The Napkin and the Noose

How Laffer’s curve, Piketty’s math, and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago feasts turned America into a banquet for billionaires and a breadline for everyone else.

Good morning! Elizabeth Wick got the email she’d been dreading. Her health-insurance premium is about to leap from $862 to $1,380 a month, and the federal subsidy that keeps her practice afloat will evaporate at year’s end unless Congress acts. She’s a therapist for sexual-assault survivors, which makes this all the more poetic: Washington is assaulting her finances while she tries to help others recover from theirs. She says health insurance will determine what her life looks like.

Multiply Wick by 24 million ACA enrollees and you have a country on the edge of a health-care cliff. The “enhanced subsidies” that made Obamacare barely affordable expire December 31, and the Trump administration’s government shutdown has turned renewal talks into hostage negotiations. Republicans say they’ll discuss it after reopening the government; Democrats say they won’t reopen until the aid is extended. Meanwhile, insurers are hiking rates an average of 26 percent, and the KFF analysis shows premiums for many will more than double.

So, in the richest nation on earth, the question confronting millions is whether to pay rent or stay alive. A 63-year-old cancer patient in Missouri says her new premium will be $1,758 a month. A retired Maryland couple dropped coverage entirely because the cheapest policy costs half their income and “doesn’t cover much anyway.” Across the country, people are deciding whether chest pain merits an ER visit or just another prayer. The American dream has become a deductible with legs.

And as those choices tighten, the regime’s media ecosystem is accidentally letting the mask slip. Fox News aired footage of mile-long lines outside a Cleveland food bank, because SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans have been frozen by the shutdown, before pivoting to a fluff piece about Mar-a-Lago’s latest indulgence. MeidasTouch spliced the two images together: emaciated Americans in the cold and, a few hundred miles south, Trump’s guests toasting themselves with champagne and snow crab claws under chandeliers.

Just a week ago, the same crowd packed into a “Roaring ’20s” Great Gatsby gala, complete with synchronized swimmers performing “God Bless the USA” and a $64,000 Thailand vacation auctioned off between verses. The theme for that one was “A little party never killed nobody,” which is technically true if you’re rich enough to outsource your dying.

And the guest list keeps getting richer. Last night’s glittering dinner doubled as a celebration of Argentine libertarian president Javier Milei, who flew in fresh from CPAC to rave about his $40 billion U.S. bailout, the one underwritten by taxpayers now choosing between food and insulin. Milei, Trump’s new favorite apostle of “anarcho-capitalism,” told the cheering donors that socialism is the enemy while he clinked glasses with the man literally cutting America’s safety net. It was the perfect tableau of modern empire: the strongmen eat stone crab, the poor eat nothing, and the only trickle-down is champagne runoff on a marble floor.

The irony’s radioactive: Trump’s regime slashes food aid and health subsidies while serving the world’s most expensive shellfish beneath a banner celebrating the decade that birthed the Great Depression. It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s the purest expression of Arthur Laffer’s napkin religion, the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will somehow make everyone richer. We’ve been living under that napkin for forty years, and now it’s soaked through with grease and contempt. Laffer’s curve promised prosperity through starvation, and every administration since Reagan has traced its slope straight into the abyss. Taxes on capital fell, public wealth shriveled, and the state’s remaining purpose became protecting those crab claws from confiscation.

Piketty eventually did the math Laffer refused to check. R > G, he wrote, the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth of the real economy, and once that happens, inequality stops being an accident and becomes a feature. We now live in Piketty’s dystopia: capital earning 5 percent while the economy limps along at 1 percent, and the political class calling it freedom. The “free market” has become a feudal lease system where the lords collect rent in perpetuity and the peasants are told that if they just work harder, they might one day afford insulin.

Even the government’s data are collapsing under the weight of its own ideology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is gutted, 40 percent of the Consumer Price Index now “estimated” because Trump fired the statisticians, and the job reports are postponed indefinitely “due to the shutdown.” Inflation numbers are literally being made up, which is the perfect endpoint of Laffer economics: when you hollow out the state enough, you can claim prosperity by spreadsheet.

In Washington, Trump Media just posted a $54.8 million quarterly loss, roughly equal to the GDP of a small island nation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is hollowed out, 40 percent of the Consumer Price Index is now “estimated” because data collectors were fired, so inflation numbers are literally made up. The regime’s answer? Propose a 50-year mortgage so Americans can spend half a century paying interest to banks while pretending to own homes. Even MAGA commentators called it “indentured servitude with a yard.”

Workers are still waiting for job reports that never arrive because the shutdown “prevents publication.” When the government stops counting the unemployed, they simply vanish, Schrödinger’s labor force. It’s the first economy run entirely on vibes, spreadsheets, and lies.

If you want a physical metaphor for the entire Trump presidency, look no further than the East Wing of the White House, now a pile of rubble possibly laced with asbestos. The administration bulldozed the 1902 structure without a public abatement plan, contracting an unlicensed firm after refusing union labor. Senators, health advocates, and journalists have all requested the safety documentation; the White House has produced exactly zero pages. Witnesses describe clouds of dust drifting over the grounds while Trump’s favorite contractor shut down its website and hid its records.

It’s almost poetic: tear down history, poison the air, deny the paperwork, and call it progress. Trump even wrote in 1997 that asbestos was unfairly maligned by “the mob.” Now his EPA director is reconsidering the national ban. As a metaphor, you can’t improve on it, a government dismantling its own house, insisting the toxins are imaginary, and daring the workers to breathe deeper.

Across the Atlantic, Ireland delivered a reminder that the rest of the world still notices when moral rot starts to stink. The Football Association of Ireland voted 74-7 to urge UEFA to suspend Israel from European competitions for violating international law by fielding clubs in illegal settlements and ignoring racism rules. It’s a sports motion, yes, but it’s also a statement that conscience doesn’t have to wait for Congress.

Within hours, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham thundered on X that Ireland would “pay a heavy price”, economic threats over a soccer vote, accusing Dublin of “punishing the Jewish people 80 years after the Holocaust.” The bluster only underscored the point: when compassion defies empire, empire reaches for its wallet. Ireland’s action mirrors what’s happening in cities worldwide: fans, artists, and unions doing what governments won’t, demanding accountability for Gaza’s devastation while Washington pretends not to see the plumes of smoke.

So here we are: Americans choosing between food and medicine while their president parties among synchronized swimmers; a White House literally and figuratively filled with asbestos; a Senate threatening allies for voting with their conscience; and a nation that once exported democracy now exporting carcinogens and debt. The fireproofing has failed. The house is burning. And somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, the band is still playing “God Bless the USA.”