Most People” by Dave Levitan, trying to track the Trump 2.0 death toll. And in case you want a more scholarly source, Boston University researchers have set up a site to track the consequences of Trump 2.0 funding discontinuations and disruptions. The death toll for children is 167,372 so for, plus another 80,212 adults, continuing at a rate of 103 deaths per hour.

UPDATE June 6: Associated Press reports that EPA rules Zeldin now plans to axe prevent 30,000 deaths in this country and save Americans $275 billion every year. Expert comments: “More people will die. More of this type of pollution that we know kills people will be in the air.” Great news for coffin manufacturers and bankruptcy law firms.

Richard Conniff’s Substack is not funded by cowardly billionaires, corporate sponsors, or advertisers. I depend on support from readers like you. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Richard Conniff’s latest book is Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. He survived measles as a child, before the development of an effective vaccine. That year, the disease killed 562 other American children.