Kentucky’s fiscal philosophy is almost as misguided as Trump’s | Opinion

This past week the chair of the Appropriations and Revenue Committee of the House of Delegates, Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, announced that in setting the budget for the forthcoming fiscal year the focus will be on reducing spending.

As Petrie would have it, there is no “revenue problem ... but we always have to fight spending that’s out of control.” Of course, Rep. Petrie provides no particulars to substantiate his statement. The Republican approach to public discourse is to state a falsehood so consistently that the public comes to accept it as common fact. Since the Reagan era, Republicans have demonized Democrats as the “tax and spend” party robbing “hard-working people” of their justly earned income to squander it on “others.” Andy Beshear is but the latest Democrat to become the victim of such calumny.

To state that Kentucky has no revenue problem depends on what you believe are the appropriate sources of that revenue and for what ends it is being raised. The Republican-heavy legislature has been hellbent on eliminating the progressive income tax that most fairly and effectively raises the revenue needed to meet peoples’ fundamental needs.

In its place, the state has increasingly relied on sales and service taxes and lotteries, which, unlike income taxes, fall disproportionately on those below the upper ranks of society. As the Republicans have gained a death hold on the legislature, they have made increasingly destructive cuts to budgets, ensuring that public needs will not be met, particularly in education. Penny-pinching government inevitably means a government that fails to promote the general welfare of the people it purports to serve.

Since the Reagan revolution against government, this country has suffered a catastrophic redistribution of wealth upward, with tax policies and other ploys rewarding the superrich with some 50 trillion dollars which had previously gone to the working and middle classes. Donald Trump’s second administration is accelerating this injustice.

First, is his addled attempt to make tariffs, rather than the income tax, the chief revenue raiser. This colossal misconception has led to tariffs becoming a staggering sales tax on the American consumer. Then there are the Big Beautiful Bill’s draconian cuts to Medicaid which will effectively eliminate healthcare for well over a million Kentuckians and endanger the survival of as many as 35 of the state’s rural hospitals. Not to mention the exponential rise in premiums the bill triggered for those enrolled in the Affordable Care Act.

As a crowning insult, Republicans, in fealty to Trump, enacted enormous tax cuts as payback to plutocrats whose flood of campaign money and media disinformation enabled an unprecedentedly disgraced ex-president to garner in 2024 the support of a plurality of an electorate infected with a severe case of civic myopia. Adding to Trump’s fiscal prodigality are the scores of billions he is spending on his private army as well as on his gunboat diplomacy, ranging from the Caribbean to the Middle East.

But one can never comprehend the overall damage Trump is doing to this country and its international standing without appreciating how kleptocracy controls his domestic and foreign policies. Seemingly, every major undertaking involves a payoff for Trump, his family or his corporate cronies, whether it is cryptocurrency, Venezuelan oil, the rare earth minerals in Greenland and Ukraine, the Board of Peace for Gaza’s reconstruction, or the privately run concentration camps for the victims of ICE’s pogroms.

The latest grift is the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for a leak which disclosed that, in the course of nearly a decade, Trump paid virtually no taxes. When confronted by reporters as to how he could justify being both plaintiff and judge, Trump insisted that “I’m supposed to work out a settlement for myself,” while assuring them that it would eventually go to “numerous, very good charities.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Representative Petrie may feign to be concerned about our Democratic governor’s proposed budget being “out of control.” He should shift his attention from Frankfurt to Washington. We have a president who is so out of control that he is imperiling the very survival of our republic.

Robert Emmett Curran is a professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University.