The Arithmetic of American Fracture: Notes on the American Settlement
By Earl Cotten for The Earl Angle
One notices first the paper. The bill arrives in a three-ring binder, nine hundred pages thick, the kind of document designed to be photographed rather than read. The title—“One Big Beautiful Bill”—suggests a real estate prospectus for a gated community, perhaps one overlooking a sea of receding possibilities. This is how America redistributes its future now: not with grand manifestos or revolution, but with columns of numbers, actuarial tables, and the dry syntax of appropriation. The numbers, as always, tell the story we pretend not to see.
I. The Permanent Things
Consider the estate tax. A reduction of $212 billion, locked in perpetuity. The language is technical—"unified credit increase," "portability adjustment"—but the effect is medieval: a fortress wall around dynastic wealth. One thinks of the English country houses, those monuments to entailed inheritance now preserved as museu…
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