One of the longest running pointless discussions in US politics is about what to do about the federal budget deficit. This is simply the annual excess of all government spending over all government revenues. The cumulative total of all such deficits is the government debt. For the fiscal year 2024, the government had revenues of $4.92 trillion and spent $6.75. trillion, leaving a deficit of $1.83 trillion. The national debt up through November 2024 was $36.09 trillion.(See here for more.)

Different people have different views about how big of a problem the deficit is. One school of thought uses the metaphor of the government budget being like a family’s budget, and that a deficit means borrowing money that has to be paid back with interest later. They argue that running up deficits year after year means that the debt burden will become intolerable and that we are leaving future generations (our children in this metaphor) in a fiscal hole that they will have a hard time digging themselves out of. They view this as a horrible prospect.
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State and federal-mandated minimum wages set a floor for what employers can pay their employees. It benefits more than the minimum wage workers because it raises wages up the line. Hence it is should be no surprise that the capitalist class and its supporters hate raises in the mandated minimum wage and try to do everything in their power to keep them from being raised because it lowers their ability to exploit workers and increase their profits. In their mind, the there should be no mandated minimum wage and all wages should be set by the employer and the employee, negotiating freely. Of course they oppose unions as well since those too interfere in the glorious working of the free-market. In this world view, a single employee and a company or massive corporation are equally matched powers and thus the figure they arrive at would reflect the true market value of labor.

Of course this is a fantasy indulged by the capitalist class and has no basis in reality. There is a massive power discrepancy between employer and employee and you need the federal and state governments and unions to at least partially redress that imbalance.
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Medicare is the government-run health insurance program for people over 65 years of age. It is a very well-run program and funded by a tax on income that is automatically deducted from people’s paychecks. The Medicare tax is not huge. It is 2.9% for most people and 3.8% for high earners. If you are self-employed, or get any income that is not a salary or wage, you are still obliged to pay that tax when you file your annual income tax. I have done so routinely with any outside income I got from giving talks or from my writings. You fill in a separate form to report self-employment income and another form to pay the tax on it. It is pretty straightforward.

ProPublica has gone through the tax records and found that very wealthy people have exploited a loophole that enables them to avoid paying any Medicare taxes on their income. The article focuses on three of the most egregious tax avoiders.

The trove of tax records behind ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series contains plenty of examples of billionaire financiers who avoided Medicare tax despite earning huge amounts from their companies. In 2016, Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, paid $0. So did Stephen Schwarzman, head of the investment behemoth Blackstone. Bill Ackman, the headline-grabbing hedge fund manager, was able to shield almost all his income from the tax.
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But these maneuvers by the rich hasten Medicare’s future crisis. Sometime in the 2030s, the program’s trust fund is due to run dry. Closing the loophole, along with eliminating other ways around the tax for wealthy business owners, could raise more than $250 billion over 10 years for Medicare, according to recent government estimates.

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Rich people and companies have all manner of ways to avoid paying any taxes at all, let alone their fair share, all because of so-called ‘loopholes’ in the tax laws. These tax evasions are facilitated by giant accounting firms, especially the largest known as the Big Four: Deloitte, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), Ernst & Young (EY), and KPMG. These accounting firms are not just passively looking after the books, they are often key to setting policies.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal one such massive loophole that is being exploited and how Deloitte played a leading role in doing so.
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It used to be considered that the wealthy had some use because they would benefit society via philanthropy by supporting the arts, funding libraries, cultural centers, charities, and so on. It was a kind of trickle down mentality, that they would use some of their surplus wealth to benefit the broader community, if not out of a sense of altruism, at least to head off potential resentment and anger.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in a review of a book by Italian historian Guido Alfani that the new billionaire class does not have the social function that they were once considered to have .and are now increasingly becoming seen as a menace as inequality increases.

In the past generation, the ranks of the super-rich have grown dramatically. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of billionaires in the U.S. increased ninefold. In China, the growth of the super-wealthy has been more explosive still: in a single year, between 2020 and 2021, that country’s billionaire count grew by sixty per cent. Private fortunes of this scale are fundamentally transnational and less moored to individual nations that might make demands of them.
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