On the menu: Free fallin’; The caves of Rome; Louisiana Senate race gets hot for Cassidy; Omaha sends a warning sign to GOP; Bessent can’t boogie

Pollsters for The Wall Street Journal asked voters whether they thought there was enough waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending that Washington could balance the budget by eliminating those things.

Fifty-three percent said yes.

When it comes to just fraud and abuse, there’s some serious money to be had — something like $149 billion in the previous fiscal year, according to the Government Accountability Office. The bad news: That adds up to just a little more than 2 percent of the nearly $7 trillion in spending for the same period — not even a tenth of the cuts that Republicans are looking for.

So that takes you to “waste,” which is a much more subjective concept. One taxpayer’s waste is another’s vital funding. Is $45 million for a military parade in Washington a wasteful vanity project for the commander in chief or an appropriate way to boost national pride and military recruitment? Do billions in grants to elite universities fund life-saving technologies of the future or just constitute a slush fund for woke indoctrination? Anything can be waste if you disagree with the expenditure in the first place.

One place where lots of Americans routinely agree there are scads of wasteful spending is on foreign aid. It wasn't by accident that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) posse went after foreign aid first. When the Kaiser Family Foundation asked voters this spring to estimate how much of the federal budget went to foreign aid, more than half thought it was at least 10 percent of federal spending, with more than 20 percent maintaining that it was at least 40 percent.

The truth is that foreign aid, even before Musk whipped out his chainsaw, was just a little bit more than 1 percent of what Uncle Sam spends: about $72 billion a year. We’re on our way to a $2 trillion deficit for the current fiscal year, and if you zeroed out America’s least favorite kind of “waste,” it wouldn’t make a dent.

Looking at it that way, it's not surprising that the much-vaunted DOGE cuts, the cuts that congressional Republicans hoped would save them from hard choices, turned out to be a flop. After a lot of high-visibility, noisy action in the opening weeks of President Trump’s second term, it became obvious that there’s just not enough fat around the edges to deliver meaningful reductions for a government so deeply in debt.

It’s gotten so bad that Republicans are now talking about raising taxes on the rich to finance increased spending and some targeted tax cuts for the working class and older adults, key parts of the GOP coalition.

While soaking the rich is a sharp departure from the GOP’s historical commitment to trying to keep taxes as low as possible, it is certainly a hit with voters. Some 63 percent in a recent Pew Research Center poll said they wanted to see top earners taxed at a higher rate. It’s popular, but is it profitable?

A proposal favored by Trump and some Republicans in Congress for a new tax bracket for those earning more than $1 million a year would bring in some money, for sure: something like $40 billion a year. But that would have to be offset by the harm that would do to the economy and would no doubt be tamped down as rich people found new ways to shield their income from new taxes.

Again, it’s real money. If you put it all together — new taxes, slashing widely........

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