“Defunding the police” means moving money within city and state budgets. The idea is to take money out of policing and spend it on services like mental and physical health care, education, and affordable housing instead. “Defunding” assumes that meeting people’s needs will prevent many problems caused by desperate people doing desperate things. Happier, healthier, more stable households would mean less work for police. Police unions will fight this move, of course, but it’s long overdue.

The trend over the 40 years since the election of President Reagan has been to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. The poor lose services; the rich get tax cuts. The first type of service to go is always oversight and monitoring. That way, when budgets get cut, there is no one to tell us what suffering is the result.

In this 40-year history of public service funding being transferred to private wealth, Republicans reliably make things worse. Democrats have only slowed the trend at times, and never managed to turn it around. Their rich donors made sure of that.

If a lot of public money really is moved to services the public needs, we’ll have to make sure those services don’t get cut back again. In 1980, the last year of his term, President Carter tried to defund psychiatric institutions, where too many people had been imprisoned, often in terrible conditions. Carter intended to build community mental health centers to take the place of the old system. However, as soon as Reagan got elected, he stopped funding community MH care. The old institutions closed; new ones never opened. Poor people with serious mental illness were left with no place to go but the street or the jail cell.

Everything our government spends is our own money. Now Trump’s head of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, says that it is none of taxpayers’ business where he has spent half a trillion dollars. That 500 billion was supposed to help small businesses survive after Trump’s two-month denial of the crisis made a lock-down necessary. US taxpayers have bailed out the airline industry, the fossil fuel industry, big banks, and financial services companies. When will we bail out ordinary people? Not until we elect a new president. And even then, not unless we insist.