By Daniel Pritchett
Daniel Pritchett is a resident of Dover.
As President Donald Trump put his Sharpie pen to the huge bill that he and his party jammed through Congress, I began to fear that the country’s 249th birthday will go down in the history books as the tragic day that the U.S. government embarked upon a policy that would:
- Affirmatively deny Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (i.e., food) to hundreds of thousands of hungry and poor Americans — including, most notably, children — who are already struggling to get enough food on their tables to meet their basic needs.
- Begin moving officials to deny health care benefits or any medical coverage to millions of people — again, even children — thus condemning them to needless pain, stress, suffering and early death.
- Exacerbate and possibly explode the national debt and related concerns about the U.S. dollar, to give huge income and estate tax breaks to the most affluent Americans, especially multimillionaires and billionaires.
- Effectively declare war on the rest of the planet by ending any support for our country to adopt and build a cleaner energy system, and at least try to slow down our headlong rush toward a dangerous level of climate change, which may make our grandchildren’s world almost unlivable.
- Allow, therefore, our greatest geopolitical and economic adversary to take the lead in building the cars and energy systems of the future, providing jobs, income, investments and the technological breakthroughs that will surely make China the No. 1 economic power in the world very quickly. (Xi Jinping can hardly believe his and his country’s luck in having this bill approved. He couldn’t ask for more.)
- Officially begin to dismantle the free and open society of the United States by appropriating over $150 billion to assemble the personnel and construct the edifice of a police state to round up, incarcerate and deport millions of people — almost all of whom will be law-abiding, hardworking men and women, who, by performing often thankless, low-paying jobs, were the backbone of the American economy.
- Allow potential mass murderers who need silencers to kill their victims more quietly to not have to pay a $200 excise tax, thus enabling them to afford more ammunition.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who enthusiastically voted for the bill, told her constituents that “we’re all going to die.” She is, of course, right. We just didn’t know that the government created 236 years ago — to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty for us — would, on Independence Day 2025, officially become the architect of both our planetary and our national suicide.
In his noteworthy career as a serial failed businessman, Donald Trump had to declare bankruptcy six times. It is now quite possible that, by signing into law this horrendously ugly bill, he will have sent the United States of America on the road to national bankruptcy, in every sense of the word. He will then have done something that would have never seemed possible: He will have made the Fourth of July a date that will live in infamy.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
