Background Briefing: December 5, 2024
“It’s Going to Be Fun” Says Ramaswamy Who Along With Musk Will Try to Cut $2 Trillion By Targeting Social Security and Medicare
We begin with the DOGE tour of Capitol Hill today by Musk and Ramaswamy who are being celebrated by Republican lawmakers as the two billionaires gleefully anticipate putting thousands out of work and have promised to cut over $2 trillion from the federal budget. Since roughly two-thirds of the total budget is mandatory, that includes programs like Social Security and Medicare, the real targets are what is left of the social safety net as Ramaswamy recently promised at Mar a Lago that Musk “doesn’t bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw, and we’re going to be taking it to that bureaucracy…It’s going to be a lot of fun.” Joining us is Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University and founding co-director of Social Security Works, an organization which launched and staffs the Strengthen Social Security Coalition which he co-chairs. He served as policy advisor to two presidential commissions — the 1982- 83 National Commission on Social Security Reform and the 1994 Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform and also served on the advisory committee to the Social Security Administration’s transition team.
How 9/11 Made the Trump Presidency Possible and Hollowed Out the Very Idea Of Citizenship in the US
Then we discuss the case made in the new book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life that we have lived for 23 years in the shadow of the burning Twin Towers and that almost no aspect of American life—economic, social, political, cultural—remains untouched by the collective trauma of 9/11 and our responses to it. Joining us is Richard Beck, a writer at n+1 magazine based in New York. He is the author of We Believe the Children and most recently, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life in which he argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible and how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States. He also has an article at Time we discuss, “The War on Terror and the Demonization of Student Protests.”