To the editor:

The president has asked us to be patient through “a little rough patch of economic adjustment.” I’m wondering what that “little rough patch” means to him and his billionaire friends. Let’s imagine that it means everyone loses something equally, say 10%. When a billionaire loses 10%, instead of $10 billion he has only $9 billion. When your grandma’s nursing home loses 10% (see “Medicaid cuts in Republican tax bill”), it closes. When your town’s main street cafe loses 10% (see “fewer eating out due to tariff-induced inflation”), they go out of business. When the new small business start-up loses 10% (see “small businesses hit with high tariff costs on materials”), it fails. When the working single mom loses 10% (rising grocery costs will do that), the family may be homeless. When your ag business loses 10% (see “world markets destroyed by tariffs and USAID cut”), you lose the farm.

Oh, but don’t worry about that first bunch, the billionaires. They aren’t going to lose 10% (see Republican tax bill, the “palace in the sky,” the meme coin grift, Musk’s sweetheart government contracts, and more). Do you really think they care about you and me? They didn’t care about the thousands of veterans they threw out of work at the VA. They didn’t care about the thousands of government workers who did research on cancer, kept our air and water clean, protected us from fraud, kept air travel safe, made Social Security reliable, and much more — people with kids, car payments and mortgages — that they tossed out of work for no reason. Why would they care about you? They really care about only two things: making even more money and staying in power.

Isn’t it finally time for you to contact Rep. Finstad (who was the deciding vote for the tax bill that cut Medicaid and instead gave that money to the top 1%) and tell him to stand up and start representing us?

Tom Kuster

New Ulm