I’m writing about this:

Here’s his follow up:

Garcia is Washington Bureau Chief at The Independent, and I follow him to get a flavor for better-than-average DC conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, his use of “nut cutting” in this case is completely wrong. I don’t use that term, or if I do when I write a post, I always prefix it with “As Dick Nixon would have said” because Nixon liked to use that term, as he did many other profane terms, because he was an asshole and mostly assholes talk about “nut cutting”.

Before I go on, I should note that I’ve actually seen a nut cutting. My wife is from a family of farmer/ranchers who would never call it a nut cutting. They’d call it “working cattle”. Nut cutting — turning a bull into a steer — is just part of it. They also do a bunch of other vet care when they have the young bull in a crush. It’s pretty brutal, but cattle are bred to be very resilient, plus they are also quite stupid. Unless we’re going to stop eating meat, nuts will be cut, because bulls are hard to manage and don’t yield good meat.

Back to the expression: Garcia is using it incorrectly because nut cutting is not a “trim” — it is transformational for the bull that undergoes it. The expression is really a variant of “come to Jesus moment”, “time to get serious” or other phrases indicating that a difficult but important decision is needed.

That said, in one way, Garcia is using the expression correctly, because if Democrats approach the Trump cleanup with a mentality of “gosh, we had better not do anything good because we have to raise taxes and do some austerity to handle the national debt” it will truly be transformational. We’ll transform ourselves into a losing party.

How to deal with the Trump debt is a question that will require multiple blog posts, but I have a few thoughts.

First, taxing the rich won’t fix the problem, but it’s a hell of a good start. There’s no way that Democrats should come into office and make the national debt our first priority. As long as we’re shaving away at it, good enough.

Second, cutting defense won’t fix the problem, but we will need to be smart about digging ourselves out of the hole that Trump will leave after expending all of our expensive munitions in the stupid Iran war. It’s clear that using six- or seven-figure missiles to shoot down four- or five-figure drones is a losing strategy, and we need some form of drone offense and drone defense instead of the current expensive path we’re on. Also, cancel the stupid “Trump class” battleships, and have a top-to-toe audit of our defense procurement with the aim of cutting waste. I’m sure we can wring a few billions out of that budget.

Third, I’d love to see the numbers on cutting out or reducing insurance middlemen in our incredibly expensive healthcare system.

That’s just a start. Garcia clearly wants to replay the same tired old DC playbook that’s trotted out every time Democrats are in power. As soon as we take office, all of a sudden the national debt is a pressing issue. We can’t let that happen.

If you’ve read this far, here’s a funny video from Kyle Clark on the subject of nut cutting. He uses the term correctly, btw.