Today's Bee Letter

 Responding to the Bee's publication 6/19/26 "Sacramento leader: The county's budget rewards failure, cuts public safety" by Rosario Rodriguez, on page B10

Supervisor Rodriguez' editorial fails to mention that the County's commitment to "safety" relies primarily on coercion after the fact rather than prevention. Cops, courts and cages are what she complains are being underfunded, despite being roughly 70% of the County's budget. Incarcerating for addiction is seven times the cost of medical treatment, and is less effective, but Rodriguez proposes no expansion of rehab. She just wants a jail expansion, even though the Mays decision settlement doesn't request it. 

She also omits that Sheriff Cooper confessed his "cuts" were illusions. He is re-assigning deputies to existing vacancies, not reducing police staffing. It’s not news that cops just want more money, even if they solve less than 15% of crimes--and don't solve 85% of them. The world is scary enough without the Bee appealing to fear with this kind of incomplete reporting. Please start solving problems, and stop adding to them.

====

I might add that it's extraordinarily frustrating to have no interest from local publications in the editorial I wrote responding to Ms. Rodriguez appeal for more coercion. My writing has appeared in these publications previously, but they're just not interested in contradicting the belief that cops, courts and cages are the way to deal with the desparate people in Sacramento County. One example of a better way to prevent such desperation is Contra Costa County's "Destination Home," a program to provide people on the brink of losing their rental with some funds to keep their housing.

The Bipartisan War on Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua

(from LA Progressive)

by Roger D. Harris and John Perry
Jun 18, 2026

While Democrats criticize Trump's foreign policy style, both parties continue to support sanctions, economic coercion, and efforts to reshape governments across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington's efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute – if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering – is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it – with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.

The central role of sanctions in projecting imperial coercive power

Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then – most drastically – against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.

Sanctions – a form of collective punishment – are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.

Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost-free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention – as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026 – the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.

Yet sanctions are very potent: between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year – more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.

While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies – the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.

The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication – that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and – very frequently – intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.

Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Díaz-Canel proclaimed: “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.

Transitioning to “democracy” in Venezuela

In the case of Venezuela, the Democrats have criticized the Republicans from the right, complaining that the cudgel of imperial power against essentially defenseless small states has not been wielded with sufficient malice.

Washington has imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela since 2015 in efforts to asphyxiate its Bolivarian Revolution. The transparently false rationale for continuing sanctions is that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. Although the threat is obviously the other way around, mainstream Democrats have not exposed this lie. How could they, when it originated with Obama and was subsequently echoed by Biden and then Trump?

Despite the horrific toll of an estimated 100,000 excess deaths attributed to US-imposed sanctions, Venezuela has resisted and maintained an unbroken continuity of leadership from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro and to now Delcy Rodríguez. And that’s the rub for the Democrats.

Ranking Democrat members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Representative Gregory W. Meeks and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, issued a “request [for] a clear explanation” of Trump’s Venezuela policy. Their meek missive came a full five months after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, an operation that resulted in more than 100 collateral deaths. Meanwhile, more than 200 occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been subjected to extrajudicial murder by the Trump administration.

Yet these inconvenient facts are absent from the June 8 Democratic Party congressional foreign-policy leadership’s statement on Venezuela. Their complaint is that Trump’s White House has failed to sufficiently “exercise its leverage.” As they put it: “As of today, the [state] department has yet to provide any evidence the Trump Administration is doing any of this hard work.”

The contradiction of kidnapping a lawful head of state in the name of restoring democracy does not trouble the Democrats. Rather, they “strongly support the Venezuelan people’s right to choose their leaders,” … after the US abducts their president.

These Democrat leaders are also troubled that Venezuelan authorities were allowed to appoint a new attorney general and defense minister without apparent US interference. In addition, they express impatience with Trump’s lethargy in not yet overhauling Venezuela’s supreme court and electoral council.

To the extent that they make any concrete demand, the putative opposition party wants Trump to impose an “electoral timeline” on Venezuela. Yet, the same party has no problem with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine who suspended elections after his legal term in office expired two years ago, banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, and arrested political opponents.

Restoring “democracy” in Cuba

Democratic Party policy toward Cuba is perhaps best exemplified by Biden’s retention of the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, which he inherited from Trump. Then, just six days before leaving office, Biden rescinded the designation with full certainty that the incoming Republican would – and did – reverse his decision.

Former National Security Council officer Ricardo Zúñiga was Obama’s adviser for the Americas and Biden’s special envoy for the Northern Triangle. He writes in Foreign Affairs offering advice on, rather than criticism of, Trump’s Cuba policy.

Zúñiga advocates achieving regime change in Cuba through “diplomacy” rather than “force.” Scare quotes are used because, for this Democrat, brute economic strangulation is regarded as diplomacy. Zúñiga would “forswear military action,” but only if Cuba submits to US dictates. And so long as “pro-market reforms” are adopted, “democracy” can wait.

Without a hint of opprobrium, Zúñiga casually references the US invasion of Iran and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president as policy options that would not be effective in Cuba. Given these examples, he then complains that Cubans remain resistant to “American views on democracy and human rights.”

He acknowledges that even if Trump wished to selectively roll back the murderous sanctions currently imposed on Cuba, he would face opposition not only from Republicans but also from Democrats. Where this Democrat differs from Republicans is in his supremely hypocritical conclusion: “It is ultimately Cuban citizens who will determine their country’s future” … after the US overthrows their government.

Promoting “democracy” in Nicaragua

Tiny Nicaragua is also labelled an “extraordinary threat” to the US. While the harshest and most successful sanctions against it were applied during the Reagan administrations, when an economic blockade and the US-financed Contra war eventually unseated the Sandinista government in 1990, economic pressure quickly resumed once the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007. Both the Bush and then Obama administrations made cuts in aid, and it was under Obama that Democrats joined with Republicans to launch the NICA Act, eventually implemented (under Trump) in 2018.

While Trump signed the NICA Act and sanctioned various Nicaraguan functionaries, Democrat senators took the lead in formulating stronger measures in the RENACER Act, signed by Biden in 2021. This led to an estimated loss of $500 million annually in development finance that would have been directed at Nicaragua’s poorest communities. Democrat senator Tim Kaine, with Marco Rubio, put forward new legislation in 2023 that was intended to strengthen the RENACER Act and ensure even greater damage.

Biden officials were consistently aggressive toward Nicaragua. In 2022, his nominee for ambassador to Managua, Hugo Rodríguez, promised the US Congress that he would “support using all economic and diplomatic tools to bring about a change in direction in Nicaragua.” As a result, Rodríguez was never accepted as ambassador and the post remains unfilled.

In 2024, Biden’s trade representative launched a hostile investigation clearly aimed at disrupting trade with Nicaragua and possibly at excluding it from the regional trade treaty, CAFTA. When it eventually reported in late 2025 it recommended punitive tariffs, but only relatively mild penalties were actually implemented by Trump.

Marco Rubio regularly imposes sanctions on individual Nicaraguans, including a hundred more just this month. More than 2,300 have now been sanctioned by successive administrations. Nevertheless, hardline Democrats, as well as Republicans, are pushing Rubio to do far more.

Two parties, one strategy

The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance. The two major parties differ mainly in messaging and, to a lesser extent, on tactics. Their theatrical contention is neither between intervention and nonintervention, nor between coercion and diplomacy. More often, it is between competing methods for achieving the same strategic objective.

Republicans may be more inclined toward overt confrontation, selective military assaults and maximal pressure; Democrats typically prefer a combination of inhumane sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and multilateral coercion. But both approaches rest on the assumption that Washington has the right to shape the political future of other nations.

Despite differences in tone and tactics, the supposed opposition party offers not an articulated alternative to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine but, at the very most, a variation of it.

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
 

CubaNicaraguaTrump RegimeVenezuelaLatin America

By Roger D. Harris


Roger D. Harris is a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network and is active with the Task Force on the Americas and the SanctionsKill Campaign.

By John Perry

John Perry is a writer based in Nicaragua and writes on Central America for the Nation, the London Review of Books, openDemocracy, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and other outlets.

The cost of the suburbs

 

Downtowns and mixed use neighborhoods subsidize the suburbs. pic.twitter.com/DQP7pBMNQP

— Mark R. Brown, AICP, CNU (@CompletedStreet) June 13, 2026

The Supervisor Rodriguez Conundrum

(c) by Mark Dempsey

In Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez's latest newsletter, she decries the County's budget deficit as a threat to public safety. Why? Because cops, courts and cages are not fully funded. And this, she says, is a big, big problem.

Sure:

• Incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical treatment for addiction (rehab) 
• The US incarcerates at five times the world average, per-capita. 
• Funding for cops, courts and cages has increased, nationwide, four times faster than US population growth since the '80s, and 
• Police solve less than 15% of crimes (13.2% of felonies in California in 2022). 

But we must have more policing!

Per-capita, Canada incarcerates one-seventh as many as the US, yet has lower crime rates. Of course the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually, while Canada has single-payer healthcare, so social services might actually be cheaper and more effective at preventing crime.

She asserts that the Mays Decision - a lawsuit the County Jail lost for mistreating prisoners - requires physical improvements to the jail. That's not true, but the likes of Ms. Rodriguez would love a multi-million-dollar mega-jail renovation there. Why we don't incarcerate nearly enough people at five times the world's average per-capita rate!

In fairness, the jail is full. But 60-80% of the prisoners are not convicted of anything other than being unable to pay bail. In Sacramento County, you're not "innocent until proven guilty," you're "guilty until proven wealthy."

And if you believe prosecutors don't use that pre-trial incarceration as a lever to extort plea bargains, then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. It's not justice; it's an extortion racket.

Is there any discussion of no-cash bail (as Illinois currently has) or pre-trial supervision? Not that I can detect. 

The Supervisor also complains that the County's maintenance costs are rising. Is there any move to deny land speculators their big payday, and curtail edge city development? Not that I can detect. After all, the region has 20 years' worth of unbuilt infill, and infill maintenance costs half as much to maintain as edge city development since the roads and utilities are shorter and already in place.

What Ms. Rodriguez (and her predecessor) are advocating is the domestic equivalent of the "No war is too expensive to fund or fight" international policy that has the US starting wars it can neither afford nor finish. That domestic equivalent isn't e pluribus unum ("from many, one"), it's "The beatings will continue until morale improves." 

Update #1: Signs of Reform - German prisons inspire changes. (appears in the same issue of the Davis Vanguard where the original essay appeared.

Update #2: The Mays Decision (settlement summary) In case you're wondering whether Rodriguez argument we need to expand the jail is true (it's not):

"On June 10, 2019, the parties submitted a joint notice of settlement in the form of a proposed Consent Decree, which involved a Remedial Plan requiring the County to expand its mental health programs and services, provide constitutionally-adequate medical care, provide additional safeguards to reduce suicides by people in custody, identify people with disabilities and ensure that they receive appropriate accommodations, and expand mental health input into the jail's disciplinary and use of force practices. Under the proposed Consent Decree, the Court retained jurisdiction to enforce the Consent Decree and the agreement would last for six years from the date it was entered by the court." 

Update #3: Internal records expose no real layoffs for Sacramento deputies

[From the Sacramento News & Review: It turns out the budget "cuts" are an illusion summoned in service to further the Copaganda]

Sheriff Jim Cooper has warned publicly that Sacramento County’s proposed 2026-27 budget would force his department to gut specialized units and trigger a “public safety crisis,” claiming patrol deputies and detectives would drop from 480 to 394.

County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez echoed the alarm on social media, posting that the proposed budget would “significantly reduce law enforcement services” and weaken neighborhood safety.

An examination of the Sheriff’s Office’s internal budget submittal, obtained by The Observer, tells a different story.

The sheriff proposed eliminating approximately 140 positions and several specialized units to meet county budget targets, but the document states those positions would be reassigned into existing vacancies rather than eliminated.

In other words, the proposed budget would lay off no active law enforcement personnel.

....

Warnings of an impending safety crisis also are undercut by the sheriff’s own crime data.

The office investigated 18 homicides in 2025, down from 37 in 2024, 38 in 2023, and 39 in 2022. Spokesperson Lt. Amar Gandhi told the Sacramento Bee in January that last year’s figure represents the lowest annual homicide total the office has investigated since the 1980s.
 

  

 

7 Ideas That Should Make You Distrust Your Own Mind

by Hunter Trace
June 3, 2026 - 6 min readArticle

 



When Robert Trivers died this year, I lost a friend and the world lost one of the few people who genuinely understood why we lie to ourselves. Skeptic readers know his work even if the name sits just out of reach—his fingerprints are on half of modern evolutionary psychology. Bob once let me fly him out to lecture my state pharmacy association on the science of deceit: a room full of pharmacists learning, from the man who worked it out, that the mind is built to fool its own owner before it fools anyone else. He was generous like that, and funnier than his reputation. That idea—self-deception as design, not defect—is where any honest account of our species has to begin.

It’s also the first entry on a list I’ve spent years assembling in an attempt to gather the load-bearing findings about human nature—scattered across biology, psychology, economics, and anthropology, buried in thousands of pages no busy person will ever read—and compress them into something you can hand to a friend. What follows is the compression of the compression. Seven ideas. If they’re new to you, they will rearrange how you see nearly everything. If they’re not, consider this the map of where the bodies are buried.
The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it.

A warning before we start: there is no flattering way to read this list. I am implicated in every item on it. So are you. 

1. You are the mark, not the con artist.

Trivers’s central insight, laid out in The Folly of Fools, is that self-deception is not a malfunction. It’s an adaptation. The most convincing liar is the one who believes his own lie—he leaks no tells, because there’s nothing to leak. So natural selection built minds that hide their real motives from the conscious tenant upstairs. The unsettling part is the part most people skip: in this arrangement, the “you” that experiences your own reasoning isn’t running the con. You’re the one being conned. Your sense of why you do what you do is a press release, not the minutes of the meeting.
 

2. The rider works for the elephant.

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor, with the mechanism supplied by Daniel Kahneman’s two systems: conscious reasoning (the rider) imagines it’s steering, but the automatic, emotional, intuitive part (the elephant) decides first—in milliseconds—and the rider’s actual job is to invent justifications after the fact. When you form a political opinion, you do not reason your way to it. You feel your way to it, then reason your way to a defense. This is why facts so rarely change minds. You’re not arguing with someone’s logic. You’re arguing with their elephant, and the rider you’re talking to is just the press secretary. And here’s the twist that should keep an honest person up at night: the implication is notthat morality is arbitrary. There are almost certainly better and worse answers to how conscious creatures should treat one another—Sam Harris is right that the moral landscape has real peaks and valleys. The problem is that the machinery generating your moral certainty was never built to track those peaks. It was built to track your tribe.
Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 

3. You are a monkey with a machine gun.

For the overwhelming majority of our existence, we lived in bands of roughly 150, chased scarce calories, faced physical threats, and tracked reputation face-to-face. That world is gone. The brain is not. You are running twenty-first-century software—cable news, dating apps, global markets, eight billion strangers—on hardware and instincts shaped over deep evolutionary time, in a world that vanished in an eyeblink by comparison. Nearly every modern pathology is this mismatch wearing a different mask: obesity is the calorie-seeking system in a world of abundance, social-media misery is the status-tracking system run at a volume it was never built for, chronic stress is a threat-detection system designed for lions and now triggered by email. Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 

4. Tribalism is a feature to be managed, not a bug to be solved.

This is the sentence most people across the spectrum get wrong. Progressives tend to think tribalism is ignorance that education will cure. Conservatives think it’s a virtue when aimed at the right targets. Libertarians think clear thinking dissolves it. All three are wrong, because the impulse to sort the world into us and them is as deep in the architecture as language. You will not eliminate it. The groups that out-survived the others were the ones that cooperated inside and competed outside, and you are their descendant. The functional question is never how to abolish tribalism but how to channel it—through cross-cutting institutions, productive competition, and norms of engagement. Societies that manage it thrive. Societies that let it run loose produce Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Weimar. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. 

5. The Blank Slate is not just wrong—it’s dangerous.

Steven Pinker’s target is the still-dominant assumption that humans arrive infinitely malleable, with no nature worth mentioning—that every difference between individuals, groups, and sexes is pure socialization. The science doesn’t support it. But the deeper problem is moral, not empirical. If people have no nature, then anyone who refuses to be molded to your program must be acting in bad faith—stupid, corrupt, or evil. That inference is the seed of every utopian catastrophe in history. The planners who believed they could manufacture a New Man had the power. They lacked the knowledge. The gap between the two filled with corpses. You cannot modulate what you refuse to acknowledge; a pilot who denies gravity does not fly well.
 

6. Patternicity will fool you, and it feels exactly like insight.

This one belongs to Skeptic’s own founder. Michael Shermer’s point is that the brain is a pattern-detection machine with the sensitivity dial turned all the way up—because mistaking a shadow for a predator a hundred times is cheaper than mistaking a predator for a shadow once. So we find faces in clouds, meaning in coincidence, conspiracies in noise. Layer motivated reasoning on top, and you don’t just find patterns everywhere; you preferentially find the ones that confirm what your tribe already believes. The feeling of having seen through to the truth is generated by the same machinery whether or not there’s anything there. Which means the conviction can’t be your evidence. It never could.
The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense. 

7. Design for the animal, not the angel.

Here’s the payoff, and it’s strangely hopeful. The systems that work are the ones built for the creature that actually exists. Markets succeed because they channel self-interest instead of pretending it away—the butcher feeds you out of his own interest, not his benevolence. The American founders built checks and balances not for angels but for the ambitious, self-interested primates who would actually hold power. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” The institutions that fail are the ones designed for a species we wish we were. Understand the animal, and you can build a civilization worthy of it. Deny the animal, and the animal runs the show.

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s an eighth idea, and it’s the one that makes the other seven dangerous to summarize: the bias blind spot. We can see every distortion clearly—in other people. Hand a sharp partisan a list like this one and watch him aim it across the aisle, never once at himself. The studies are brutal on this point: greater intelligence and scientific literacy don’t reduce motivated reasoning on identity-defining issues. They supercharge it. The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense.

So I’ll say what the science forces me to say. Nothing on this list exempts me from anything on this list. I am the mark in my own mirror as surely as Trivers was in his—and he knew it, and knowing it was the closest thing to an escape hatch our species has ever found. Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it.

You are not the exception. Neither am I. But the effort to catch yourself—to ask, before the next certainty hardens: Is this my thinking or my tribe’s? Is this evidence or is it rationalization?—is the one thing the animal can do that the animal it evolved from could not.

That effort is what my book The Why Behind Things is for. This was the cheat sheet.

Remember when "People are starving in China" got you to eat your broccoli?

 

Addressing the most common criticism of my previous post, I have here plotted the extreme poverty rates of the US and China on the same scale, sourced directly from the World Bank.

The result is the same: the extreme poverty rate ($3/day PPP) is higher in the US than in China. https://t.co/G98KugxCrv pic.twitter.com/Rd2VAsfIqB

— Jostein Hauge (@haugejostein) June 8, 2026

 

Update: China may have fewer people living in poverty than the US 

Is federal spending a solution, not necessarily a problem?

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

Don't get me wrong, federal spending isn't always good. The most recent initiator of massive deficit spending was the Milton Friedman acolyte Reagan administration 46 years ago. His deficits exceeded the sum of all previous ones, and for his trouble, Reagan got an average business cycle recovery, but jump-started the American oligarchy by cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half.

Here are US GDP growth rates, historically. 

 

Note the two large increases in GDP growth in the early years graphed occurred with the New Deal and that big public works project called "World War II," both instances of big deficit spending. Both dwarf the "Morning in America" (the Wall St. Journal's expression) Reagan recovery in the '80s (see the graph above).

Milton Friedman's failures aside, let's consider the possibility that government "overspending" is at the root of inflation--a problem, not a solution. If the government spends too much money, it's certainly conceivable that the spending could bid up the prices of various resources, causing inflation. But what if the government activated otherwise idle resources--for example, with a job guarantee for the unemployed? What bidding would occur then? And would spending be the only initiator of inflation? Couldn't a shortage of critical goods like food or energy also explain an inflation surge?

One online commenter's remark decrying "25 years of massive deficit spending" implies that those deficits were inherently inflationary because they give money to the population, which was ultimately spent, bidding up prices. But supply and balance of payments issues precede all the hyperinflations (says a Cato Institute study). A public eager to save (in Japan) accompanies massive public debts, as high as 240% of GDP, without producing inflation, so the assertion that inflation is always the government's fault is at least myopic.

But shouldn't we reduce national debt? The US has been fooled by plausible deceivers like Friedman and has significantly reduced its debt seven times since 1776. The problem is that reducing spending or increasing taxes reduces national debt, and it ultimately injects fragility into the economy by reducing people's savings. One hundred percent of the time the significant national debt reductions have occurred in the US, they're followed by a massive wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures--not a big surprise since smaller savings accounts reduce economic resilience.

The Great Depression followed such national debt reductions in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, but perhaps the most dramatic instance of this phenomenon occurred when Andrew Jackson paid the debt off entirely in 1835, and closed the central bank that issued dollars. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. It was a business nightmare, which led to a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures called the "Panic of 1837"--a Great Depression-sized hole in the economy. 

Independent of inflation considerations, one added dimension to this problem is the bizarre belief that dollars grow on billionaires. The government is not like a household that has to get its dollars from somewhere else (like billionaires). It literally makes all the (legal) dollars. Taxes create the demand for dollars; they don't provision federal programs.

In fact, the phrase "tax and spend" is an impossible sequence of events. Where would people get the dollars to pay taxes if the monopoly provider of dollars didn't spend them out into the economy first?

So it's not "tax and spend," it's "spend first, then retrieve some dollars in taxes." And what do we call the dollars spent, but not retrieved in taxes...you know, the ones in your wallet? First, they are the dollar financial assets of the population--people's savings. Perhaps less obviously, they are also national debt.

This is not exotic economics; it's double-entry bookkeeping. 

In addition to his failed economic predictions, Milton Friedman gave intellectual respectability to the notion that the pursuit of profit excuses all behavior, no matter how bad. Politically interested people will even tell you, despite all the historical evidence to the contrary, that corporations are obliged by law to ignore the community, their workers, and society at large because they are compelled to pursue profit at all costs (The Ferengi ethic!). It's not true, but this is yet another demostration that you're as likely to get truth from a Friedmanite economist as you are from your opponents in a poker game.