Larry Floersch
I heard a snippet of the song “Mister Bojangles” the other day, and it brought to mind an incident I witnessed in New Orleans a few years ago.
“Mister Bojangles” was written by Jerry Jeff Walker and is about an aged street performer Walker met in a drunk tank in New Orleans. As a contemporary of Walker’s once remarked, Jerry Jeff was not there on a master’s degree research project. The song was about hard lives all the way around.
The song made me think about a street performer similar to Bojangles I encountered while wandering around NOLA’s French Quarter. This guy was nowhere near the age of Mister Bojangles of the song. He was about 16. He had on beat-up basketball shoes to which he had somehow affixed flattened bottle caps to act as “taps” so he could do tap dances and soft shoe numbers for donations. In addition to his dancing skills, he was remarkable for two other things: his ability to do a powerful yet extremely graceful back flip from a standing position, and his ability to engage and extract money from passersby.
As he was dancing, he spotted a man walking by who was obviously a tourist. “Hey mistuh!” the teen said in a New Orleans drawl, getting the man’s attention. “I bet you twenty dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes,” he said.
Puzzled at first, the man stopped, and with a quizzical grin reiterated the question, “You’re betting me twenty dollars you can tell me where I got my shoes?” “Yep!” said the kid. “I’ll take that bet,” said the tourist, pulling a twenty from his pocket, “Tell me where I got my shoes.”
“Mistuh, you got your shoes on the bottom of your feet,” said the kid triumphantly. Snickers rippled through the small crowd that had gathered. The man, realizing he had been hustled and sensing the crowd was on the kid’s side, had no choice but to pay up.
The Republicans in the U.S. Congress have just passed a “big beautiful” budget bill that will set the course for government spending for the next few years.
The bill seems to have beautiful benefits for everyone, from table servers and factory workers (no tax on tips or overtime pay) to aging newspaper columnists (no or reduced taxes on Social Security benefits).
There are benefits for middle income households, mostly in the form of tax credits for children and deductions for things such as interest on auto loans (only, however, if the car is made in the United States, so forget buying that Lamborghini with untaxed tip money).
But the real beauty of this bill seems to be in tax cuts for the mega wealthy, which were set to expire this year but will become permanent. According to USA Today, those who make over $217,000 a year will receive two-thirds of the cuts. People who earn over $1.1 million a year will get nearly 25% of the total tax cuts.
CBS News analyzed this further and found those making over $1 million per year could see a 4.3% increase, or $389,000, in after-tax income. A New Orleans street dancer would have to do a lot of dancing and hustling to make that kind of money.
In fact, even though they might no longer have to claim income from tips and overtime under the terms of the bill, it is estimated low-income households (under $50,000 a year) will lose $700 to $1,000 a year on average. Further analysis by CBS News shows that the bottom 20% of earners in the U.S. could see their annual after-tax income decrease by $1,035. What’s not beautiful about that!
Being deficit hawks, Congressional Republicans also are sensitive to the expenditure side of the balance sheet, so to help hold down deficits, they intend to remove ugly parts of federal spending, ugly being things that benefit low-income households. This will be done through cuts to Medicaid (approximately 7.6 million could lose Medicaid benefits over the next decade), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and student loan programs. Oh, and possibly say goodbye to those ugly national nose warts, “All Things Considered” and “Sesame Street” and enjoying your national parks. Endangered species? Forget them. Moving to green energy? Gone.
Even with the reductions in federal spending, however, the federal deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office, still is expected to rise to $3.3 trillion over the next decade. To put that in perspective, John Dickerson of the CBS Evening News pointed out (July 1, 2025) that a federal debt of $3.3 trillion, divided equally, amounts to a debt of $25,000 per household. If you divide $3.3 trillion by the total population, it is almost $10,000 for every adult and child in the U.S.
So, to recap, a gain of almost $400,000 if you make more than $1 million annually versus a loss of $1,035 if you make less than $50,000; vast reductions in government services; and everyone owes $10,000. That seems perfectly beautiful me. What about you?
I think Congress just told the American public we got our shoes on the bottom of our feet!
