The billionaires get tax cuts, the people get hunger—and the press calls it fiscal policy
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
June 5, 2025
I. The Spectacle of Policy in the Theater of Class War
In this article, the Associated Press reports that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit and strip health insurance from nearly 11 million people. The AP presents this bombshell not with horror or outrage, but with the dry, deadened prose of elite consensus, casting the bill as a technical debate over fiscal arithmetic and not what it is: a declaration of total class war. Behind the headline is a narrative that treats corporate looting as statesmanship and mass immiseration as the price of “economic growth.”
Lisa Mascaro, the article’s lead author, has long been a reliable stenographer of Washington consensus. Her reporting—like so much of the Beltway press—neutralizes imperial aggression by converting it into procedure. Her career advancement has been rooted in her refusal to speak clearly about class, power, or empire, instead framing political developments through the narrow lens of institutional choreography. The Associated Press, meanwhile, plays a structural role in the global information economy: a privately run media cartel dressed up as public utility, designed to manufacture consent for empire by appearing impartial. In practice, it acts as the information arm of the settler state, smoothing over contradictions and producing ideological stability for capital.
The bill’s public boosters—Trump, Mike Johnson, Russ Vought, and John Thune—each serve distinct but interlocking roles in the architecture of recolonization. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), with its origins in Cold War technocracy and headed by Bush-era functionaries, provides bipartisan “objectivity” to mask bipartisan class aggression. Elon Musk, meanwhile, plays both sides of the street—using his social capital to perform dissent while protecting his corporate interests and reinforcing the overall legitimacy of the ruling class project.
What follows in the article is a textbook performance of capitalist propaganda technique. The first maneuver is technocratic framing: the bill is introduced through its CBO “score” rather than its material impacts. Numbers float unmoored from human consequence: $3.75 trillion in tax cuts, $1.3 trillion in spending reductions, millions losing healthcare and food assistance. These brutal outcomes are never described as violence—only as “offsets,” “projections,” and “policy tradeoffs.” By rendering political decisions in the language of spreadsheets, the AP effectively hides the class antagonism at their core.
Second is bipartisan naturalization. Republican leadership is portrayed as determined, disciplined, and focused. Democrats are described as “angling” and “piling on,” their opposition cast as mere partisan theater rather than a response to mass suffering. Even when quoting critiques from Chuck Schumer or Brendan Boyle, the article sidesteps any structural indictment of capitalism, never connecting the policy to the broader logic of austerity or empire. The opposition is reduced to soundbites, not strategy.
Third is the sleight-of-hand of “economic responsibility.” We’re told the bill may seem expensive, but only if you use the wrong calculator. Russ Vought and Speaker Johnson argue that existing tax breaks shouldn’t count, that CBO math is flawed, and that privatizing social goods is actually fiscal prudence. The article does not interrogate these claims, merely presents them alongside token rebuttals—thereby laundering them into the discourse as valid positions rather than cynical deceptions.
Finally, the AP neutralizes the bill’s counterinsurgent function. It refuses to name what this bill actually is: an act of economic warfare waged by monopoly capital against the working class and colonized poor. The tax breaks enrich the owning class. The healthcare cuts discipline the labor force. The food stamp rollbacks impose hunger as leverage. The Medicaid work requirements are racialized punishment. And the simultaneous boost in border militarization and deportation funding reveals the core function of fiscal fascism: social abandonment for the poor, police-state enforcement for the surplus population.
The Trump tax bill is not a budgetary miscalculation—it is a precise mechanism of technofascist governance, built to recolonize the domestic core, destroy the public sphere, and consolidate class power through austerity and repression. The AP article isn’t journalism. It’s ideological camouflage for a system at war with its own people.
II. The Facts Beneath the Fiscal Theater
Once the corporate spin and technocratic theater are stripped away, the material facts of the Trump tax bill stand naked in their brutality. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, the legislation would increase the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade, while stripping health insurance from an estimated 10.9 million people. It would deliver roughly $3.75 trillion in tax cuts—primarily to corporations and the wealthy—while offsetting only a fraction of that through $1.3 trillion in spending reductions. These “offsets” come at the expense of the most vulnerable: Medicaid recipients, undocumented people, SNAP beneficiaries, and working-class families.
These are not projections—they are calculated acts of class war. The bill slashes $880 billion from Medicaid, endangering coverage for over 80 million people, including 40% of all U.S. pregnancies. It cuts $300 billion from SNAP, threatening food assistance for 43 million Americans. Grocery stores in low-income areas—where 50% of revenue often depends on SNAP—face closure, creating new food deserts. Rural hospitals and nursing homes face collapse due to changes in reimbursement structures. This is not economic governance—it is economic warfare.
Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires have accumulated obscene levels of wealth. According to Oxfam, the top 10 billionaires in the U.S. gained $365 billion in wealth over the past year—equivalent to 726,000 years of median worker earnings. Five of the largest tech corporations saved $31 billion between 2018 and 2023 by exploiting foreign-derived income loopholes preserved by the 2017 Trump tax law—loopholes extended under the new bill. This is not fiscal reform—it is looting in legislative form.
This pattern is not new. As Commanding the Casino details, Trump’s broader economic strategy has always hinged on weaponized chaos: using fiscal sabotage to discipline markets and deepen the privatization of social life. The illusion of growth masks the engineered collapse of the public sector. By inflating the deficit and then pointing to it as a threat, the ruling class justifies further cuts, more austerity, and harsher labor discipline.
As Cracks in the Temple reveals, the ruling class is far from unified on how to manage this collapse—but they are united on the end goal: preserve capitalist profitability. Trump’s bill, and the media’s treatment of it, reflect a fragile coalition between cowboy capitalists, technocratic digerati, and the traditional Wall Street bloc, each angling to command the spoils of a shrinking empire.
In Made in America, we showed how the myth of domestic prosperity has always depended on repression and extraction. The technofascist model emerging now is one where the façade of patriotism is propped up by mass immiseration. Trump’s tax cuts don’t “stimulate” the economy—they stimulate a process of settler austerity that punishes the working class while securing new profit zones for corporate power.
And as When Billionaires Quarrel makes clear, even disputes within the capitalist elite—like Elon Musk’s supposed revolt against the bill—are part of the spectacle. Musk has gained $135 billion since 2024 alone, even while calling the bill a “disgusting abomination.” These performative skirmishes obscure the fundamental unity of the ruling class in upholding empire through austerity, surveillance, and class warfare. Whether Musk wins a concession or not, the people still lose.
| Sacrificed on the Altar of Greed | Billionaire Bounty |
|---|---|
| ◼ 11 million stripped of health insurance | ◼ $3.6 trillion wealth increase for U.S. billionaires since 2017 |
| ◼ 4 million losing food aid | ◼ $60,000 average annual tax cut for top 1% households |
| ◼ 388,000 jobs lost from SNAP cuts | ◼ $180,000 savings for top 0.1% from GOP policies |
As Oxfam America notes, a 3% wealth tax on U.S. billionaires could fund SNAP benefits for 22.5 million Americans every year. There is no fiscal necessity here—only manufactured scarcity. The numbers are staggering. The suffering is real. But the framing of this bill as a routine budget debate is part of the illusion. This is not economics—it is a slow-motion counterinsurgency, engineered by the ruling class to consolidate its grip on a declining empire through looting, starvation, and terror. The AP report pretends there’s a debate. In reality, there’s only a plan—and we’re not in the room.
III. Tax Cuts as Technofascist Counterinsurgency
To call the Trump tax bill “economic policy” is to mistake a bullet for a blueprint. This legislation is not designed to promote growth, stimulate innovation, or “help the American people”—it is crafted to advance a project of class war under the mask of fiscal governance. It is a technofascist weapon wielded by a consolidated ruling bloc determined to recolonize the domestic terrain of empire and suppress the rising contradictions of capitalist decay.
At its core, the bill functions as a three-pronged assault:
- First, it accelerates capital accumulation for the ruling class by slashing taxes for the wealthy and expanding corporate profit margins under the pretext of growth. This is the classic neoliberal formula: redistribute wealth upward while preaching the gospel of trickle-down economics. It’s not a tax plan—it’s looting in slow motion.
- Second, it deliberately defunds and destabilizes the public sphere, making state institutions incapable of serving the needs of working and poor people. Medicaid, food stamps, public education, and health services are gutted, not because of fiscal necessity but because their very existence contradicts the logic of privatization and profit.
- Third, it manufactures a crisis of budgetary legitimacy to justify further repression. Once the deficit explodes—as engineered—the same ruling class will demand deeper austerity, more cuts, more privatization, and harsher work regimes for the laboring poor. The bill is the crisis. The response is more crisis. This is the spiral of technofascist stabilization.
This framework echoes what we outlined in Deportation as Economic Warfare: just as ICE raids and border terror suppress wages and discipline surplus labor, fiscal terror disorganizes social reproduction and deepens dependency on capital. The Trump tax bill and the war on migrants are two fronts of the same strategy—starve, shock, and subdue.
In Technofascism and the Unified Ruling Class, we traced the convergence of finance, Big Tech, the military, and the state. This bill represents their strategic synthesis. Tax policy becomes a battlefield in the broader counterinsurgency against the domestic proletariat. The state no longer functions to manage capital and labor—it has become the executive enforcer of capital’s vengeance.
As Pete Hegseth reveals, this counterinsurgency extends into the cultural realm. The war on public education, civic institutions, and even basic truth is not accidental—it is a deliberate campaign to replace the public mind with authoritarian doctrine and market worship. The more the people are starved of knowledge, the more obedient they become to capital.
This logic is captured most chillingly in Trump’s Assault on Education, where we show how defunding schools, universities, and research is not fiscal restraint—it is ideological warfare. By choking off collective reason, the ruling class disables the possibility of resistance. The tax bill, then, is not just a budget. It is a noose drawn tighter around the neck of social consciousness.
This is the shape of modern counterinsurgency: not only militarized police and border walls, but spreadsheets, legislation, and bureaucratic cruelty. The state no longer pretends to care—it now openly governs through abandonment. This is not malfunction. This is strategy.
The Trump tax bill is a technofascist document of conquest: a roadmap for gutting what remains of public life and reasserting the rule of capital through calculated economic terror. It is a monument to the ongoing counterrevolution against workers, the colonized, and the dispossessed.
IV. Rebuilding Class Consciousness Against Fiscal Fascism
This bill is not just about taxes. It’s a blueprint for domestic imperialism—an austerity assault designed to recolonize the working class inside the heart of the empire. In that sense, it mirrors the structural violence the U.S. has long exported abroad. What we are witnessing is not a “shift in fiscal priorities,” but a realignment of the settler state around a new phase of technofascist rule: surveillance, privatization, and permanent precarity. The enemy is no longer hiding behind bipartisan civility—it is in full view, executing its war plans on the public stage.
As Recolonizing the Core made clear, this is a settler regime fighting to maintain control over a fragmenting empire. When the outer colonies resist, the colonial ruling class turns inward—redirecting the logic of structural adjustment toward its domestic periphery. Trump’s tax bill is the IMF’s austerity plan, rewritten in red, white, and blue. It is a reassertion of imperial order over an increasingly unstable working class.
We’ve seen this playbook before. In Brooke Rollins and Agricultural Policy, we examined how starving social budgets empowers corporate consolidation of land and labor. The Trump tax bill follows the same logic, only scaled up: defund the public, create crisis, then hand over power to the oligarchy. This isn’t “free market” reform—it’s engineered collapse in service of monopoly control.
Trump’s Agricultural Research Freeze shows how knowledge itself is being privatized—public science dismantled, communal survival sold off piece by piece. That same logic applies to this tax bill. As public goods are stripped, the power to survive—eat, heal, learn—becomes a commodity in the hands of the few. This is a war not just on income, but on collective life itself.
And when the public resists, repression replaces welfare. As we wrote in The Suspension of Freedom, the settler state is replacing social rights with surveillance, policing, and coercion. The Trump tax bill makes this explicit: while Medicaid is gutted, $350 billion is allocated to border security, deportation, and national enforcement. The message is clear—capital will not support life, only contain it.
There is no reforming this system. The solution is not a better tax code or a more “responsible” budget—it is revolutionary transformation. Reparations for the colonized. Land back to Indigenous nations. Worker control over the surplus we produce. And the abolition of capitalist rule in all its forms. These are not dreams—they are necessities for survival.
To fight this fiscal fascism, we must expose its every mask. Not just in Trump’s bombast or Johnson’s lies, but in the quiet violence of bureaucratic language, the neutral-sounding reports, and the bipartisan betrayal that paved the road to this moment. We must rebuild class consciousness grounded in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle—rooted in the understanding that this system is not broken, but operating exactly as designed.
Let this bill be a line in the sand. We are not merely taxpayers or voters—we are the laboring class whose surplus fuels this machine. And we say: no more.
Endnote: For further analysis, see Weaponized Information’s archive of related articles:
Recolonizing the Core |
Brooke Rollins and Agricultural Policy |
Trump’s Agricultural Research Freeze |
The Suspension of Freedom |
Technofascism and the Unified Ruling Class |
When Billionaires Quarrel
Weaponized Information 
Leave a comment