How Did we get to the Big B* Bill? It’s in the Algorithms

The downside is that by the time you read this the Pretender’s “Big Beautiful Bill” may be on his desk for signature. And while the bill was birthed as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan to cripple the U.S. government, one of its major features – tax cuts for corporations and top earners – is right from the regular Republican play book.

When the BBB passes, it will be the fourth time since Ronald Reagan that GOP tax cuts have added dramatically to the national debt. Each time, the scheme has been sold to the public with the same — solidly disproven — claims that the cuts would free up so much money the economy would grow to cover the growing debt. Sadly, never happened. Not once, not ever.

The BBB would add more than $3 trillion or more to the debt by extending the Trump tax cuts for the well off and very well off … forever.  That’s net after cuts of as much as $1 trillion to social services, including food stamps but mostly to Medicaid. And already annual US debt service payments now exceed the yearly budget for national defense.

To top it all off, national debt and the investor class have a neat symbiotic relationship: Beneficiaries of the Pretender’s tax cuts need to invest that money and among other things they buy U.S. government bonds, earning interest on their tax savings, payments that come from general government funds. Oh, and those monies come from you and me, ordinary taxpayers, hit twice on this deal.

Surely no Dems have suggested this, but a nice slogan available to undermine the BBB would be “No more debt. No more tax cuts at the top.”  That has some resonance. Debt is a worry almost everyone shares, even MAGAs, personally and when thinking about government. Voters angry about debt would perhaps scare two or three – or four! – Republican senators. Problem is, Democrats, not thinking too far ahead and used to spending borrowed money themselves for social programs won’t buy “No more debt,” unwilling to accept that the long-run answer is raising taxes at the top.

Then there’s the other side of the BBB: cuts to Medicaid. The bill would push 12 million low-income Americans and their children out of the health care system. Though it’s hard to call what we have now a “system,” when Medicare and Medicaid are the only rational parts of U.S. health care, services increasingly dominated by the finance industry, private equity and its siblings.

Nevertheless, even with these cuts to Medicaid potentially savaging communities that Republican members of Congress represent, the fealty to Trump is almost unbroken. (Recent exception: Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina decided not to run for re-election after Trump attacked him for not supporting the bill and threatened a primary challenge.)

Importantly, though, primary challenges are not the only weapon Trump wields to keep supporters in line. The bigger weapon is social media. Politicians who dare to contradict or criticize the Pretender’s plans are viciously attacked. They and their families are threatened with harm by MAGA trolls and bots. How social media works to build the MAGA mind is the essence of Trump’s power. As they say, “It’s the algorithms, stupid.”

Social media algorithms are designed keep you on a site – see more ads. To do that the algorithms work to kick-start and feed strong emotions, lead a person into the next screen and the next after that. Users are pulled to sites where a bit of anger or discontent with life takes them to like-minded on-line groups where membership, identity with the group, leads to scorn, even anger toward others different from them – in thought or skin color. These “others” are now an enemy, a threat that must be hated. Anger is just a lot more catching than, well, love, or messages urging you to help poor kids in the schools learn to read.

And herein lies the problem for Democrats far beyond the fate of the BBB, however it turns out. MAGA world’s use of social media – right there for younger voters – is years ahead of the Dems. Not just ahead, different in kind. Because social media algorithms automatically stimulate strong emotions, they’re perfect for MAGA: screw those atheist coastal liberals, their crime-filled cities, their hate for the flag, their LGBTQ+ buddies and criminal immigrants.

What could Democrats put on social media equal to the grip of those ideas? What messages would be as powerful, able to counter such negative and hate-filled content? A good question. Campaigns for universal (or at least better) health care, effective schools, living wages (above the current minimums, ridiculously low in most states), affordable housing, an equitable and just society are simply not promoted by the anger algorithms built into social media. Democrats are not selling hate.