Donald Trump’s modest proposal

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2025 (407 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In A Modest Proposal, the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift suggested a way for the poor to ease their economic plight: sell their children to the elite for food. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food…”

This was intended as hyperbolic satire, mocking how the wealthy in 18th century England and Ireland treat the poor. It wasn’t intended as an instruction manual.

But Republicans south of the border and Conservatives to the north have taken its main theme, the wealthy enriching themselves at the expense of the poor, to heart.

Just weeks into his new term, U.S. President Donald Trump and his henchmen have taken a wrecking ball to America’s government.

It is too soon to assess all the damage, but among the early casualties are the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development, science funding agencies, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Parks. In the crosshairs are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed more than 40 million of America’s poor, and Medicaid which provides health insurance for more than 70 million low-income Americans. And much more. Medicare, social security; how far will he go?

And why is Trump so desperate to gut the federal government?

He needs to pay for tax cuts, soon set to expire, that benefit millionaires and billionaires.

America is one of the most unequal countries in the industrialized world. The bottom half of the American population, ~170 million people, had in 2024 a combined wealth of just under US$4 trillion. By comparison the roughly 800 in the billionaire class in 2024 were worth US$6.7 trillion.

Billionaires are not the one per cent. They’re not the 0.1 per cent. They are the 0.0002 per cent. And their wealth is half again as much as the bottom 50 per cent.

Think about that.

And Trump wants more. He’s slashing government services to fund the biggest tax cuts in American history. The rich get richer, the poor kicked to the curb.

In our country, right-wing lobby groups such as the Fraser Institute and Canadian Taxpayers Federation fetishize America’s economy. Their productivity is so much higher, and their per capita GDP so much more, they say.

We must be more like Americans, they say.

No we don’t.

We need to be less like America.

Their greater overall wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. And it’s about to get worse.

The right-wing lobbyists rail against income redistribution as inherently evil. And it can be. Especially when you rob from the poor to give to the rich.

Income redistribution in the opposite direction, reducing grotesque levels of income inequality is a virtue.

To answer the obvious question, yes, income is far less concentrated at the top in Canada than in America: economists use the Gini index to measure this. According to the CIA factbook, America’s Gini index is 41.5, Canada 33.3, Scandinavian countries the high 20s.

The danger for Canadians is that Trump’s agenda emboldens Maple MAGA followers. Conservatives salivate at the thought of massive budget cuts to pay for their own Trump-style tax cuts.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has boasted he’ll slash federal spending. But other than eliminating the CBC and fewer federal workers, he won’t tell us what he’ll cut.

So what is on the chopping block?

Obviously, recent programs from the Trudeau-Singh partnership — e.g., $10-a-day daycare; dental care; the national school food program — will be the first to go. The Canada Child Benefit will likely not survive unscathed.

Provinces can expect transfer payments to be slashed with cuts to their two big-ticket items, health care and education, unavoidable and big.

Federal science funding will be cut and so too anything related to climate change or environmental protection.

We can’t have regulations to protect our air and water blocking new oil and gas development.

What makes the blood run cold is that a Canadian prime minister with a majority government has more power than even Trump to implement radical change.

Trump faces possible opposition in the House and Senate, if not now, then two years from now after the midterm elections, when Americans render their verdict on the Republican revolution.

The winners in this new world of unrestrained selfishness are those who already have much. They demand more. And as Elon Musk has showed, they’ll weaponize their wealth to get their way.

Franklin Roosevelt was right when he remarked, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Republicans south of the border, and Conservatives to the north will fail this test — miserably.

Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg.