The MAGA Budget of 2025

Part I, The Problem

I spent a week digging through the numbers, the warnings, the buried footnotes of this ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’. What emerged wasn’t a revelation—it was a bleak inevitability. I wrote a dystopian postcard from the future. But you can probably guess most of the details. So lets skip the storytelling and lay it out plainly.

The bill will pass. Maybe not in its original form, but close enough to do the damage. And that damage won’t hit all at once. It will creep in. Slowly, in drops. Then, like the old saying goes, it happens gradually… then all at once.

That’s how it will unfold for every household in America without at least a million dollars stashed away in retirement or brokerage accounts. Costs rising from every direction. Healthcare, Drug Costs, Tuition, Essentials. Credit card debt ballooning. Federal deficits so large the government will have to jack up interest rates just to keep investors coming back to the auctions. That will be the start of the spiral. A spiral that the Fed will be helpless to prevent. That’s when the screws will begin to tighten.

And as the safety net disintegrates, on cue, the police state expands. Surveillance, erosion of civil liberties. More for the few, gated off away from the dystopia.

What will America look like in 2035? Just rewind the tape to 2015. Back to the golden escalator. Back to Trump’s descent and his opening act. Could you have imagined what came next? COVID incompetence, the culture war over masks, January 6? And now, the ICE raids, the rise of fascism? It’s anyone’s guess what’s next. I have my hunches, and its not pretty.

And here’s the bitter twist:

The same people who once refused to wear a mask—screaming about freedom, tyranny, the Constitution—now cover their faces willingly. Not to protect the vulnerable. Not to stop the spread. But to intimidate. They march into communities with zip ties and flags and a clenched-jaw rage. They wear masks now as uniforms. Not resistance, but menace. Not liberty, but control.

So yes, Trump will get this obscenity signed into law.

And we will all watch—not a revival of the American Dream, but the last shovel of dirt on the grave of the American century.

The final illusions of shared prosperity buried beneath deficit gimmicks, billionaire carve-outs, and the quiet cruelty of austerity by design. The country won't explode but erode. And most won’t even notice the collapse—until they step outside and realize: the sidewalk isn’t crumbling. It’s gone.

---

Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times” (1987) is a masterwork of minimalism—musically spare, lyrically dense, and politically timeless. Built almost entirely on a single Cm7 groove, the song becomes a hypnotic litany of Reagan’s America: AIDS, poverty, gang violence, drug epidemics and nuclear dread. Prince even nods to Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” where rockets are sent to space while children go hungry. It offers no solution, no harmonic resolution—just observation, irony, and that haunting refrain: “Time. Times.” The song's skeletal production is not an aesthetic choice but a structural metaphor: a society stripped bare.

Prince captures the slow bleed of democracy, the normalization of despair, and the numbing repetition of crises that characterize this American moment, a live feed from the edge, not some snapshot of the late 1980s. And some of the best funk guitar put to tape.