The Grover Norquist delusion is that if you cause a massive imbalance by having big tax cuts, that imbalance will eventually be corrected by having big spending cuts. But that's wrong.

I don't know why you keep coming back to this. No one is arguing for this.

Just which half of the government's finances is likely to be changed, given the politics of the situation. You seem to think it's "cutting popular government programs." I think it's "raising taxes a few percentage points, concentrated among the well-off."

Your math doesn't work. Raising taxes a couple of points on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos isn't going to raise nearly enough money.

It's not a few points on a couple of guys. More like 5 to 10 points on most Americans.

Having a top rate of 39.6% instead of 35% is not going to cause people to "not be able to pay for their own lives" or "not be able to retire for five 5 more years."

Again. The middle class is going to have to pay for it. You want to talk about delusional, it's delusion that the Tax The Wealthy approach will raise enough money to cover the spending. For one, why would they stick around and pay it? They won't.

Pointing to things like Defund the Police that were always broadly unpopular (the "elite leftist set" picking the wrong side of an 80/20 issue) doesn't give you any insight into how people will react to changes in a program that is massively popular (keeping Social Security and Medicare protected from cuts is definitely the 80 side of the 80/20 issue).

You missed the point. Things are popular until they're not. What makes something unpopular is how hard it hits home. Defund the Police was popular among the liberal elite until the consequences of the policy hit home with them.

So will your tax raises. It'll be popular until people can't pay for other things, then they won't be.

As I said, we're talking past each other now.