Good morning. It’s Martin Luther King’s Birthday. Sam’s off today. President Trump continues to show little interest in compromise over Greenland. Spain has closed part of its high-speed rail network after a collision between two trains killed dozens of people. And Prince Harry’s case against the publisher of the Daily Mail goes to trial today. We’ll get to more news below, but first we take a look at Trump’s impact on government spending.
Make it rain
President Trump returned to the White House last year with a buzz saw. He promised to cut spending, ax workers and trim fat from the government. He created the Department of Government Efficiency, put Elon Musk in charge and told it to shrink the federal bureaucracy. He dismantled entire agencies, pushing out hundreds of thousands of civil servants in the process. When it comes to saving money, that effort didn’t really work: Many of the savings DOGE claimed were bogus. Government spending actually rose this past year, a Times analysis found. And Congress last week quietly swept away many of the budget cuts that Trump had proposed in the early months of his presidency. Trump is still focused on the government’s coffers, but something has changed. He now seems to dwell less on cutting costs and more on adding revenue. He says he wants the government to rake in more cash — but not by taxes, the standard mechanism. His tax law slashed what businesses and high earners pay. Instead, he’s hyping unconventional sources of money. The shiftCosts and revenues each affect the Treasury’s bottom line. But cutting is subtractive and managerial. It means saying, “We can’t afford this,” which also makes it harder to justify new spending. And people notice cuts (of, say, food stamps or health care subsidies or mental health assistance — cuts the Trump administration reversed last week). We tend to feel the sting of a loss more acutely than the joy of an equivalent gain, behavioral economists have found. So leaders often prefer to gather money from revenue instead. Income taxes are a tough sell, politically; lowering them is popular, and that’s what Trump did, even though they make up the bulk of government revenue. He also hobbled the agency responsible for collecting those taxes by firing its workers and limiting its capacity to enforce the tax code. Fewer audits, more carve-outs. But adding revenue in other ways can feel like winning. You know those tariffs? The ones that raised $250 billion this past year? The president says they’ll generate enough to eliminate income taxes, start a sovereign wealth fund and send millions of families envelopes of cash. During what voters call an affordability crisis, that holds obvious appeal. (He has not explained how these policies might work. The cash rebates alone could cost the government almost twice as much as it will collect in tariff revenue this year, according to the Yale Budget Lab.) How it’s goingConsider some of Trump’s creative revenue-raising policies:
These flashy moneymaking initiatives are modest countermeasures in the larger scheme of things. Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me the potential gains from such revenue streams are “far outweighed” by Trump’s tax policies, which are expected to reduce government revenue by $5 trillion over the next decade. This past year, the U.S. spent nearly $2 trillion more than it collected in revenue. It will be hard to turn those numbers around.
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Martin Luther King III, son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar of voting rights, discuss a Supreme Court case that could nullify a key piece of the Voting Rights Act. Congress needs to push back on Trump’s use of law enforcement for vengeful retaliation against critics, the editorial board writes. Here is a column by David French on civil immunity. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
A family business: This London chimney sweep has the same job his great-great-great-grandfather had in the mid-19th century. Chimney sweeps have been in business in Britain since at least 1519. High electricity prices, among other things, mean that business these days is very good. “A cold-blooded icon”: Thousand of San Francisco residents gathered to mourn the death of a beloved local alligator. Your pick: The most-clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a video analysis of the shooting of Renee Good. Metropolitan Diary: “Could you tie my tie?” A knuckleballer: Wilbur Wood, who played for the Chicago White Sox, started more games and pitched more innings in a season than any pitcher in the past 100 years. He died at 84.
1— That is the ranking The Athletic gave to Macklin Celebrini of the San Jose Sharks in its midseason list of the best National Hockey League players under age 23.
A.F.C.: The New England Patriots reached the A.F.C. championship game after their 28-16 win over the Houston Texans. The Patriots will play the Denver Broncos on Sunday. |
