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Foreign. 2026 in Ohio today, Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy launched a $10 million TV and digital ad campaign to run until Election Day. Jeremy Palzer of cleveland.com explained that this ad buy alone is more than twice as much as the $4.4 million Democratic candidate Amy Acton, the former state health director, has raised. And it is only about half of the $19.5 million Ramaswamy's campaign has raised. Forbes reported in December 2025 that Ramaswamy's net worth had nearly doubled from about $1 billion to about $1.8 billion since he announced his candidacy in February 2025. On March 9, Mike Baker and Stephen Rich of the New York Times published a long expose of the corruption of American politics by billionaires. They explain how underwriting political campaigns, from those for local school boards to the presidency, has enabled the very wealthy to lock in their policy preferences for tax cuts, deregulation and cuts to the social safety net while also steering valuable government contracts to themselves. In 2024, Baker and Rich note, 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated 19% of all political contributions in federal elections, either directly or through political action committees or PACs. While that amount does not account for money that might have gone through dark money groups that don't have to disclose their donors, it still amounts to more than $3 billion, or an average of $10 million per family. The author's example of what this flood of money looks like in the political system is the victory of Senator Tim Sheehy, a Republican of Montana who beat popular Democratic incumbent John Tester in 2024 with the help of $8 million from billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and at least 63 other billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members who donated about $47 million to Sheehy's Senate race. In the Senate, Sheehy has become a key ally on tax policies that benefit the wealthy and co sponsored a proposal to eliminate the estate tax. The author's note Sheehy has been in the news lately for killing a decades old solar energy tax credit when his own home uses solar power. Sheehy's spokesperson declined to tell reporters if he had used the tax credit for 26% of the system's cost. Sheehy has also been in the news for jumping into the effort of three Capitol police officers to eject a protester opposed to the Iran war from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The arm of Brian McGinnis, a Marine Corps veteran who was wearing his dress uniform, was stuck behind the door. As Sheehy threw his weight into McGinnis, there was the audible crack of his arm breaking. When a spectator called Sheehy a coward, the senator appeared to tell him, go yourself. Sheehy later said he was trying to de escalate the situation and blamed McGinnis for causing violence. Billionaire Elon Musk spent close to $300 million in the 2024 elections, putting much of it as well as the support of the social media platform X behind Trump. After his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency created a backlash to his companies and sparked a rift between him and Trump, Musk said he was going to step back from political spending. And yet by the end of 2025, he had already given $20 million to Republicans to prepare for the 2026 elections. It's a big deal for Trump and for the Republicans to have the world's richest man on their side, republican strategist Brian Sychik told Julia Mueller and Julia Shapiro of the Hill in February. Baker and Rich noted that while both parties had reaped windfalls from billionaires in the past, the in 2024 that money turned sharply toward Republicans. For every dollar of billionaire money that went to Democrats, they wrote, $5 went to Republicans. During his term, President Joe Biden called for securing the solvency of Social Security and Medicare and addressing the growing national debt with higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. He wanted to increase the tax rate for those making more than $400,000 a year to close the carried interest loophole and to impose a tax of 25% on Americans with a wealth of more than $100 million, saying during his 2024 State of the Union address, no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse when she took over as the Democratic candidate. Vice President Kamala Harris also called for higher taxes on the wealthy, although at slightly lower rates than Biden backed. In contrast, Trump promised billionaires he would extend the 2017 tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and corporations. At a fundraiser at Mar A Lago, he told oil executives that they should raise a billion dollars to put him back in office. That price tag would be a deal, he told them, because of the taxes and regulations they would avoid if he were in charge. And so some of them pumped money into his campaign. Once back in office, Trump gave his wealthy supporters what he promised the one big beautiful Bill act that extended the 2017 tax cuts, cut regulation and slashed the social safety net. But along with those tax cuts and deregulation, those who supported Trump gave the country an erratic president who has destabilized the world economy through tariffs and now has led us into war in the Middle East. Today, Paul Krugman wrote in his newsletter that this is the billionaires war, since it was their campaign money that mobilized low information voters to rally behind Trump and his minions. There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10th that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the US has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months. That's $50 billion a week on average. As Trump's tax cuts revenue, Republicans are sounding the alarm about the ballooning debt and suggesting the only way to address it is to cut more programs that benefit the American people. But that raises fundamental questions about the purpose of the US Government. What should it do? Whom should it benefit, and why? In the 1860s, during the US Civil War, the Republican Party reacted to rising expenses and growing debt not by punishing everyday Americans, but by inventing the income tax in a time when the very existence of the American government was under threat. Republicans argued that the federal government had a right to demand 99% of a man's property for an urgent necessity when the nation required it. Vermont's Justin Smith moral said the property of the people belongs to the government from the beginning. Congressmen graduated the taxes according to income. Morrill said the weight of taxation must be distributed equally, not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay. Recognizing that those who supported the government financially would care deeply about its survival, the American people welcomed the taxes. Even conservative Republican newspapers declared there is not the slightest objection raised in any loyal quarter to as much taxation as may be necessary.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.