“Trillion Dollar Fraudsters”: We’re Looking At An Enormous, Destructive Republican Con Job, And You Should Be Very, Very Angry
By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.
But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.
You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.
So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.
Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.
It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.
O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth. Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent. Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.
So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.
One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.
But I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.
But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.
Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 20, 2015
“A Virtual War On The Poor And Middle Class”: Give House Republicans Credit For Producing A Budget This Cruel
Everyone condemns politicians for being too quick to pander, too concerned with doing the popular thing, too willing to hide what they really believe in order to curry favor with an unmerciful electorate. So when a group of politicians throws caution to the wind and tells us what they really think despite the political risk, they deserve our praise. So it is with the House Republicans, who have just released their new budget.
That isn’t to say the budget is free of gimmickry or outlandish projections (we’ll get to that in a moment). But let’s look at some of the rather notable things it would do:
Turn Medicare into a voucher program. This is accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about how the magic of the market will hold down costs (just as it has with private insurance — oh, wait) and free seniors from the tyranny of their government insurance plan. Let’s see how that will go over.
Roll back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and lay the groundwork for further cuts. All those millions of low-income Americans who got coverage through the expansion are suffering terribly, because “Medicaid’s promises are empty, its goals are unmet, and its dollars are wasted.” House Republicans would liberate them from this oppression by taking away their health insurance. The rest of the program would be block-granted so that states could have “flexibility,” which in practice means the flexibility to dump even more patients from their coverage.
Repeal the rest of the ACA. The subsidies that have allowed millions of people to afford insurance? Gone. Protection against denials for preexisting conditions? Not anymore. If you were expecting this to be accompanied by a few comically vague words about “patient-centered reforms” with which the ACA would be replaced while 16 million people are wondering what to do about the coverage they lost, then you’ve been paying attention.
Cut regulations on Wall Street. They’ve been having a real hard time over there, and they could use a helping hand.
Cut environmental regulations. Let’s face it, if the environment is ever going to learn to take care of itself, it needs a little tough love.
Cut Pell grants, which they describe as “targeting Pell Grants to students who need the most assistance.”
Block-grant food stamps, or turn them into a “State Flexibility Fund.” There’s that word again.
Most of these ideas are presented without any actual dollar figures attached to them, but there is “a magic asterisk” in a table located in an appendix, as Max Ehrenfreund points out. This is more than a trillion dollars of savings they claim they’ll get from “Other Mandatory” spending. Ehrenfreund explains:
Other than health care and Social Security, mandatory spending includes a range of programs such as food stamps, disability payments for veterans, the earned income tax credit, and Pell grants for college students. The budget document did not specify which would be cut. Even presuming very large cuts to these programs, though, it was still unclear how lawmakers expected to come up with $1.1 trillion, said Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
By comparison, the Republican majority in the House voted in favor of reducing the budget for food stamps in 2013. The controversial measure passed only narrowly, with every Democrat and a few Republicans opposed. Many worried the cut was too severe, but it totaled $40 billion, just a sliver of the savings claimed in this week’s proposal.
At this stage, it isn’t so terrible for their proposals to lack specificity; this part of the budget process is meant to sketch a broad outline, while later legislation will set all the particulars. But let’s give the House Republicans credit. They aren’t shying away from talking about voucherizing Medicare (as their Senate colleagues did), and the rest of the document lays out a virtual war on the poor and middle class. They may toss the word “opportunity” in here and there, but the document is a bracing statement of Republican ideology.
Which is as it should be. Sure, the White House is going to criticize it, because the Democrats’ priorities are very different. Now we can have a debate. Should we turn Medicare into a voucher program? Should we toss millions of people off Medicaid and take away the subsidies that allow millions more to afford insurance? Should we cut food stamps and education grants? What are the alternatives? Those are the questions that debate should address, and then the two sides will have to arrive at a budget that incorporates the answers.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, March 18, 2015
“GOP Irrational Hostility”: A Mean-Spirited Interpretation Would Deny Millions Health Care Coverage
Millions of Americans only recently rescued from worry and hardship by acquiring health insurance now face losing it because Obamacare’s foes won’t end their obsessive opposition.
The latest threat to the Affordable Care Act is a Supreme Court case, due to be decided this spring, that will determine whether all Americans are eligible for the subsidies that make coverage affordable. The Court should allow working families all across the country to keep their life-saving subsidies.
The case turns on the kind of technicality that only a lawyer could love. The law says citizens are eligible for subsidies purchased through health-insurance exchanges established “by the State.”
Because of intense ideological hostility, 36 state governments betrayed their uninsured residents and refused to set up exchanges. In those cases, the law called for the federal government to set up exchanges for the states.
Obamacare’s implacable enemies are arguing that only Americans who were lucky enough to live in the 14 states that set up their own exchanges are eligible for subsidies, thereby excluding those who live in two-thirds of our country.
Since 85 percent of purchasers need subsidies to make insurance affordable — the subsidies cut monthly premiums on average from $346 to $82 — that nonsensical, mean-spirited interpretation would deny millions of working Americans decent health insurance.
That’s not what Congress intended when it passed the most sweeping reform of American health care in nearly 50 years. It didn’t mean to punish millions of citizens by denying them health insurance because of what state they live in. The architects of reform — the chairmen of the relevant committees — confirmed this obvious truth in a recent op-ed.
And it’s not only the five million Americans losing coverage who will suffer if the Supreme Court rules against national subsidies. The whole system will risk collapse as healthier enrollees succumb to the cost squeeze first and drop out, leaving sicker, more desperate, more expensive clients behind. Other components of the law — such as the one requiring large employers to offer coverage to their workers — could also be questioned in states that didn’t establish their own exchanges.
Trying to downplay the impact of a potential decision that would cut off millions of Americans from their health insurance, some Obamacare opponents claim states would quickly set up their own exchanges in response.
But there’s no sign that irrational hostility has weakened much to the law — even as millions of Americans experience its benefits, and besides, the vast majority of state legislatures will be out of session by the time the High Court rules in June, so no quick fix will be available.
Another answer would be to change the health-care law to remove any uncertainty about who’s eligible for subsidies, but of course the new GOP majority in Congress is too busy trying to repeal the law altogether to usefully amend it.
Indeed, the current legal attack on the Affordable Care Act is only part of an unrelenting five-year campaign of opposition, one that will presumably continue regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision in this case. There’s no clear historical precedent for so much time, effort and emotion being poured into resisting an improvement in the material well-being of fellow citizens.
Think how American health care could be improved if all that angry passion was redirected into fruitful cooperation! Not even its biggest supporters are content with the Affordable Care Act as it is. Health care is still too expensive, too many people are still left out, health outcomes are still disappointing.
But we can’t address those problems until fiery Obamacare opposition cools. The Supreme Court can help the process along by acknowledging that Congress intended for all Americans — not just those living in certain states — to have access to affordable health care.
By: William Rice, The National Memo, February 12, 2015
“A Rickety Scaffold Of Fictional History”: The Sham Lawsuit That Could Eviscerate Obamacare
Republicans in the House voted on Wednesday to repeal the Affordable Care Act—for the fifty-six time. After four years these show votes have become a tedious joke. But Wednesday’s action had bleaker implications, as it was cast in the shadow of a lawsuit that could undermine the healthcare law in fatal ways.
In a few weeks the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, which contends that the text of the ACA allows the IRS to give subsidies only to people who purchase insurance through exchanges set up by their state, and not to those who rely on the federally run marketplace. If the plaintiffs prevail, some 7 million people in the thirty-four states that have declined to set up their own exchanges would lose the tax credits that subsidize their insurance. Coverage would likely become unaffordable for many of them; without enough people in the marketplace, the law could collapse into a “death spiral.” In human terms, a group of hospitals wrote in a brief supporting the government, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs “would be a disaster for millions of lower- and middle-income Americans…. The ranks of the uninsured will swell again, with all that portends in the way of untreated illness and overwhelming debt.”
To build their case, the plaintiffs have erected a rickety scaffold of fictional history around a single phrase in the 906-page law. The section of the law in question concerns the calculation of subsidies available to people “enrolled in through an exchange established by the State.” The plaintiffs argue that lacking an explicit reference to subsidies available to people enrolled in the federal exchanges, the text indicates that subsidies are only available in states operating their own. Furthermore, the plaintiffs argue, this was not sloppy writing but instead “reflects a specific choice by Congress” to design the subsidies as a carrot to entice states to establish their exchanges and punish them if they failed to do so.
The lack of structural integrity in the plaintiff’s case has become increasingly obvious in the past week, thanks to a sheaf of briefs filed states, lawmakers, and the healthcare industry. In sum, there’s about zero evidence for the challengers’ version of history, and what proof they do muster is shoddy. For example, one brief cites former Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who played a defining role in designing the exchanges. According to the plaintiffs, Nelson thought it was “insufficient to merely allow states the option to establish Exchanges,” hence the need for a stick. But Nelson himself stated recently that he “always believed that tax credits should be available in all fifty states regardless of who built the exchange, and the final law also reflects that belief as well.”
It’s not hard to find conservative lawmakers, like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who will argue now that “the language of the law says…subsidies are only available for states that set up state exchanges.” But the idea that subsidies might be withheld was never articulated by anyone during the congressional debate, nor in the months after the law’s passage—even when states began to signal they would not operate their own exchanges. Instead, the same Republicans who endorse the lawsuit now were passing laws and making statements that affirmed the idea that subsidies would be available in all states. Statements from legislators and state officials that back up the plaintiff’s version of legislative history were made only after the implications of that ambiguous phrase in the ACA began to circulate around right-wing thought shops like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute.
If Congress did intend to use the subsidies as an incentive for states to set up their own exchanges, the fact that many state officials were clueless about the possible loss of tax credits is perplexing. None of the states “had reason to believe that choosing a federally facilitated exchange would alter so fundamental a feature of the ACA as the availability of tax credits,” reads a brief filed last week by nearly two dozen attorneys general representing red and blue states alike. “Nothing in the ACA provided clear notice of that risk, and retroactively imposing such a new condition now would upend the bargain the states thought they had struck,” it continues. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent spoke with a number of Republican state officials involved in the implementation of the ACA who confirmed that the possibility of losing subsidies was never part of discussions about whether or not to set up state exchanges.
The court could strike a blow against the ACA without fully accepting the strained version of history offered by the challengers. But as legal scholar Linda Greenhouse describes in The New York Times, doing so would require the justices to set aside their own principles and precedents. “The court has permitted itself to be recruited into the front lines of a partisan war. Not only the Affordable Care Act but the court itself is in peril as a result,” Greenhouse writes. “To reject the government’s defense of the law, the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their often-stated view of how Congress should act toward the states.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the lawsuit as a deeply silly partisan attack, akin to the House GOP’s repeated votes for repeal. Its basis may indeed be fluff. And yet it’s entirely possible that it will be this absurd case—not sabotage by Republicans at the state level; not lawsuits challenging the law on its constitutional merits—that dooms the signature achievement of the Obama years, at an immense human cost.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, February 5, 2015
“Hurting A Large Number Of Their Own”: Republican Refusal To Expand Medicaid Could Come Back To Haunt Them
Republican legislatures in state after state, from Tennessee to Wyoming, are rejecting the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act for no other reason than pure spite against poor people:
On Friday, the Wyoming Senate shot down Gov. Matt Mead’s expansion plan, and a House committee then pulled its bill. The double whammy effectively killed the state’s chances of enacting the Obamacare option this year.
Lawmakers there acted just days after the Tennessee Legislature shot down an expansion proposal by Gov. Bill Haslam. Together, the two rejections diminish the momentum that Medicaid expansion supporters were enjoying last month, when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence won federal approval of his particular plan and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson agreed to extend that state’s “private option” program for 18 months. Both Pence and Hutchinson are also Republicans.
There’s simply no good reason for any of it, even within the confines of conservative economic orthodoxy. The money for the Medicaid expansion comes from the federal government; the states themselves are at no risk of further expense for many years to come if at all. Republican governors are trying to get the funding for the healthcare of their citizens. Better access to healthcare means fewer illnesses, better productivity, and more money in the pockets of the sorts of consumers most likely to spend in the economy. More money for Medicaid creates a virtuous economic circle at no cost to the states.
No doubt there is a great deal of racism in the motivation of conservative state legislators to deny healthcare to their poorest residents. But in fact, the majority of those on Medicaid are not minorities–and poor whites are overwhelmingly Republicans. So even from the jaundiced view of a bigot these GOP legislators are hurting a huge number of their own.
And it’s starting to cause problems for them. Republicans in Kentucky are doing backflips to pretend to their constituents that there’s some big difference between Kynect, Kentucky’s state exchange, and Obamacare. And even now some Republicans are defecting over it:
Former Republican state Sen. Tim Johnson on Wednesday announced he’s switching parties and challenging incumbent Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves this year.
But the noted Elvis impersonator said he won’t be appearing as the King on the campaign trail.
“Why join the Democratic Party and run for lieutenant governor?” Johnson said before a cheering throng of supporters at a Capitol press conference. “I’ll tell you: We are all Mississippians first. Elected officials should be in the business of helping all Mississippians, not picking out who to hurt.”
The Republican Party has relied for decades on cultural and racial resentment to keep them afloat. But there’s only so long a political party can only abuse the entirety its own people without even an eye toward sowing cultural division, without it coming back to haunt them.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 7, 2015
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