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Obviously the story of the week is Musk vs. Trump. Support seems to be coalescing in two camps: on Musk's side, people who think the national debt is the most important issue the US faces, and on the Trump/MAGA side, the idea that culture and national borders are more important. It's kinda like a proxy Stephen Miller vs. libertarians battle.
The question comes down to: can a country stay the same if the people are "replaced", so to speak.
Let’s take the SGV (San Gabriel Valley) in Los Angeles as a real-world example, where I'm from. Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean—entire commercial districts where English isn’t the default, and where cultural references, aesthetics, and even holiday calendars operate on a different frequency than the rest of America. Is this good? Bad? That depends on your values. But is it a change? Unquestionably. Even after WW2 and the effective destruction of its entire country, Germany remained full of Germans and tts continuity wasn’t just institutional, it was cultural and demographic. America, by contrast, is attempting something unprecedented in history: to maintain national coherence while undergoing massive demographic transformation without any clear cultural center holding it all together. How much change can a country absorb before it becomes something else entirely? And does that change matter? It’s not that immigrants are bad or incapable. That’s not the point. The point is that America is trying to do something historically novel: become a post-ethnic, post-historical nation that binds together people with radically different origins, languages, and values using only a kind of civic glue—and lately, even that glue seems to be dissolving.
I don’t think this feud is about immigration.
Musk was pro-H1B, and Miller is opposed, but this bill has no impact on H1B immigration and both Miller and Musk are opposed to illegal and low skill immigration. There are, of course, Republicans who support those things (those with big ag constituencies, construction and meat processing donors etc), but it’s not at the heart of this conflict.
The core of it is Musk has libertarian or classical liberal beliefs about the deficit, while Donald Trump doesn’t care about it at all. Trump has always borrowed as much as he could and thought about how to pay it back later. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but he somehow always made it. Donald Trump’s entire career is a lesson in not worrying about going deep into debt. He is not about to start caring deeply now. DOGE was fun for a while, but as Musk quickly realized that almost all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense (which Trump’s political instincts tell him, correctly, that he can’t cut) they were always going to be at loggerheads.
Miller is solely focused on immigration and therefore needs the bill to pass to give him more money and therefore more options re the border, but the reality for him is that congress needs to act to really change the immigration situation long term barring a curveball like SCOTUS allowing the president to end birthright citizenship or some kind of actual mass deportation apparatus capable of locating, detaining and deporting 3.5m+ illegal migrants per year spinning up magically in the next few months - neither of which will happen.
In the end, possible AGI weirdness aside, this will probably end with a fiscal and therefore political crisis of great magnitude followed by ‘emergency, temporary’ tax rises and medicare/medicaid cuts some time in the near to medium term future.
There is also the biggest budget post by far: social security.
social security honestly has never seemed to be as big of an issue. Certainly the demographic slowdown is a bit concerning for anything like this, but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.
Medicare/Medicaid/health spending in general....much thornier problem.
So it isn't a problem because you plan to cut entitlements and raise taxes? How does that make it different from any other unfunded entitlement?
because the cost of social security benefits and the cost of medical spending are growing at two very different rates.
Normally I'd agree but the situation is already unsustainable and rapidly spinning out of control. Massive fiscal reform needs to happen soon and I doubt that cuts to future entitlements that obviously were never going to happen would garner more opposition than cuts to current entitlements.
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