State, federal budgets betray our heritage and our future

We are destroying the benefits past generations worked hard to give us while ensuring our own children will drown in debt, unable to move forward.

Great Depression, Young Girl Stringing Tobacco is a public domain work.

“Money is the transfer of work and time, and we’ve decided our kids will need to work more in the future, and spend less time with their families, so wealthy people can pay lower taxes today.”

-Scott Galloway, Post Corona

May is the time for gardening, graduations, and, for the most wonkish, government budgeting. Unfortunately, government budgets are so far off the rails this year that they need everyone’s focus.

In Iowa, years of skimping on infrastructure, divesting from the future, lining the pockets of private school owners, and cutting taxes are starting to bite: Governor Reynolds’ miserly budget pulls hundreds of millions from our rainy day fund. Worse, this one-time money budget assumes a good economy, not one upended by trade wars, a recession, or DOGE’s reckless chainsaw destroying the subsidies that support Iowa’s farm economy (23% of net farm income will come from the government this year).

And Iowa’s mess is small next to the federal budget, where the morass has layers.

For starters, we are working from an outdated foundation. Congressional Republicans simply failed to set this year's national budget. Instead, they limped through the year by repeatedly extending the funding levels of the 2024 budget. So our default spending levels are stale and do not even reflect inflation, much less our nation’s changing needs.

Enter the Musk-led demolition of Americans’ public goods: our health, our civil service, our libraries, our public lands. These chaotic cuts hit agencies keeping us safe and healthy–for instance, preventing the spread of disease–further slashing their outdated budgets. Congressional Republicans propose to cement many of these cuts, seemingly without considering the consequences to critical services like Medicaid. We have already felt these cuts locally at the University of Iowa, FilmScene, the Bur Oak Land Trust, and the VA, and those are but an omen of what is to come.

You might think that Musk’s reckless cuts are part of a plan to wean us off of foreign creditors. You would be wrong. Tax cuts in this year’s proposed budget would add almost $6 trillion to our $36 trillion debt. That debt is already high–it recently surpassed our GDP, a level we have not seen since WWII–and substantially caused by giveaways to billionaires. Trillions more in debt will push us towards a debt bomb causing future high taxes, a massive debt crisis, or both.

And $6 trillion may be a lowball estimate, ignoring the risks that Congress is allowing the president to take with tariffs. When the US issues bonds (i.e. lets bondholders make loans to the government), someone must buy them. China and Japan--both countries subject to high tariffs--have been two major buyers. What if they stopped buying or, worse, dumped the bonds that they hold? Interest rates would go up. If a percentage point or two makes a big impact on a mortgage, it’s pouring gasoline on a $36 trillion debt problem.

So what does this all mean? “Trillion” is such a mind-boggling number that it’s hard to understand, much less the difference between 36, 50, or more trillions.

For one, it means less safety and security for our future selves, our children, and our grandchildren. More of the budget will go to debt. Less to education. Less to healthcare. Less to defense. Less to Social Security. Less take-home pay as taxes go up. Fewer ways to achieve the American dream. Worse, if our politicians print money to get us out of debt, we risk hyperinflation.

Equally importantly, it means that we will have prioritized tax cuts for the already-wealthy over building a better tomorrow, sold out our children’s futures to greedy rent-seekers.

So call the borrow-and-spend Republicans in Washington and Des Moines and tell them to stop selling out our children, our cultural heritage, our technological progress, our well-being, and our future to their greediest donors.

Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.

Originally published in the Press-Citizen on May 10, 2025.