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Republicans Are Trying to Hide Their Health Care Cuts

The United States is the only advanced industrial nation without some form of universal health care coverage/access, instead leaving American citizens to either get coverage through their jobs - typically at high cost - or at the mercy of the rapacious for profit health insurance like United Health Care. The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") sought to improve access to coverage, but the Felon and his bootlicking congressional Republicans are making cuts to support for the ACA and throwing millions off of Medicaid. Compared to European nations where life expectancy is still rising, in the Felon/GOP's America, life expectancies are falling, particularly in red states (the difference in life expectancy in say Massachusetts versus West Virginia is nothing short of shocking). Only in America are average citizens treated as disposable garbage while the ultra-rich are showered with massive tax-cuts.  With the mid-term elections approaching, voters need to realize the cuts are about to get worse, cynically timed to take effect after the mid-term elections.  Obviously, the GOP views much of its base as too stupid to realize they are getting screwed over yet again so that the very wealthy can live ever more opulent lifestyles. A main editorial in the New York Times shouts out about the Felon/GOP's insidious cuts.  Here are highlights:

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

[The Felon] President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, [the Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.

Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct.

In the passive approach, [The Felon] Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans allowed the expiration of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats created the marketplaces for people who fell through the cracks. These people did not receive coverage through their jobs, and they were not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

In 2021, President Joe Biden and Congress increased the size of the subsidies, but they set them to expire in 2025, which mitigated their impact on the federal debt. . . . The federal debt is a genuine problem, having soared in the 21st century relative to the size of the American economy. But taking away people’s health insurance is not the answer. Repealing [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s foolhardy tax cuts, which benefit mostly the wealthy, would have a bigger fiscal effect than his health insurance cuts.

Those health insurance cuts led premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional $3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption.  . . . About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let the president get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

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Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Rich. Again.

The federal deficit has hit an all time high, with a disproportionate amount of the debt piled on under the Felon's two regimes. So what does the Felon and his billionaire sycophants want to do? Give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, of course, further pursuing the Republican Party's effort to create a new Gilded Age, with even more tax burden shifted to the less than wealthy. It's all part of the GOP's long established reverse Robin Hood agenda. Should more tax cuts for the wealthy be enacted,  the deficit will balloon even more, likely driving up interest rates and making things more expensive, not more affordable. Decades of evidence shows that tax cuts for the wealthy never pay for themselves and that "trickle down economics" has been a fraud since the Reagan era. But in the up is down and down is up alternate reality of the GOP and far right, why worry about facts and objective reality.  Meanwhile, the super wealthy, who put lower taxes above all else, are spending millions on the mid-terms to elect pro-tax cutting Republicans to Congress.  Concerns about bankrupting America are nowhere on the radar screen.  A piece at The New Republic looks at this latest round of irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy proposals.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s election time, so the White House, according to Bloomberg’s Katy O’Donnell and Caitlin Reilly, is weighing whether to give the rich more tax breaks. Republicans! They just can’t help themselves!

Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not.

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. . . . . In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. . . . . Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.

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Trump Is Trapped in His War in Iran

The price of oil remains elevated, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Iranian allies in Yemen have fired on Saudi ships in the Red Sea, and the Felon's only words to the American public is "it will work out" as Iran signals that it has the Felon right where they want him.  The Felon won reelection promising to lower prices "on day one" and to not involve the USA in more foreign wars.  Of course, he has done the exact opposite pushing prices higher through tariffs and now higher gas prices and higher fertilizer prices among other things, thanks to the Iran war that the Felon started by choice. One can debate why many voters were stupid enough to believe these lies from the lips of a man who lied over 30,000 times during his first regime, but that doesn't help to save America from the Felon's self-created mess in the Middle East. A piece in the New Republic looks at the situation - a similar article is in The Atlantic - looks at how there is no end to the war in sight and no relief from the associated increase in prices (gasoline hit an all time high for August) any time soon.  Here are higlights from the New Republic:

[The Felon] Donald Trump is not worried about Iran—at least, that’s the message he’s trying to send to panicked investors, frustrated voters, and vulnerable congressional Republicans. “We are low-keying it” on Iran, the president told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Sunday. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” he said, noting the country was “in very bad shape” economically. “It will work out.  It always works out,” he concluded. “It’s like a chess game.”

“It always works out” is never a reassuring message to receive during a crisis, especially when it comes from someone who has declared multiple bankruptcies and launched a failed coup.

Trump, of course, was elected president for the first time after those bankruptcies and won again after the failed coup (and the dozens of criminal charges that followed it). But just because he got lucky twice doesn’t mean he will again. And if the war with Iran is a “chess game,” then it’s one he and the United States are losing badly, with few available moves left on the board.

Iran announced on Monday that it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that carries around a fifth of the world’s oil supply, until the U.S. agrees to its demands, which include the lifting of sanctions, the payment of reparations and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and ending the blockade that Trump believes will ultimately lead to victory.

Now, Iran—not Trump—is playing hardball. And there’s little reason to believe that even the economic chokehold Iran is currently facing will cause its leaders to bend anytime soon, especially since they’re well aware of the damage that the war—in particular its steroidal impact on the price of gas, fertilizer, and other essential goods—is doing to the GOP’s bid to retain control of Congress in the November midterms.

Ever since the war began, Iranian leaders have insisted that they are prepared to withstand crippling economic sanctions and devastating airstrikes, in large part because they believe that Trump and congressional Republicans are far less willing to face the rising prices that have accompanied the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. So far, it’s hard to argue with that read.

Trump is historically unpopular on the economy; his net approval on inflation is 50 points underwater. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are facing an electoral bloodbath that could equal the 2006 wipeout. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, seem more than willing to withstand a blockade until the midterms and to use those elections to their benefit. The only question now is if Trump folds before the midterms or if he allows the war to continue indefinitely—an eventuality that would almost certainly hand the White House to Democrats in 2028.

The war in Iran is already, strategically speaking, one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders in American history. Iran will likely emerge from the conflict, whenever it ends, stronger than before. The U.S., meanwhile, has lost much of what was left of its global credibility, along with the majority of its supply of munitions. But the war is also the capstone of one of the biggest political blunders in American history. Less than two years ago, voters elected Trump because they were frustrated about the state of the economy. Since retaking office, he has done seemingly everything he can to make that economy even worse—and make an ever-increasing number of those voters hate him.

The frenetic nature of Trump’s presidency makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell one overarching story about it. Every week, it seems, features at least three middle-of-the-night tweetstorms, two historic corruption scandals, and one other news-generating disgrace that eats up several days of media coverage.

In just a year and a half, his administration has launched a global trade war, decimated much of the U.S. government, kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation and launched a war against another, all while deploying masked paramilitary goons to snatch people off of the street in our communities and trying (usually without success) to prosecute its critics. In this time, Trump has also survived two historic scandals, one relating to his long-time friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the other involving ongoing self-dealing and corruption that has netted him and his family billions—and that would make a politician in the Gilded Age blush. There’s a lot going on, in other words.

But the biggest story of Trump’s second term is arguably its simplest. Voters returned Trump to power because prices were high, even though the incumbent administration was not really at fault. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation was rampant everywhere in the world.

That didn’t matter. Voters were pissed off about paying too much—so pissed off, in fact, that they reelected the person who had failed to responsibly manage the pandemic and then tried to cling to power after he lost in 2020, notably by ginning up a mob that intended to hang his vice president.

Trump got lucky. A normal administration would have recognized as much on some level. At the very least, it would have made the most important issue of the recent presidential election a focal point: do everything possible to bring prices down and take other steps to alleviate the affordability crisis. Trump didn’t. He and his advisers decided a narrow, fluky election was a historic mandate that gave them clearance to do whatever they wanted. Many of those moves—the massive cuts driven by Elon Musk’s DOGE project, Trump’s global trade war, the war in Iran—sabotaged the economic recovery that had begun under Joe Biden. They did nothing to address the things that people hated about the economy under Biden—and in fact, they all made those things worse to varying degrees.

And so here we are. Even Trump’s voters are fed up. . . . . . Trump’s overall economic numbers are historically bad and have fallen 31 points since he returned to office.

Congressional Republicans, particularly those in vulnerable seats, are campaigning in the constant shadow of these political storm clouds. But Iran’s leaders can see them too, and that’s why they’re playing hardball over the Strait of Hormuz. All Trump can offer, meanwhile, is hollow reassurance that “it always works out.” That adage may be true for him, but it rarely works out for the people caught in his blast radius.

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