Trump sells protection to billionaires

There's been a lot of noise over Joe Biden's campaign cash advantage over Donald Trump. And up to now in 2024, that's been real. Joe has collected millions, much of it from small donors. 

Meanwhile, Trump's small donor supporters are showing symptoms of exhaustion; do they still continue to be willing to receive 8 emails a day, especially knowing that their gifts are likely to go for the candidate's legal expenses? There may be a limit. 

Many of Donald's billionaire buddies have been hesitant to pony up; tycoons don't much like disorder and arbitrary decision making and they know what they saw last time. But with his semi-normie challengers -- Haley and DeSantis -- out of the race, they are coming around. A bunch of them brought buckets of cash to Palm Beach last weekend. 

David Lauter of the LA Times does a succinct job of explaining what they expect to get for their investment in Donald:

... one thread runs through much of the wealthy opposition to [Joe Biden]: taxes. “At the end of 2025, on Dec. 31, all of the individual tax provisions of the 2017 tax bill will expire,” said Howard Gleckman of Washington’s Tax Policy Center. That includes some popular provisions such as the higher standard deduction and lower tax rates for average taxpayers.

The 2017 tax bill reduced taxes so much at the upper end that it was easy for Democrats to portray the bill as a tax cut for the rich, even though it did reduce rates for most taxpayers. But allowing it to expire “would be cast as a huge tax increase for most American households,” Gleckman said. 

Congress will have a limited set of choices:
    1    Allow all the popular tax breaks to expire and risk the wrath of voters.
    2    Extend them and cause the federal deficit to balloon by about $3.5 trillion over the following decade. (Both parties have repeatedly allowed huge deficit expansions, but interest rates and near-record debt have changed the calculus.)
    3    Find ways to offset the cost while preserving tax breaks for average Americans.

Option three is the scenario many ultra-wealthy Americans appear to be worried about.

If Congress decides that some or all the cost of renewed a tax cut needs to be offset, which party has the majority and whether the White House is occupied by Trump or Biden will have an enormous impact.

Republicans have had huge difficulty for more than a decade in uniting behind any concrete plan for cutting the federal deficit. 

Their dilemma has gotten harder to solve as the Republican voter base has become less affluent. Proposals to reduce the cost of big federal benefit programs [like Social Security and Medicare], which were a GOP hallmark pre-Trump, have fallen out of favor.

... For decades, wealthy Americans have been able to count on their friends in Congress, especially in the Senate, to bottle up popular ideas for upper-income tax hikes. But as both parties have become more populist, that strategy has become less of a sure thing.

Instead, a lot of rich Americans appear to have settled on a different way to hedge their bets: support a fellow billionaire for the White House.

Taxes are the cost of civilization. Billionaires -- think Elon Musk, for example -- have forgotten they need civilization to survive. Silly boys.