(11 minutes) – Paul Krugman answers questions for Canadian TV:

I refuse to give the current president any ground by calling his extreme right wish list bill what he calls it, we must discuss it since it will be the centerpiece of the current administration and probably the centerpiece of the next congressional elections. This bill is big, ugly and brutal.

The whole concept is to find enough “savings” in our current federal budget so they can justify giving huge tax cuts to those who need it least – the wealthy. While I can barely read a budget or a spreadsheet, I do get a newsletter from some highly informed and educated economists who can read budgets and make recommendations on them.

About a week ago, Paul Krugman’s newsletter had several great suggestions where large chunks of money can be saved. So I will now crib from Krugman’s substack of May 23rd:

But Congress could and should do more. You don’t have to be a deficit fetishist, a fiscal scold — which I definitely am not — to realize that even before the Budget of Abominations America was on an unsustainable fiscal path. So what will it take to get back to a tolerable fiscal position?

It’s a cliché to say that doing this will require making hard choices, that ordinary Americans will have to make sacrifices. And maybe that’s true. What strikes me about where we are now, however, is that we could vastly improve our fiscal position with a series of easy choices — actions that would mainly spare the middle class and only hurt people most Americans probably believe deserve to feel a bit of pain. So here are four things we could and should be doing.

First, get Americans — mainly wealthy Americans — to pay the taxes they owe. The net tax gap — taxes Americans are legally obliged to pay but don’t — is simply huge, on the order of $600 billion a year. We can never get all of that money back, but giving the IRS enough resources to crack down on wealthy tax cheats would be both fiscally and morally responsible, since letting people get away with cheating on their taxes rewards bad behavior and makes law-abiding taxpayers look and feel like chumps.

Republicans are, of course, doing the opposite: They’re starving the IRS of resources and trying to make tax evasion great again. Why, it’s almost as if cheats and grifters are their sort of people.

Second, crack down on Medicare Advantage overpayments. Currently, much of Medicare is run through insurance companies whose payments from the government are based on the health status of their clients — the sicker the people they cover, and hence the higher their likely medical bills, the more the insurance companies receive. Unfortunately, insurers game the system, finding ways to make their clients look less healthy than they really are, and thereby get overpaid.

We’re talking a lot of money here. A Center for American Progress estimate found that

“Medicare is at risk of overpaying [Medicare Advantage] plans between $1.3 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade”

Third, go after corporate tax avoidance. Much of this involves multinational firms using strategies that are shady and dishonest but legal to make profits actually earned in the United States disappear and reappear in low-tax nations like Ireland.

In 2017 Gabriel Zucman estimated that such maneuvers were costing the U.S. Treasury around $70 billion annually. The number is probably bigger now. There are several strategies that could limit these losses; ideally, major economies would cooperate to crack down both on corporate misbehavior and the nations that enable it.

Finally, we should just get rid of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. That tax cut wasn’t a response to any economic needs, and there’s not a shred of evidence that it did the economy any good. All it did was transfer a lot of money to corporations and the wealthy. Let’s end those giveaways.

Four incredibly simple and fairly easily implemented actions that would greatly either increase revenue of decrease outflow. 

Most people do not understand that the “waste, fraud and abuse” that MAGA politicians are constantly spewing is not some individual lone wolves tapping the till. Nope, it is for the most part giant insurance corporations abusing the rules to defraud the Medicare system. Florida Senator Rick Scott’s company was one of the prime examples in the late 1990s.

If MAGAs were really serious about the deficit it is long past time for them to step up and tax the people who are most responsible for the debt – the wealthy – and set up ways to collect the taxes. Eisenhower would be proud.