The Trump Economy Has Been Terrible for the Non-Rich

As noted in a previous blog, I did not watch the State of the Union since Trump's voice is nauseating and I knew his "speech" would be packed with lies.  On the latter front, Trump lived up to expectations and lied through his teeth, especially about the economy.  One has to wonder when his racist/Christofascist base will belatedly realize that his regime is killing them financially even as the super rich gobble up more of the nation's wealth.  Two pieces look at Trump's glaring untruths.  The First is in New York Magazine and looks at Trump's false claims of a blue collar boom.  Here are excerpts:

Americans are flourishing, Donald Trump insisted during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. Unemployment is down; so is poverty. Everyone is delighted and having a very good time. “Under the last administration, more than 10 million people were added to the food-stamp rolls,” he added. “Under my administration, 7 million Americans have come off of food stamps, and 10 million people have been lifted off of welfare.” Congressional Republicans leapt to their feet and roared approval.

I note, because this is a Trump speech, and certain traditions must be observed: [Trump] The president is not telling the full truth. The number of Americans on food stamps did increase during the Obama administration. But the increase was linked to the recession, which Obama did not cause. . . . . If Trump’s criticism is that the wastrel Democratic president threw gobs of money away on lazy poor people, it doesn’t quite hold.

Trump’s braggadocio about his own record is similarly undermined by reality. [Trump] The president spoke tonight of a “blue-collar boom,” an economic golden age instigated by his administration’s deregulatory policies. This is false — unemployment is down, but wages are largely stagnant, and income inequality reached historic heights last year. People didn’t stop using food stamps because their economic circumstances had drastically improved. The percentage of Americans on food stamps shrank because the Trump administration changed eligibility standards. The president took help away from people who needed it. That’s not proof of a blue-collar boom. In fact, the administration has demonstrated no real interest in creating a blue-collar boom at all.

Trump’s economic priorities consist of slashing welfare, deregulating industry, and passing tax cuts that mostly enrich the wealthiest people in America. No standing ovation can obscure the basic fact that the Trump presidency has been disastrous for the poor. 

As for how those other than the poor have fared, a piece in Yahoo Finance looks at some of Trump's biggest lies.  Here are some highlights:

Trump seems unable to resist lies and exaggerations. When he gave a speech on the economy in November, Yahoo Finance tallied 22 glaring lies on trade, jobs, interest rates, wages and Trump’s record compared with President Obama’s. His main thrust seemed to be taking credit for economic developments that were likely to happen anyway.

“We have added nearly $10 trillion of value to our economy.” GDP was $19.2 trillion when Trump took office, and it’s $21.7 trillion now. That’s a gain of $2.5 trillion, not $10 trillion.

“Under my administration, [median income] rose $5,000.” Census data shows median household incomes have risen from $62,626 to $63,179 since Trump has been in office. That’s just $553. The data ends in 2018, but another 11 months won’t account for that extra $4,447 Trump tossed in.

The average household is $10,000 richer under Trump. He gets this figure by starting with the $5,000 in income gains he’s inflated by a factor of 10, then making similarly gassy claims about savings from tax cuts, deregulation and “energy cuts,” whatever that means. Nobody can come close to substantiating this figure, and ordinary people can fact-check that by looking around for their own magical $10,000 windfall.

“We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars in tariffs that China is paying for.” American importers and businesses are paying the tariffs, not China. The tally so far is about $75 billion in new taxes on businesses on an annualized basis, according to the American Action Forum. This may be Trump’s most prolific economic lie—he’s told it at least 100 times, according to a Yahoo Finance tally.

America is Failing at Child Care

It has been a long time since most American families could afford to have one spouse work and the other be the full time child care provider. Now, both spouses must work full time simply in order to make ends meet financially.  The losers in this are the vast majority of America's children, those not born to wealth who find themselves shuffled from various child care scenarios as their parents work. And this doesn't even factor in America's abysmal record on maternity leave compared to every other advanced nation - and even some not considered advanced. Why does America spend relatively lavishly on senior citizens yet begrudge spending on children.  Sadly, part of the reason is racial - a false perception that "those people" receive childcare benefits whereas "real Americans" (meaning whites) do not. Republican propaganda has fueled this lie for decades.  This belief is a fallacy, of course, as countless white working mothers struggle to work and provide child care for their children.  With two working daughters I see it daily in their juggling act.  A column in the New York Times looks at America's failed treatment of children which is literally harming the nation's future.   Here are highlights:

The other day a correspondent asked me a good question: What important issue aren’t we talking about? My answer, after some reflection, is the state of America’s children.

But policy toward children has attracted far less media attention than the debate over “Medicare for all,” which won’t become reality anytime soon — let alone the so-called Warren-Sanders “spat.” And my guess is that even well-informed voters have little sense of the grim exceptionalism of America’s child-oriented policies, which are Dickensian compared with those of every other advanced country.

A few numbers may be in order here.

Every advanced country mandates some form of paid leave for new mothers, typically three or four months — every country, that is, except America, which offers no maternity leave at all.

Most advanced countries devote substantial sums to benefits for families with children; in Europe these benefits average between 2 and 3 percent of G.D.P. The corresponding number for the United States is 0.6 percent of G.D.P.

Even where the United States does help children, the quality of that help tends to be poor. There have been many comparisons between French and American school lunches: French schoolchildren are taught to eat healthy meals; American children are basically treated as a disposal site for farm surpluses.

What’s especially striking is the contrast between the way we treat our children and the way we treat our senior citizens. Social Security isn’t all that generous — there’s a good case for expanding it — but it doesn’t compare too badly with other countries’ retirement systems. Medicare actually spends lavishly compared with single-payer systems elsewhere.

So America’s refusal to help children isn’t part of a broad opposition to government programs; we single out children for especially harsh treatment. Why?

The answer, I’d suggest, goes beyond the fact that children can’t vote, while seniors can and do. There has also been a poisonous interaction between racial antagonism and bad social analysis.

These days, political support for programs that aid children is surely hurt by the fact that less than half the population under 15 is non-Hispanic white. But even before immigration transformed America’s ethnic landscape, there was a widespread perception that programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children basically helped Those People — you know, the bums on welfare, the welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

This perception undermined support for spending on children. And it went along with a widespread belief that aid to poor families was creating a culture of dependency, which in turn was the culprit behind social collapse in America’s inner cities.

The result was a decline in assistance for the poor children who needed it most.

At this point, however, we know that cultural explanations of social collapse were all wrong. The sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that social dysfunction in big cities was caused, not by culture, but by the disappearance of good jobs. And he has been vindicated by what happened to much of the American heartland, which suffered a similar disappearance of good jobs and a similar surge in social dysfunction.

[W]e’ve established a basically vicious system under which children can’t get the help they need unless their parents find jobs that don’t exist. And a growing body of evidence says that this system is destructive as well as cruel.

Multiple studies have found that safety-net programs for children have big long-term consequences. Children who receive adequate nutrition and health care grow up to become healthier, more productive adults. And in addition to the humanitarian side of these benefits, there’s a monetary payoff: Healthier adults are less likely to need public aid and are likely to pay more in taxes.

It’s probably too much to claim that helping children pays for itself. But it surely comes a lot closer to doing so than tax cuts for the rich.

So we should be talking a lot more about helping America’s children. Why aren’t we?

At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that could greatly improve American lives, and are far more likely to become law. But it’s not too late to refocus.

Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, I hope he or she will give our nation’s shameful treatment of children the attention it deserves.

The Trump/"Conservative" War on the Poor

In addition to pushing policies that will cause many poor Americans to lose health care coverage, Trumpenführer, his boot licker, Mike Pence - who pretends to be a devout Christian - and much of the conservative establishment also seeks to gut the the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a/k/a the food stamps program.   To justify attacks on the needy, the mythology that the program takes away incentives to work and that blacks disproportionately are recipients - neither is true - is continually put out by hypocrisy filled politicians like Paul Ryan and right wing pundits and leaders of "family values groups, both of which constitute a class of societal parasites. in my view.  That Trump backs cuts and restrictions is particularly obscene given his great wealth, and his large inheritance that launched his con-man like career.  The phenomenon underscores my growing belief that one cannot be a moral person and remain a Republican much less at Trump supporter.  A column in the New York Times debunks the myths peddled by the political right and looks at the true motivation: simple cruelty and contempt for those less fortunate.  That evangelicals remain the strongest supporters of this agenda demonstrates their true moral bankruptcy despite feigned religiosity and sexual prudishness. Here are column excerpts:

In general, Donald Trump is notoriously uninterested in policy details. It has long been obvious, for example, that he never bothered to find out what his one major legislative victory, the 2017 tax cut, actually did. Similarly, it’s pretty clear that he had no idea what was actually in the Iran agreement he just repudiated.

In each case, it was about ego rather than substance: scoring a “win,” undoing his predecessor’s achievement.

But there are some policy issues he really does care about. By all accounts, he really hates the idea of people receiving “welfare,” by which he means any government program that helps people with low income, and he wants to eliminate such programs wherever possible.

Most recently, he has reportedly threatened to veto the upcoming farm bill unless it imposes stringent new work requirements on recipients of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still commonly referred to as food stamps.

Let me be upfront here: There’s something fundamentally obscene about this spectacle. Here we have a man who inherited great wealth, then built a business career largely around duping the gullible — whether they were naïve investors in his business ventures left holding the bag when those ventures went bankrupt, or students who wasted time and money on worthless degrees from Trump University. Yet he’s determined to snatch food from the mouths of the truly desperate, because he’s sure that somehow or other they’re getting away with something, having it too easy.

But however petty Trump’s motives, this is a big deal from the other side. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that new work requirements plus other restrictions proposed by House Republicans would end up denying or reducing nutritional aid to around two million people, mostly in families with children.

Why would anyone want to do that? The thing is, it’s not just Trump: Conservative hatred for food stamps is pervasive. What’s behind it?

The more respectable, supposedly intellectual side of conservative opinion portrays food stamps as reducing incentives by making life too pleasant for the poor. As Paul Ryan put it, SNAP and other programs create a “hammock” that “lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

But this is a problem that exists only in the right’s imagination. Able-bodied SNAP recipients who should be working but aren’t are very hard to find: A vast majority of the program’s beneficiaries either are working — but at unstable jobs that pay low wages — or are children, elderly, disabled or essential family caregivers.

Is it about the money? The enactment of the budget-busting 2017 tax cut proved once and for all, for anyone who had doubts, that Republicans don’t actually care about deficits.

But even if they did care about deficits, the C.B.O. estimates that the proposed cuts to food stamps would save less than one percent, that’s right, one percent, of the revenue lost due to that tax cut. In fact, over the next decade the entire SNAP program, which helps 40 million Americans, will cost only about a third as much as the tax cut. No, it’s not about the money.

What about racism? Historically, attacks on food stamps have often involved a barely disguised racial element . . . . I suspect that Trump himself still thinks of food stamps as a program for urban black people.

Nationally, significantly more whites than blacks receive food stamps, and participation in SNAP is higher in rural than in urban counties. Food stamps are especially important in depressed regions like Appalachia that have lost jobs in coal and other traditional sectors.

And yes, this means that some of the biggest victims of Trump’s obsession with cutting “welfare” will be the very people who put him in office.

Consider Owsley County, Ky., at the epicenter of Appalachia’s regional crisis. More than half the county’s population receives food stamps; 84 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2016. Did they know what they were voting for?

In the end, I don’t believe there’s any policy justification for the attack on food stamps: It’s not about the incentives, and it’s not about the money. And even the racial animus that traditionally underlies attacks on U.S. social programs has receded partially into the background.

No, this is about petty cruelty turned into a principle of government. It’s about privileged people who look at the less fortunate and don’t think, “There but for the grace of God go I”; they just see a bunch of losers. They don’t want to help the less fortunate; in fact, they get angry at the very idea of public aid that makes those losers a bit less miserable.

I feel sadness for the children who will be harmed - evangelicals, of course, only care about children prior to birth - but the adults who voted for Trump and Republicans truly deserve to suffer since they allowed racism and bigotry to sway them to vote against their own best interests.  Am I being cruel?  Perhaps, but far less so than your Trump supporters and typical Republican.

Why White Evangelical Christianity is in Big Trouble

Roy Moore's home church.

White evangelical Christians have become the mainstay of the Republican Party and the toxic Trump/Pence regime even as the GOP controlled Congress and Trump/Pence both engage in behavior and push policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message and Christs teachings on the treatment of the poor, the sick, the homeless and the hungry.  As posts on this blog and numerous op-ed columns have noted, the consequence is the killing of the Christian brand as evangelicals give the faith reputation for hypocrisy, selfishness and a hatred of others.  As evangelicals cheered the GOP's passage of a bill that will lavish millions in tax cuts on the obscenely wealthy, including Der Trumpenführer, the failure of the GOP to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, now leaves health care access for 9 million children in doubt.  A piece in the Washington Post sums the situation up as follows: 

Congress appears unlikely this week to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which has become a crucial element in broader negotiations over how to fund the government.

For the Smiths, who are Republicans, the congressional stalemate over the $15.6 billion program is bigger than a question how to pay. It is also a question of who — or what — to believe.

Over the course of the year, their faith in the GOP-led Congress has eroded. Their general disenchantment became more pronounced when lawmakers, including even their home-state senator, Orrin G. Hatch, an architect of the CHIP program, failed to secure the funding.

The tangible effects of that inaction reverberated from the Smiths’ home to doctors’ offices and statehouses across the country. Nine million children use CHIP to help lower their medical costs.

Federal funding for CHIP stopped flowing on Sept. 30. A report put out by the Kaiser Family Foundation published on Wednesday noted that states are running out of money faster than anticipated. Half will have no money for the program by January’s end if nothing is done.

Nearly 2 million children would lose insurance by the end of January, according to the Georgetown Health Policy Institute. 

Seemingly, aiding sick children is not a priority with evangelicals who place a higher priority on a license to discriminate against others than following Christ's dictates.  As an op-ed in the Washington Post notes, if Christianity is dying in America, it is thanks to white evangelicals.  Here are column highlights:

It’s that time of year again, when we hear about the profanity of “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and about Starbucks’ covert “war on Christmas,” run through their seasonal coffee cups. . . . . This year, however, it’s increasingly difficult not to notice that the main threat to Christianity in America comes from American Christians themselves.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard a case from a baker who argued his Christian convictions led him to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Last week, we witnessed the spectacle of white Christians in Alabama who convinced themselves either that the man they hoped to elect as their senator was not so creepy around young girls as to get himself banned from a mall (fact check: he was), or that the behavior that got him banned is actually biblical in character, and therefore okay (exegesis check: it isn’t). In the end, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Moore.

When we’ve reached a place where good Christian folk think it’s a matter of major theological principle not to sell pastries to gay people but are willing to give pedophiles a pass, I think it’s safe to say that American Christianity today — white American Christianity in particular — is in a pretty sorry state.

We’re remarkably ignorant of the history and the current state of the world we inhabit, and no better with scientificknowledge either. We don’t believe the media, but we’ll believe the most incredible Twitter rumor or Facebook post, curated for us by Vladimir Putin. We are surprisingly ignorant about religion, not only other people’s, but even our own.

White evangelical Christians like guns, for example, and do not especially like immigrants. Compared to other demographics, we’re excited about the death penalty, indifferent to those who are impoverished or infirm, and blind to racial and gender inequalities. We claim to read the Bible and hear Jesus’ teachings, but we think poor people deserve what they (don’t) get, and the inmates of our prisons deserve, if anything, worse than the horrors they already receive. For believers in a religion whose Scriptures teach compassion, we’re a breathtakingly cruel bunch.

Indeed it’s hard to know who we do feel pity toward, except ourselves — for we believe that we are the real victims in today’s world. 

The tyranny of fear in white Christian life is especially visible among white evangelicals, who stand out in their opposition to pluralism in America. While all other religious groups, like Americans overall, oppose letting small business owners refuse to serve gay and lesbian people — by margins of roughly two to one — white evangelicals, by 56 percent to 39 percent, say shopkeepers should be allowed to so discriminate. 

Ironically, it may well be that it is Christians’ fears about losing control of the culture that have accelerated the rise of secularism itself. (This has been an open secret in the sociology of religion for almost two decades.) Consider the rise of the “Nones” in American public life — those adults, especially younger adults, who when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none.” For decades that number was very low, but then it began to increase rapidly in the 1980s. Why was that? It seems to be caused by the tight alliance of Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity, with conservative politics over the past several decades . . . . that alliance has repelled many younger people from religion out of a distaste at seeing religion so eagerly bend the knee to short-term political gain. That is to say, Christians’ response to a misperceived crisis have become, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 As the Christmas holiday approaches, I will celebrate being with family and friends.  One thing I will not be doing, however, is calling myself a Christian give what a hideous connotation that label has come to hold - thanks to evangelicals in particular. 

The Republican Created Health Crisis for 10 Million Children

GOP Senator Orrin Hatch

Recently GOP Senator Orrin Hatch ranted when Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown suggested that Hatch and GOP policies were harming millions of regular Americans.  Hatch basically lied and said that he had worked to benefit poor Americans throughout his career. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are working to take from the poor and middle class and lavish tax cuts on the extremely wealthy and large corporations. A case in point is Republican refusal to renew funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a program that benefits poor children otherwise lacking health coverage.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest Republican travesty.  Here are excerpts:

Fifty-six days after Congress failed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), some American children are at risk of losing their health insurance. The deadline to renew the program’s funding was Sept. 30, and Congress hasn’t granted the program $15 billion to continue.

As a result, the popular state-level insurance program for low-income children and pregnant women is facing a funding cliff. While some states may be able to keep the program going through some of next year, half a dozen are projected to run out of funding by late December or early January.

States closest to the funding cliff are preparing to warn customers that funding might disappear, leaving kids in the lurch. There are a few options for those families who rely on CHIP once the funding disappears.

States decide if those families could be enrolled in Medicaid or covered through Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace offerings. But Republicans — Trump in the executive and members of his party in Congress and at the state level — have tried hard block access to both of those alternatives, by sabotaging Obamacare, eliminating support for enrollment, blocking Medicaid expansion, etc.

The program has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, but Republicans, in control of both chambers of Congress and steering a massive tax bill through a lightning-fast approval process, are now unable to the program the funds it needs to survive.

At the center of both House and Senate Republicans’ tax bills is a giant, unnecessary tax cut for corporations: a 20 percent corporate tax cut at a price tag of nearly $1.5 trillion dollars. The Senate has decided one way its bill will raise enough money to fund this is by repealing the ACA’s individual mandate provision, a move that would leave nearly 13 million Americans uninsured.

Trump’s tax proposal would sharply reduce the federal government’s ability to match state funds (the ACA expanded matching) and would cut billions from CHIP’s funding.

During a heated exchange with Sen. Sherrod Brown over the facts of the GOP tax plan, Brown highlighted that it doesn’t include any funding for CHIP, and any tax plan that truly wasn’t geared towards wealthy individuals would include that funding. Hatch replied sharply, “I’m not starting with CHIP.” 

Increasingly, voting Republican is to me a sign of one's moral bankruptcy.  Children don't matter, impoverished elderly do not matter.  No one matters except the wealthy and right wing Christian extremists.  

The Republican Attack on Feeding the Hungry

If Republicans succeed in their effort to provide massive tax cuts to the very wealthy and huge corporations, not only will the federal deficit explode, but the GOP will push for severe cuts in social programs for the poor, spending on public education, infrastructure and a host of other programs  that benefit the majority of Americans.  One of the programs the Congressional Republicans salivate over cutting is the Food Stamp program which helps feed poor children and the impoverished elderly.  It goes without saying that the majority of Christofascists support such cuts - never mind the Gospel message of feeding the hungry - because in their minds those receiving aid from the program are "other" - non-whites, especially blacks, and others targeted for hatred by the "godly folks."    A piece in The Atlantic looks at this ugly agenda that needs to be blocked.  Here are article highlights:

The end of September marked the 40th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, the program that institutionalized the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Its passage was a model of how to make constructive and important legislation, finding common ground by making tradeoffs across all the usual boundaries. In this case, the key players included George McGovern and Bob Dole, Tom Foley and Shirley Chisholm, among others. 

The McGovern-Dole alliance was a striking one. When I came to Washington in 1969-70, I witnessed the near-nuclear conflict between the two men. . . . . But the two men built a different relationship around the issue of food. McGovern cared deeply about hunger in America. Dole cared deeply about the plight of farmers, who were whipsawed by the commodity markets and prices that sank when there was too much surplus food. That was the basis for a partnership that turned into a legendary friendship spanning four decades, until McGovern’s death in 2012. They used the relationship, and their overlapping interests, to build the broad coalition for the Food Stamp Act, . . . SNAP has been an enormous success story, feeding hungry, poor people. Forget the outrageous anecdotes about food stamp recipients feasting on lobster; consider instead a story I wrote about when I last addressed this issue four years ago, from a column by Katy Waldman in Slate, based on a conversation she had with Debra, a single mother in Washington whose food stamp allotment had been cut from $203 a month to $130. This is what Debra said about getting by on $203 a month:

It’s me and my daughter at home. She’s 21. It was bad enough before the cuts. We were eating lunch meat all week, and we only had enough for a can of vegetables a day. Divide $203 by 30 days, and then by three meals, and then halve it for each person. It’s not a lot.

According to Feeding America, 42 million Americans suffer from what the experts call food insecurity—for many, it is simply hunger, period; for others, it is like Debra, rarely if ever getting a full and nutritious meal, often finding near the end of the month that there is nothing left to buy food until the next allotment of food stamps, and perhaps getting by with food banks. According to the Department of Agriculture, 80 percent of SNAP benefits are used within the first half of the month. The consequences of food insecurity are bad; trouble concentrating, more vulnerable to illness. Another longitudinal study found that poor children with access to SNAP benefits, years later had lower rates of heart disease and obesity, along with better high school performance, than kids who did not. Leaving people hungry hurts not just them, but the entire society, adding to health costs and reducing productivity. 81 percent of SNAP benefits go to those who are working or to those we do not expect to work—children, the elderly, the disabled. [Y]et again, Republicans, including the Trump administration, are going after SNAP with a meat ax. President Trump’s budget calls for a cut of more than 25 percent over five years, massively shifting the burden to states, cutting eligibility, and hammering the benefits now going to millions of children, elderly and the disabled. Even as they shift the burden to states that are not prepared to jack up their own budgets, the president and his budget crew want to allow the states to pare basic benefits way below a marginally healthy diet that will make Debra’s situation look great by comparison. For kids, we also have the school lunch program—from which Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue wants to remove the nutrition requirements for healthy food put in place at the urging of Michelle Obama. There is Meals on Wheels for seniors—and the Trump budget blows up community block grants that provide a sizable share of the funding for that program. So if Trump, his Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, and congressional Republicans get their way, the hungry will grow a lot more hungry and a lot less healthy. [T]his is a time for all of us to reflect on what kind of society we want to live in. Let’s keep in mind Hubert Humphrey’s eloquent appeal: The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Our government met that test 40 years ago. We are on the verge of failing it, miserably, now.

Trumpcare: The Face of Republican Evil

Yesterday the GOP Senate healthcare bill saw the light of day and what could be seen was hideous if one feels any concern for children, the non-wealthy elderly and people with disabilities.   When disabled protesters in wheel chairs massed outside the office of GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to protest the bill, as reported by Think Progress and many other news outlets, Capitol police dragged them out of their wheel chairs, handcuffed and arrested.  Perhaps such treatment of the disabled is just a glimpse at what many disabled will suffer if the GOP Senate "healthcare reform" bill is enacted.  This bill is nothing than a humanitarian disaster to quote several critics.  Not surprisingly, the American Hospital Association has been quick to condemn it, recognizing that it would be a catastrophe for many hospitals, especially those in rural areas.   As explained below, this is very personal to me.  A piece in the New York Times looks at what we now know Republicans seek to inflict on millions of citizens in order to give massive tax breaks to the very wealthy.  Here are excerpts:

The bill is aligned with long-held Republican values, advancing states’ rights and paring back growing entitlement programs, while freeing individuals from requirements that they have insurance and emphasizing personal responsibility. Obamacare raised taxes on high earners and the health care industry, and essentially redistributed that income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades.

The draft Senate bill, called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, would jettison those taxes while reducing federal funding for the care of low-income Americans. The bill’s largest benefits go to the wealthiest Americans, who have the most comfortable health care arrangements, and its biggest losses fall to poorer Americans who rely on government support. The bill preserves many of the structures of Obamacare, but rejects several of its central goals.

Like a House version of the legislation, the bill would fundamentally change the structure of Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 74 million disabled or poor Americans, including nearly 40 percent of all children. Instead of open-ended payments, the federal government would give states a maximum payment for nearly every individual enrolled in the program. The Senate version of the bill would increase that allotment every year by a formula that is expected to grow substantially more slowly than the average increase in medical costs. States would continue to receive extra funding for Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to more poor adults, but only temporarily. After several years, states wishing to cover that population would be expected to pay a much greater share of the bill, even as they adjust to leaner federal funding for other Medicaid beneficiaries — disabled children, nursing home residents — who are more vulnerable. High-income earners would get substantial tax cuts on payroll and investment income. Subsidies for those low-income Americans who buy their own insurance would decline compared with current law. Low-income Americans who currently buy their own insurance would also lose federal help in paying their deductibles and co-payments.

The bill does offer insurance subsidies to poor Americans who live in states that don’t offer them Medicaid coverage, a group without good insurance options under Obamacare. But the high-deductible plans that would become the norm might continue to leave care out of their financial reach even if they do buy insurance.

Under the bill, states would be able to apply for waivers that would let them eliminate consumer protection regulations, like rules that require all health plans to cover a basic package of benefits or that prevent insurance plans from limiting how much care they will cover in a given year.

States could get rid of the online marketplaces that help consumers compare similar health plans, and make a variety of other changes to the health insurance system. The standards for approval are quite permissive.

Americans with pre-existing conditions would continue to enjoy protection from discrimination: In contrast with the House health bill, insurers would not be allowed to charge higher prices to customers with a history of illness, even in states that wish to loosen insurance regulations.

But patients with serious illnesses may still face skimpier, less useful coverage. States may waive benefit requirements and allow insurers to charge customers more. Someone seriously ill who buys a plan that does not cover prescription drugs, for example, may not find it very valuable.

Subsidies under the bill would help middle-income consumers buy insurance that pays 58 percent of the average patient’s medical costs, down from 70 percent under Obamacare; it would also remove a different type of subsidy designed to lower deductibles further for Americans earning less than around $30,000 a year. Out-of-pocket spending is the top concern of most voters. The insurance they would buy under the bill might seem cheap at first, but it wouldn’t be if they ended up paying more in deductibles.

To me, this displays complete moral depravity - by those who claim to embrace "Christian values" and their supporters like evangelical Christians.  A piece in  Salon looks at how the GOP got this morally bankrupt.  Here are highlights:

In the hellish months since Donald Trump’s inauguration, a dark parlor game of sorts has cropped up in liberal circles that I like to call “Would an Impeachment Even Be Worth It?” With the full acknowledgment that it’s unlikely to happen as long as Republicans are in charge, participants still sip cocktails and ponder out loud the question of whether booting out Trump on his butt would be enough to save our democracy, considering the fact that the Republican slimeball taking his place would invariably sign a bunch of retrograde legislation setting back this country decades.

These discussions break down into two camps: those who think Trump presents a unique threat to our democracy and replacing him with someone in the succession line, like Vice President Mike Pence or House Speaker Paul Ryan, would at least preserve our democratic norms; and those who think the corruption started long before Trump and has spread throughout the Republican Party, rotting it from the inside out.

[M]y view that the Republican Party as a whole is irredeemably antidemocratic has been borne out, yet again, in the process that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has put into motion to destroy the Affordable Health Act, a process that will likely take out the U.S. health care system as we know it. One could even argue that bog-standard Republicans, under the leadership of Ryan and McConnell, represent an bigger threat to our democracy than Trump, possessing as they do more competence and cunning than the TV-addled overgrown toddler in the White House. McConnell has arranged to have the Senate version of the House’s American Health Care Act . . . . written in secret, with no hearings, no public discussion and no real debate. Republicans are barely even pretending the reason is anything other than the obvious: The bill is so terrible that it defies the will of people of all political stripes and sensibilities, whom legislators supposedly were elected to serve. McConnell’s contempt for the processes, much less the defining principles, of democracy couldn’t be more apparent. But he doesn’t really care. No doubt the election of Trump helped confirm the rising sense among Republicans that they can wipe their collective butts with the Constitution, flip the bird at their constituents and not really worry about losing many seats. Republican voters might not like it, but they like liberals, black people and feminists even less, so they will show up and dutifully vote against the Democrats every time. Losing health care access isn’t great, but for conservative voters, admitting that liberals might have a point is a hell from which there is no escape. . . . bedrock conservative voters don’t care about niceties like the rule of law or government by the people. They just want to punish women for having sex and gripe about “Obama phones,” and don’t care if the price paid is the ultimate ruin of this country.

In 1999/2000 one of my children was stricken with bacterial meningitis.  We were lucky, had purportedly "excellent healthcare coverage"  and my child had a miracle recovery (even if it wiped us out financially).  A key part of her survival was being in close proximity - less than 10 minutes - to a first rate hospital that could stabilize my child before a transport to a world class children's hospital.  If rural and inner city hospitals close thanks to Trumpcare, people will literally die for lack of close proximity to a hospital.  Mere minutes can make a life and death difference.

More recently, one of my grand children was born 2 months early.  He ended up staying in the hospital for a month.  A month earlier, my daughter had been ordered to do bed rest to try to delay his birth. Since Virginia and the USA do not have mandatory paid maternity leave, my daughter lost her heathcare coverage.  Thankfully, she signed up with Medicaid and my grandson had coverage. Without it, he may have died.

Sadly, average Americans simply no longer matter to the GOP, especially those like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.   I'm sorry, but to me, voting Republican is now synonymous with moral bankruptcy. 

Trump's War on Medicaid

America is one of the few advanced nations in the world where the ruling class now in office view the poor, the low income elderly and the sick as little better than disposable garbage. Now, programs that were already inadequate will likely be slashed further and people will literally dies, yet this is what "family values" Republicans and their evangelical Christian supporters want. This mindset is one of the principal reasons I have walked away for Christianity - its loudest adherents are simply foul and horrible human beings.  A piece in Salon looks at the coming slash and burn approach that Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer is poised to unleash on Medicaid.  Having been through a hellish experience seeking placement of the husband's intellectually disabled adopted brother, one has to wonder how people like him will fare under the Trump/GOP agenda.  Will they ultimately simply euthanize such people?  That was the Nazi solution after all and Trump certainly seems to want to go down the road to fascism.  Here are article excerpts:

For all his posturing on populism and sticking up for the “forgotten men and women” of the United States, President Trump is no friend to low-income Americans. In the first days of his administration, he has lined up some policies that, if implemented, are likely to measurably worsen the lives of poor people in this country. Chief among them thus far is his plan for Medicaid, which will be hacked up, shriveled, and left to rot if the new president has his way.

Trump campaigned, somewhat perversely, as a champion of social programs — largely meaning Social Security and Medicare — but Medicaid has long been a target of his. Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the president, confirmed over the weekend that Trump’s plan for the health care system after he tears apart the Affordable Care Act (and its expansion of Medicaid coverage) is to change the Medicaid funding structure.

Specifically, the program will be block-granted, meaning that federal funding for the program will be distributed to the states in one big annual chunk, leaving the states to manage that money as they see fit.

There is a rationale for this, of sorts. As Conway put it, switching to block grants instead of direct federal management will make sure that “those who are closest to the people in need” will run the program.

This need for “flexibility” and “efficiency” has long been the core argument for block grants. But states already have a good deal of flexibility when it comes to Medicaid — what populations and procedures to cover and what eligibility thresholds to observe are all determined (to varying degrees) by state governments. The added “flexibility” that would come with block-granting the program can mean a lot of things, but it’s generally presumed to mean more stringent means-testing, forcing recipients to pay premiums for their care, reducing benefits, and other barriers to eligibility.

Changing the funding structure to block grants means that Medicaid will become less about providing access to health care and more about finding ways to manage costs. “Because a Medicaid block grant is explicitly intended to produce significant federal budgetary savings,” the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes, “block grants are designed in ways that give states considerably less federal funding each year than they would receive under the current financing system.”

Block grants would reduce the number of people enrolled in Medicaid, but it would do so without servicing the ongoing health care needs of those people who are kicked off the rolls.

The inevitable end result of this will be that more low-income people are unable to gain access to health care. And when we’re talking about Medicaid beneficiaries, we’re talking mainly about kids, the disabled and the elderly, who together make up 64 percent of total Medicaid enrollees and account for 77 percent of Medicaid spending. Those are the people who will suffer the most from Trump’s plan to save money under Medicaid by giving state governments both means and incentive to kick needy people off the program.

The irony is that many aging working class whites who voted for Trump may in the near future find themselves unable to secure needed assisted living or nursing home accommodations since the Medicaid funding that would have assisted them will have been cut.  Perhaps I am callous, but a part of me says it will serve them right. 

Jeb Bush the Clueless and Single Mothers

Jeb Bush may be trying hard to distance himself from his idiot brother, but he is quickly reminding us that he is just as out of touch with the reality of the lives of most Americans as was/is the Chimperator.  Moreover, he is out of touch with just how poorly America stacks up compared to other developed countries when it comes to child welfare and well being.  Bush brought all of this into focus while traveling in Europe where he condemned single mothers and said that children needed fathers and mothers to thrive where child welfare exceeds that of the America.  Perhaps Bush was pandering to the Christofascists, but the statement was as obtuse as when Mitt Romney praised Israel's health care system without grasping that it was a nationalized health system - something Romney was campaigning against.   Here are highlights from a New York Times column on the issue:

Last week, Jeb Bush was asked to answer for a passage from his book from two decades ago, “Profiles in Character,” in a chapter titled “The Restoration of Shame,” in which he blamed the “irresponsible conduct” of births to unmarried women on a flagging sense of community ridicule and shaming.

Bush responded, according to MSNBC: “My views have evolved over time, but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of children hasn’t changed at all. In fact, since 1995 … this book was a book about cultural indicators [and] the country has moved in the wrong direction. We have a 40-plus percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.”

He continued: “It’s a huge challenge for single moms to raise children in the world that we’re in today and it hurts the prospects, it limits the possibilities of young people being able to live lives of purpose and meaning.”

But, as a 2014 Pew Research Center report points out:

“It’s important to keep in mind that just because a woman has a nonmarital birth, that does not necessarily mean that the mother is ‘going it alone.’ For instance, in the U.S., more than half of births that occur outside of marriage are to women who are cohabiting.”

That same Pew report reported that 17 European countries (Iceland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Latvia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland and yes, Estonia) have higher birthrates to unmarried women than does the United States.

And according to a 2013 Unicef report, “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries,” all those countries except Latvia (Bulgaria was not included) had higher ratings of overall children’s material well-being (a measure of things like child poverty rates; child deprivation of things like three meals, including some with protein and fresh fruit and vegetables; books; regular leisure activities; some new clothes and properly fitting shoes; and whether the family owned an automobile, traveled for vacations, had a computer and had a separate bedroom for the child).

In addition to material well-being, almost all of them outranked the United States in children’s health and safety, education, behaviors and risks, and housing and environment.

We spend quite a bit of energy blaming births to unmarried women for our woes, but that is only part of the picture. The other part is the way we as a society treat those women and the fathers of their children. Instead of endless efforts to sanctify marriage, the emphasis should be on finding ways to support children and encourage more parental engagement from both parents, regardless of marital status. This includes removing all barriers and penalties for people, especially the poor, to cohabitate.

First, we should seek to reduce the level of unintended pregnancies in this country. As the Guttmacher Institute pointed out in February, about half of pregnancies here are unintended, and “unintended pregnancy rates are highest among poor and low-income women, women aged 18–24, cohabiting women and minority women.”

Second, we have to examine how we have used the law as an instrument to push unwed fathers out of homes, particularly poor ones, rather than encourage them to stay.

Maybe a deficit of shame is not our problem, but rather a deficit of common sense in advancing policy and promoting co-parenting.

Sadly, once a child is born and is no longer a fetus, the concern of the Christofascists and the Republican Party disappears and programs that would aid child well being are slashed, insurance programs cut, and children, especially those of the poor are treated as disposable garbage.  The callousness and hypocrisy is truly breath  taking.  Jeb Bush is another clueless, out of touch plutocrat.  We do not need him holding any public office.

The GOP Rush to Humiliate the Poor

"Don't feed them and they will just go away . . ."

If there was any doubt that the Republican Party has become the party of the rich and modern day Pharisees, for further proof look no farther than the rush by GOP legislators to trash and humiliate the poor through laws that impose draconian provisions and fan the worse untrue stereotypes of the poor living off the largess of the rest of us.  These ugly laws are claimed to be needed to stop food stamps from being used for everything from aboard cruise ships - a total lie - and to stop the poor from buying "surf and turf" while on SNAP.  Some of the claims would make Ronald Reagan who liked to bash "welfare queens" blush.  And who is cheering all of this on?  "Christian conservatives" of course. A column in the Washington Post looks at the ugliness.  Here are highlights:

Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law. 

Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”

Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.

The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.

Last week, the Kansas legislature passed House Bill 2258, punishing the poor by limiting their cash withdrawals of welfare benefits to $25 per day and forbidding them to use their benefits “in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, pari-mutuel facility, or sexually oriented business . . . or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted.” . . .  . it also bans all out-of-state spending of welfare dollars — so the inclusion of a cruise-ship ban is redundant in landlocked Kansas.

A profusion of such laws has bubbled up in states across the country in the last few years, imposing punitive new conditions on the poor. Many of these are from Republican states opposed to big government,  . . . . In their budget plans in Congress, Republicans propose “devolving” food stamps and other programs to state control by awarding block grants with few strings attached. The states, the thinking goes, are closer to the people and have better ideas about how to reduce caseloads. But recent experience suggests that one strategy for reducing caseloads is to harass recipients . .

12 states, most in the South, have passed legislation in the last three years requiring drug testing for public-assistance applicants. Florida’s law, struck down in court, required applicants to pay for the drug test, reimbursing them if they tested negative.

And what if all these new costs for the poor put them out on the street? The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty last year reported a 60 percent increase since 2011 in city-wide bans on public camping and a 43 percent increase in prohibitions on sitting or lying down in public places.

What is also notable about this trend is that while their "conservative" fellow Christians are supporting these attacks on the poor, the "good Christian"  are largely silent and invisible from the fray.  All of which makes me conclude that no deference should be given to religious belief whatsoever.  Both groups of believers are a problem.

One in Three Virginia Children Live in or Near Poverty

Virginia is among the more wealth states in America.  Yet, a new study released by the University of Virginia indicates that 1 in 3 Virginia children either are living in poverty or close to poverty the level.  The response of the Virginia GOP?  Block Medicaid expansion and continue to oppose spending on programs that help the poor and less fortune even as Virginia Republican's cannot prostitute themselves enough to Christofascists by claiming that they revere Christian values.  The hypocrisy is nearly complete, but sadly that is what should expect from both today's Virginia GOP and Virginia Christofascists.  Their agenda is about as far away for the theme of the Gospel message as one can get.  Indeed, as I have noted many times before, they make the Pharisees of the Bible look like wonderful, generous people in comparison.  Here are some highlights from the report's findings:

Child poverty in Virginia is of concern, not only for its current effects, but also for its future consequences. Today’s poor children are likely to have lower educational attainment, lower projected lifetimes earnings, and generally poorer health outcomes as adults—negative outcomes affecting not only these individuals, but also the vitality of the Commonwealth. This report provides a fresh perspective on childhood poverty and family structure in the Commonwealth by using the Virginia Poverty Measure and focusing on three questions:

1. How prevalent is childhood poverty in Virginia?
2. How does family structure relate to childhood poverty?
3. Are current poverty amelioration strategies — particularly those promoting marriage — sufficient given what we know about childhood poverty?

Nearly one in three Virginia children lives in economic distress —  either in poverty or near poverty.   The immediate consequences of poverty, such as inadequate nutrition, persistent anxiety, and impairments to intellectual and emotional development, affect the daily lives of too many children.

Equally troubling, the legacy of poverty follows poor children into adulthood in the form of lower educational attainment, lower projected lifetime earnings,  and higher likelihood of certain health problems, among other negative outcomes.

Because children are dependent on those who raise them, strategies to address child poverty typically begin with families.  In particular, the marital status of parents has been identified and emphasized as significant in ameliorating childhood  poverty.

While  children in single and cohabiting parent families make up one half of all children in and near poverty,  the other one half of all poor and near poor children lives with married parents.

While marriage promotion may play a role in anti-poverty policy, it fails to address the needs of children in poor married parent families.   Initiatives aimed at providing a secure financial foundation for all children should include strategies that  would benefit children in all family structures.  Such proposed strategies include better child support enforcement, childcare subsidies for poor working  parents, and universal pre-kindergarten.

There is more in the study, but the take away is that the Chrisofascist/GOP obsession (here in Virginia, The heinous Family Foundation is a prime example) with promoting marriage as a magic cure all missing roughly half of Virginia's poor and near poor children. Worse yet, the types of programs that would help these children and their families are typically anathema to the Virginia GOP.