I think it is really important to do more than say "people will lose health insurance." The fact is that many people will die and many more will suffer unnecessarily, often life-long, because of this cruel charade perpetrated by Trump and the Republicans.
Additionally, take away life-saving abortions, 3 years ago with the Dobbs decision, which is resulting in deaths of women as a hike in maternal mortality rate of 56% in Texas alone indicates.
Take away Planned Parenthood which will result in more disease and death due to undiagnosed maladies.
One of the most revealing quotes Pat Robertson ever gave was when somebody was asking him about China's one-child policy and the mandatory abortions that came with them... and instead of decrying this as the holocaust that you'd think it is according to "pro-life" logic... Pat Robertson simply said that they were doing what they had to to keep their population under control.
You can read that in one of two ways - 1) "I don't care whether the state is telling women who want abortions that they can't have them, or telling women who don't want abortions that they have to have them, the important thing is that *they* not be the ones making the decisions," or 2) "abortion in China is good because I want the scary nonwhite people to stop outbreeding us, but abortion in America is bad because we on the other hand need to keep breeding." Neither, however, really supports the idea that these people care about "life," even in the Barney Frank sense.
It is my understanding that there were actually very few forced abortions. What is really the awful thing is the infanticide and post-natal neglect of girls. Same in India.
Women are second-class citizens losing the ability to make our own health decisions due to philosophical differences that legally don’t pertain to men. What a future for our daughters and granddaughters. We have to keep raising our voices and voting.
"REJOICE at the suffering, misery, grief, and impoverishment thus created . . ."
It's not talked enough just how much eugenics has made a comeback in the last decade or so. Much of right-wing politics today boils down to "toss as much disease, poverty, instability, and violence at people, the people who survive will be the ones who deserve it, the ones who don't were unworthy and just dragging us all down anyway." (All of them are convinced that they'll be among the ones who make it. The further down the pecking order they are, the more likely it is to be a delusion).
It was already happening before, but Covid absolutely turbocharged it, with the whole "we need to let the vulnerable die so we can develop herd immunity" becoming increasingly mainstream. And of course today the political discourse has basically concluded that the response to Covid was a traumatizing overreaction and we totally *should* have left school teachers and nursing home patients to die.
Yesterday, I read a comment suggesting an intentional American genocide by just such methods as Derelict has listed:
"Take away health insurance so people cannot afford preventive care or treatment once they become ill.
Take away vaccines so children cannot be protected from communicable diseases.
Take away food from families so they're more vulnerable to disease.."
Then add the issue of ending abortion and deportations to despicable gulags.
Who will most likely suffer? The poor of any race, but especially people of color. Pardon my conspiracy theories, but that struck me as accurate, and all the actors in Trump's administration are in on the scam.
I'm an octogenarian, and never in my life have I seen such smug cruelty dealt by Americans to other Americans, men to women, and Republicans to non-Republicans. By Christians, yet!
Christ, in Florida, they want to create an island prison 'guarded' by pythons and alligators.
Like the Business Plot with Smedley Butler, perhaps Mamdani is just the beginning. The ACA has been a HUGE subsidy to the insurance industry and after some deaths, medical bankruptcies & impoverishment, there is going to be a 180 degree retaliation to the public option if the US doesn't experience 20th century European fascism first.
“People will die” is too easy for people to dismiss as hyperbole. The messages need to be very specific and relatable such as this: “It means a lot of people who lose their coverage will now have to say “no” to treatment when they get cancer. It means a lot of young families could be left bankrupt if their new baby has to spend time in the NICU. It means a lot of people who need treatment for diabetes or high blood pressure will simply have to skip it. But it doesn’t stop there: it is going to hit every American in the pocketbook. Because when people whose Medicaid coverage was taken away get in car accidents or have heart attacks they will still be rushed to the hospital and treated – but if they can’t pay the cost for that emergency treatment, it will be passed on to the rest of us who ARE insured through higher insurance premiums and higher co-pays.”
However, the central problem remains: Even if the entire electorate suddenly started paying attention and was calling and writing their members of Congress, there is no indication that Republicans in Congress give a rat’s ass about what their constituents think right now. It’s almost as if they’re counting on not having to worry about midterm elections, perhaps because those elections are already decided or just won’t happen.
It's even worse than that. What I don't hear enough about - even in the industry - is that, even though payments for Medicaid are lower than cost, it is large enough that it substantially pays for much of the foundation of the healthcare system. Take it away and we will all see even less access than we have now (which gets worse every year, particularly after COVID when many providers left the profession). Costs will go up and access will decrease for everyone. Hospitals will fail and there will be fewer doctors. It's just a financial reality.
Your point should be repeated everywhere. Rural hospitals and metropolitan (core city) hospitals will close because of the reliance they had on Medicaid for prevention and for infrastructure. Bomb.
This is an undercovered point about how the calamitous effects of this bill will cascade from the core action of kicking some people off of the health insurance rolls.
And it is likely to get worse once this first domino falls. When the GOP gets people comfortable with this move they will then feel free to let Obamacare subsidies lapse and rollback other provisions that have made the ACA effective and popular over time. I fear that people who are beneficiaries of all of this but do not understand that a large D Democratic law is the reason (like Social Security and Medicare as well), will wake up to the reality only after the pot begins to boil.
That is one side of the coin. The other side is that health care gets more and more taken over by private equity - for (more) profit. Which means less doctors and more nurse practitioners (of the limited education/experience kind). Each of these developments is scary, combined they are very scary.
The point about the bill affecting people who actually have health insurance is important. I feel that most of those people are thinking, the cuts to medicaid won't affect me since I have my own insurance. The effects on them are indirect but real.
Even relatively wealthier ACA enrollees who are currently not eligible for premium subsides will see their rates go up, possibly into the unaffordable range, as younger, healthier enrollees are pushed out due to loss of subsidies.
You have squarely pegged the corollary effects-that-may-be: in addition to the cruelty, the bbb budget bill would result in newly uncovered individuals presenting themselves at ER facilities and, at unnecessarily elevated cost, be treated at the expense of the public and those of us with coverage whose premium and co-pay rates will have to increase at an accelerated pace. It is, in all but name, a form of direct and indirect taxation not addressed by the ‘conservative’ party. Where, exactly, is the ‘beauty’ in this piece of legislation?
Right. Which is why Obama pushed the affordable care act. I don’t think republican constituents (maga) get it. The republican congress and politicians just don’t care
I wish that every Congresscritter had to spend a few hours watching my mother-in-law trying to keep breathing on her last night alive. She died of lung cancer.
You have my sympathies. My dad also died from lung cancer. It's an ugly disease in the end. That's the LAST thing anyone wants to be worried about at a time like that: how to pay the bills.
Good summary! I often tell people how I had to educate my doctor about how Medicaid cuts would affect the balance sheet of the hospital where she works. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
"People will die" is what these men (republicans, MAGA leaders, TechBro, Project 2025) want and are causing. They have said so.
The deaths of individual members of "the herd" will benefit them, just as ICE kidnapping people off the public streets and "disappearing" them benefits the Trump&CO administration: it terrifies the general populace. People know nobody is safe.
The government that Reagan warned against has been created by Reagan and his Owners. Its a glorious new era . . . for them.
Karen Hilyard - Bravo! You gave us a clear and concise example of how pulling Medicaid from a few increase the cost burden shared by all. Good analysis.
However. I HOPE (emphasis intentional) that your intimation that our elections will no longer be fair and equitable will not become reality.
Here’s how the opinion editors at the WSJ are spinning it. Of those who will lose Medicaid, some are unemployed. They say they watching TV and playing video games all day. Then there are working illegals. Their dislike of illegals is boundless. Bottom line: we don’t care, they deserve to lose it.
The Republican playbook is the same as it ever was...a white panic to gain power, then savage the vulnerable and give unneeded tax breaks to the rich. As bears shit in the woods, as the sunrises in the east, this is their one trick pony.
And it works year after year, and the voters never seem to realize what is happening. Or maybe the voters do know and approve. I have pretty much given up on politics other than as a spectator sport.
I asked a maga relative "who will take over your disabled sisters medical costs when these cuts are implemented?" Foxxx news people where shocked to learn cuts for people like her were possible/probable. I think this is the way in. Name a family member reliant on Medicaid and ask. (After recovering from his shock he spoke about $400 toilet seats.)
Soylent Green is a fictional food product, initially claimed to be made from plankton, that sustains the majority of the world's population in a dystopian future plagued by overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion. However, the film's shocking twist reveals that Soylent Green is actually made from recycled human remains. The film serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked corporate greed, overpopulation, and environmental degradation, using the revelation about Soylent Green to highlight the depravity of a society pushed to its limits.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Dystopian Setting:
The film is set in a future, specifically 2022, where overpopulation, pollution, and resource shortages have created a desperate and impoverished world.
Soylent Corporation:
Soylent Industries is a powerful corporation that controls the food supply, offering various food products, including the titular Soylent Green.
The Deception:
Initially, Soylent Green is presented as a high-protein food source made from oceanic plankton.
The Revelation:
The film's climax reveals that Soylent Green is actually made from the bodies of the dead, recycled into food in a desperate attempt to sustain the starving population.
The Meaning:
The revelation of Soylent Green's true ingredients is a powerful commentary on the potential consequences of environmental destruction, overpopulation, and corporate control, emphasizing the lengths to which humanity might go in the face of resource scarcity.
In the current sequel, Soylent Green will be made of the people rounded up by ICE. When the original movie was made, the assumption was that revealing the truth would spark outrage. Today the revelation would prompt the meme, "Eveything tastes good with Tabasco sauce."
Please keep it real. Work-bound immigrants were disliked for many years already and treated accordingly. You just did not know it, or you did not care.
Sorry I didn't place the all caps SARCASM label on the post. The point was that, if anything, the movie missed out on the depths of dystopia that are currently being plumber.
So you have an AI program? What a way to wet-noodle one of my favorite movies. Sorry to say so. But yes, in the Soylent Green future the oceans are dead because of pollution and there is no plankton (or fish) anymore to turn into food. That revelation that was a real shocker when the film was released in 1973. As was the recycling of people. And a young woman being "furniture". We did not see it as the warning it could have been.
Sorry to be the wet noodle. I copied text from an explanation of the movie. It’s interesting in the movie this was taking place in 2020. Pretty close isn’t it?
Did you watch the movie or did you just ask an AI for "an explanation"? Hey! I would never call you a wet-noodle! Just the text the AI burps up. What makes Soylent Green so good is the actors, Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, who played the last role of his illustrious career - he died two months after completion of the film. If you have a chance please watch it!
The year 2022 has no real meaning - 50 years seemed probably a long time to the makers. (It is not.) The 1982 movie "Blade Runner" was set in the future of 2019. LA does not have "spinners" (flying cars) yet. "Running Man" portrayed the USA around 2018, when criminals are hunted and killed in a life TV show. That is not happening yet. Although our TV's etc. now show how unsuspecting, probably innocent, people are thrown in vans by ICE.
Perhaps a seemingly large percentage of voters, like Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol", would reply, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
However, there was a blow to the blowhard when Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that key health care issues in the "rich get richer, poor get poorer and sicker" bill need to be stripped out of the package, sending infuriated Senate Republicans back to the drawing board.
I have never heard of a parliamentarian before in previous majority republican negotiation of bills....do these politicians just pull legal terms/positions out of their ass for us uneducated-in-the-law, everyday lay people?
The Parliamentarian is the official advisor to the Senate on the interpretation of Standing Rules and parliamentary procedure.. An important role is to decide what can and cannot be done under the Senate's budget reconciliation process.
Make no mistake, this is a relentless policy of Social Murder. We speak of the individuals who will lose coverage, delay care, get care in Emergency rooms, and die preventable deaths, but many communities will lose rural hospitals (16 projected in WA alone). So even the uninsured will lack basic care, obstetrical units close first and women will have to drive hours to deliver babies, chronic disease complications, etc. etc. Just limiting the counting of deaths to the people losing Medicaid coverage will vastly undercount the preventable harms and deaths.
And, rest assured, there will be no federal agency tracking these deaths so they will go unreported. No enemy of the US could ever imagine causing such harm to the US population. The Republicans do not care this will hit their rural constituents like a neutron bomb, erasing whole towns of voters.
And the millionaires and billionaires who get the tax cuts? They will take the money and run.
Social Murder. Deliberate and cold blooded. With impunity.
Since Dobbs, women have died and been maimed and it’s barely covered by mainstream news. If I didn’t read Jessica Valenti’s newsletter on Substack I wouldn’t know the full scope of the war on women. We’re losing, folks! This needs to change.
"It's happening because our government has been taken over by fanatics who believe that, one way or another, they can escape the electoral consequences of making millions of Americans’ lives much, much worse."
Well, TBH, the GOP has made its mission immiseration of the lives of lower-income people seemingly forever, and it's seen its vote totals grow from exactly that plundered demographic, so it remains problematic if "consequences" will indeed redound to tRump and this GOPer Congress, and that the targeted electorate dependent upon Medicare and SNAP will continue to reliably vote against their primary and essential interests.
What you're saying, Paul, is that the Big Lie won't work anymore...a yuuge ask, and I wouldn't take that bet.
Americans with health insurance need to understand this will affect their healthcare too. Rural areas already have been losing providers, so cutting off a source of revenue that keeps practitioners available will accelerate the loss. Urban insurance holders will see their premiums increase as hospitals shift the cost of serving the uninsured onto the insured. The ACA was never really focused on the poor, it was a way of addressing the irritation increasing premiums caused middle class insurance holders. Considering the rampant narcissism of our era, Democrats top line messaging should be “your insurance premiums will increase”.
ACA was a gift to the insurance companies. More people could take out a policy, thanks to tax credits. People earning less than $ 16,000/year were not eligible. The big win for consumers was that they could no longer be refused based on an existing condition and the insurance co. could no longer cancel a policy for that reason. But for many the premiums as well as the co-pay/deductible were too high.
I never understood why Medicare was not extended, by lowering the required age over a number of years. Thanks to Gap Programs etc. the insurance companies can still make money.
Professor Krugman wrote recently about the impacts of imports on certain parts of the US and the fact that resource depletion has also devastated many towns that are now decaying and poverty stricken. He wrote that the Democrats failed to do enough about this. This bill is the RepublicRats solution to the problem - by killing most of these useless people off.
Once again, someone blames Democrats but not Republicans. Stop it. Now. Those small towns didn't die because one party forced business to relocate, factories to close, or big ag to take over. Those were choices that were made by those businesses in search of more profit. Republicans have failed us far more than Democrats. Why isn't more blame placed with them?
Just to be clear, I am not using the movie Soylent Green in the literal sense but as a metaphor that we, the poor, the people of color, the disabled , LBGQT are expendable.
To be more specific, Republicans in Congress want to cause suffering and death. They have no argument in support of doing so. They are simply evil people.
Congressional Republicans don't want to cause suffering and death. But if suffering and death are a byproduct of destroying effective governance, or reducing taxes, it's a trade off they're willing to make, or are being paid to make, which ultimately is probably worse than if they were simply evil.
I think that most good people cannot wrap their heads around the fact that some people are evil. I came to accept that fact only after I saw the actions of the current presidential administration and the current Republican Congress's refusal to stop the kidnapping of people without a warrant, deporting them without due process to be tortured, and breaking up their families. During the first Trump administration, I was willing to see these people as severely misguided, stupid, or mentally ill. No more. They are evil.
Republicans like hurting people. And not just politicians or pundits or financiers; ordinary Republican voters like hurting people, and they demand it from their politicians. It's not the only thing they care about, but there's nothing they care about *as much.*
With respect to health care and food stamps, I disagree. Taking those away from people doesn't destroy effective governance. It causes people to get sick and be hungry and die. And they don't do it to reduce taxes, because they'd reduce taxes anyway. It's not as if they care about the deficit.
Some of them, maybe most of them, have this "belief" that some people are "undeserving" of life. They believe that only those born to wealth are "entitled" to live in some semblance of dignity, or even live at all for that matter.
Effective governance counteracts all of that, so they are indeed against effective governance for that reason.
Of course they don't care about the deficit - it's the excuse they use to cut benefits to the poor.
Sorry if I'm splitting hairs, but I agree that Republicans oppose effective governance. They show that, obviously, when they fire federal employees, illegally impound money that Congress appropriated, illegally destroy agencies like USAID, and so forth. Denying people health care and food doesn't seem to advance the end.
I think it's probably far less principled than that. Ultimately, I think these Republican politicians are simply opportunistic. They're being courted by Special Interests, and understand that if they just play ball, they'll be rewarded for their decisions.
It's interesting to me how Republicans can lure support for tax cuts from people who will never benefit from those tax cuts. It's Trickle-Down Economics all over again. I don't believe that there are financially insecure Republicans out there who feel that wealthy people deserve tax cuts, even if they themselves won't benefit from it. Call me cynical, but I don't. In that case, how are these poor Republicans convinced over and over to support tax cuts?
You're totally right. The poor Republicans don't really support tax cuts so much as they want to "own the libs". Tax cuts, along with the corresponding cuts to Medicaid and SNAP is one way to "own the libs".
They don't realize that they'll be hit by it too - because Faux Newspeak tells them they won't. They'll find out when the closest hospital to them - probably already 20 miles away - shuts down.
I don’t think (R)’s make any secret of the fact that they have an honest belief that the American safety net is to big and too broad. If you ask, they’d tell you they don’t *want* a particular person to suffer, but in aggregate they think society is better if individuals bear a higher level of risk. I think they’re wrong, misguided, underinformed…but I don’t think it’s somehow invalid to think that. Does that make them evil? I’m just not a fan of that framing…
I think the OBBB is terrible. I think (R)’s are hypocrites and ignorami. But let’s be clear…almost *every* public policy decision involves tradeoffs - and many mundane policy preferences alter the risk of injury/death to certain sub-populations. None of us wish suffering on others, but I doubt even the biggest hearted people here would be willing to pay an *infinite* price to reduce strangers’ suffering and risk of death. Agree? Then the difference becomes a matter of where you choose to draw your line…what price would you pay to reduce suffering? Are there things you’d rather do with your $$ to reduce suffering? We all have lines, it’s just that (R)’s draw theirs in a different place…how different does my line have to be from yours before you call me ‘evil’?
I mean, if you or I emptied our savings accounts today and sent that money to a charity feeding the poorest kids, it would doubtless reduce suffering. So does the fact that neither of us is on our way the bank right now an indication that we are somehow ‘pro suffering and death’? I don’t think so. Even though suffering and death is an unambiguous outcome of our choice not to help, I don’t think that makes us evil…
Yep. Necrophiliacs is how I refer to them. They love death. How else to explain cutting off healthcare, destroying our vaccine programs, stopping cancer research, etc.
The cruelty is so important to them that certain Republicans are calling for the Senate Parliamentarian to be removed -- because she is taking away some of their desired cruel provisions.
All the folks who keep their insurance will also be affected as emergency uncompensated care still happens and those costs will be paid by other people's insurance.
Hospitals sunk by uncompensated care will close and not treat anyone.
Everyone should care. The leopard is indeed eating your face
Professor Krugman: and so the rethuglican DeathCult marches on. how many thousands of deaths will be created by this nasty ass bill? how much will more misery will it create? how many thousands of bankruptcies? how many additional homeless?
Many poor people in the USA are not white. They will suffer and die. So will many poor white people. But, haven't all of these People been designated useless by men like Musk and Thiel? As they die off, won't the more well off white Republicans have as many babies as a woman can pump out in her lifetime and raise to adulthood? That will be her job. A job whose costs will be covered by her husband, just like in the old days. Project 2025 shows this. Their actions acquiring the 2024 election win and their actions since inauguration show this. They are taking over, and according to them, there is nothing we can do about it. We being those who support and value all the People. We are at about half and half now, given standard deviations, variability, and life experiences. Profit or People. They are part of the People, a fact they seem to have forgotten. Sure, that is a lot of data to correlate, to understand. Some of that data will be Likert (the life experiences). I am one Earth witness: I was poor and would have died without help from the system. Many are like me, but with education, we contribute to our society in many useful ways. The problem of sequestration of resources to a very small, 0.01% of Men, has persisted in various amounts by metric here on Earth for as long as we have text records. Text records are manipulated on Earth by time and location and tell the current narrative for humans in many forms. We are in a period where many folks are not wanted or needed by other classes of person. It will be okay with about half of us to get rid of that poor class of person. Unfortunately, their deaths will be seen as necessary. For the other half, they will be seen as allowed and not necessary with time and lucre investments that are reasonable, given the actual physical and fiscal existence of all The People, not just some. Crucial difference here.
This is what I do not get. Poverty costs money. To have a successful capitalistic society you need a rather well-to-do population. With these policies Republicans are digging their own grave.
Bytheway the women only good for house-keeping were invented many years ago already, when politicians decided that the wives of foreign workers could not be given the right to work. Democrats happily endorsed this idea. They also helped to put the "anti-immigrant" legislation of 1996 in place. A lot of the current issues originate from that law. Prez Trump c.s. are the pinnacle of migrant-misery, but they did not invent it. Welcome to my world.
I agree that the Republican position to funnel money away from consumers is not wise, but poor people and middle class people spend less on items than wealthy folks. If the wealthy kill off everyone who isn't already in the top 10% of the 340,000,000 folks in the US, those men and their women think this is good. These wealthy folks will spend enough to keep businesses doing well. Hence, kill or enslave anyone not wealthy. Women have been held down economically as housewives and caregivers for a very long time in most countries. As for immigration, that has been a rising problem for people in the US and Europe since rising population numbers, wars, and climate change all became drivers for mass migrations that were happening essentially to save people's lives. But, the people migrating out of their autocratic, violent, over-populated, and resource poor countries are also poor or middle class. The attitude of the wealthy (read Trump, Vought, Musk, and Thiel now, but all wealthy people before that): use the poor and middle class as servants, slaves, or they simply kill them through various means. That is the wealthy attitude to life. That does mean all US Republicans and conservatives, and it can mean the same thing to any country run by people who can afford to keep a society affloat money wise. All wars enrich the wealthy and kill off the poor and middle class who fight those wars for the rich. Now, the wealthy do need someone to grow their food, harvest it, and distribute it. They need someone to make all objects used. But, these maker people must remain servants or slaves, and they sure need to die in wars to enrich the wealthy. That seems to be how it works on Earth.
The right has a military grade propaganda machine that will continue to genuflect at the feet of their criminal orange Dear Leader while blaming Democrats for every ill in society.
Enough people have been turned into True Believers of the fake right news empire to ensure there will be no consequences for their actions.
And when Emergency Departments at remaining hospitals are inundated with folks needing care who have no medical insurance, who will be paying?
~Emergency care will be compromised for those needing it,
~we all will be paying more for care to keep hospitals financially viable, and
~most importantly people who need healthcare will no longer have access to preventative care.
When will the thievery end? Who will stop this brutality? Apparently not our Senators in West Virginia where a major part of the population depends on Medicaid and Snap. No, Republican Senators Shelly Moore Capito and Jim Justice (yes, that is his last name) plan to steal healthcare and food from the very folks who voted them into office.
The situation is baffling. I'm not sure I'd describe it as blaming the victim. It's more like dealing with a really strange cult. LBJ had some less charitable comments on the phenomenon.
A cult, yes, I’d agree. WV, as do other societies reliant on extraction of natural resources for their economies, has a history of exploitation of the population as well as the land. Our political leaders have been bought and paid for by the exploiters as they sell off the peoples’ reliance on cooperating with the system to exist. Isolation, hero culture of mining, lack of excellence in education. It all could have been different. It still could be. Eliminating access to healthcare is not a step in the right direction.
But that's fine. America, as a nation of oligarchs, can't continue to go on like this, and thus, it has to be dismantled. American Empire has to end and start afresh. It would've been much better if the foreign power had controlled it.
All this talk about low information voter (or similar terms) maybe true from election to election. But what you have now is the failure of representative democracy. The members of the congress are not "low information" by any means; they know very well that the bill is not in favor of the people they represent. They sell out, not for the benefit of a "common good" but for the benefit of the paymasters of the electoral process.
I said failure of representative democracy. That concerns the legislative branch. On the judiciary side, you now have a Supreme Court ruling, which a member of the dissenting 3-6 minority calls "a travesty for the rule of law". The executive is what it is, Trumpian. What more does one need to describe a failed state?
There was nothing to admire in the US Constitution. It's a failure through and through. America, still, has not achieved the purported dream of a free nation. It is all pomp and circumstances around the rhetoric of freedom, which ain't a thing in the US at least for the majority of the people. We aren't a multicultural, multiethnic liberal democracy.
At the time the US was founded, there were ZERO democratic countries on the planet.
ZERO.
The US Constitution has flaws, but it built on lessons from history and the US under the Articles of Confederation to create a stable democratic government.
Our existence and success enabled others around the world to argue that monarchy and its shorter term cousin dictatorship are not the only viable systems of governance.
The fact that we are still working toward a more perfect Union, and are not there yet does not diminish this milestone.
Sorry. I disagree. It's a brilliant document. Admittedly, it has its flaws but we have tried to fix those with amendments. Unfortunately, the system has come off the rails after Trump 2.0 and the document flirts with becoming irrelevant.
MAGA won't care. Look at the red states that did not expand medicaid are they still Red? Why yes they are, Did the GOP lose any votes, not that I can see
I remember when they complained about Obama’s so-called “death panels.” Here goes another projection in which they create something even worse than their accusation. America, you’re falling asleep on the job.
The economic ramifications are simply enormous. The spending cuts this bill introduce will ripple out through the economy. It cuts nearly $1 trillion. That money supports families, feeds children, keeps people alive. This is the greatest experiment in Social Darwinism in our history. It is not going to be pretty.
I think it is really important to do more than say "people will lose health insurance." The fact is that many people will die and many more will suffer unnecessarily, often life-long, because of this cruel charade perpetrated by Trump and the Republicans.
Take away health insurance so people cannot afford preventive care or treatment once they become ill.
Take away vaccines so children cannot be protected from communicable diseases.
Take away food from families so they're more vulnerable to disease.
REJOICE at the suffering, misery, grief, and impoverishment thus created . . .
Thus spake the GOP.
Additionally, take away life-saving abortions, 3 years ago with the Dobbs decision, which is resulting in deaths of women as a hike in maternal mortality rate of 56% in Texas alone indicates.
Take away Planned Parenthood which will result in more disease and death due to undiagnosed maladies.
This is what >they< call "Christian morality". They're "saving unborn babies". Once they're born, they're on their own.
As Barney Frank once noted: for Christians, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
Even that's not really true.
One of the most revealing quotes Pat Robertson ever gave was when somebody was asking him about China's one-child policy and the mandatory abortions that came with them... and instead of decrying this as the holocaust that you'd think it is according to "pro-life" logic... Pat Robertson simply said that they were doing what they had to to keep their population under control.
You can read that in one of two ways - 1) "I don't care whether the state is telling women who want abortions that they can't have them, or telling women who don't want abortions that they have to have them, the important thing is that *they* not be the ones making the decisions," or 2) "abortion in China is good because I want the scary nonwhite people to stop outbreeding us, but abortion in America is bad because we on the other hand need to keep breeding." Neither, however, really supports the idea that these people care about "life," even in the Barney Frank sense.
Posting my regular PSA that the Religious Right's focus on abortion was NEVER about abortion. It was ALWAYS about bringing back Jim Crow.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
They're master hypocrites.
It is my understanding that there were actually very few forced abortions. What is really the awful thing is the infanticide and post-natal neglect of girls. Same in India.
Pat might've spoken differently if most of the Chinese had been Christian.
So what they call "after life" is what we call life
Not exactly. "After life" is a trope that various Christian leaders use to exert power and control over those who've survived birth.
https://youtu.be/nZdRMBTF-hQ?si=OK8IXh81hZnmaBtv
I miss him.
Awesome. Classic.
They are the pro-birth party, not the pro-life party.
I would describe them as the pro-death-after-birth party.
Or Death Cult, for short.
Women are second-class citizens losing the ability to make our own health decisions due to philosophical differences that legally don’t pertain to men. What a future for our daughters and granddaughters. We have to keep raising our voices and voting.
I agree: women are losing whatever equal rights we have had. No one controls men's lives like the GOP controls women's lives.
"REJOICE at the suffering, misery, grief, and impoverishment thus created . . ."
It's not talked enough just how much eugenics has made a comeback in the last decade or so. Much of right-wing politics today boils down to "toss as much disease, poverty, instability, and violence at people, the people who survive will be the ones who deserve it, the ones who don't were unworthy and just dragging us all down anyway." (All of them are convinced that they'll be among the ones who make it. The further down the pecking order they are, the more likely it is to be a delusion).
It was already happening before, but Covid absolutely turbocharged it, with the whole "we need to let the vulnerable die so we can develop herd immunity" becoming increasingly mainstream. And of course today the political discourse has basically concluded that the response to Covid was a traumatizing overreaction and we totally *should* have left school teachers and nursing home patients to die.
Spot on, social Darwinism- which is a racist theory at baseline…
Yesterday, I read a comment suggesting an intentional American genocide by just such methods as Derelict has listed:
"Take away health insurance so people cannot afford preventive care or treatment once they become ill.
Take away vaccines so children cannot be protected from communicable diseases.
Take away food from families so they're more vulnerable to disease.."
Then add the issue of ending abortion and deportations to despicable gulags.
Who will most likely suffer? The poor of any race, but especially people of color. Pardon my conspiracy theories, but that struck me as accurate, and all the actors in Trump's administration are in on the scam.
I'm an octogenarian, and never in my life have I seen such smug cruelty dealt by Americans to other Americans, men to women, and Republicans to non-Republicans. By Christians, yet!
Christ, in Florida, they want to create an island prison 'guarded' by pythons and alligators.
"Republican" = polite speech meaning "heartless, gutless, greedy bastards".
Eugenics.
Take us back to the Depression pre-Roosevelt. The rich were delighted with the situation.
Like the Business Plot with Smedley Butler, perhaps Mamdani is just the beginning. The ACA has been a HUGE subsidy to the insurance industry and after some deaths, medical bankruptcies & impoverishment, there is going to be a 180 degree retaliation to the public option if the US doesn't experience 20th century European fascism first.
And cut taxes for the wealthy.
“People will die” is too easy for people to dismiss as hyperbole. The messages need to be very specific and relatable such as this: “It means a lot of people who lose their coverage will now have to say “no” to treatment when they get cancer. It means a lot of young families could be left bankrupt if their new baby has to spend time in the NICU. It means a lot of people who need treatment for diabetes or high blood pressure will simply have to skip it. But it doesn’t stop there: it is going to hit every American in the pocketbook. Because when people whose Medicaid coverage was taken away get in car accidents or have heart attacks they will still be rushed to the hospital and treated – but if they can’t pay the cost for that emergency treatment, it will be passed on to the rest of us who ARE insured through higher insurance premiums and higher co-pays.”
However, the central problem remains: Even if the entire electorate suddenly started paying attention and was calling and writing their members of Congress, there is no indication that Republicans in Congress give a rat’s ass about what their constituents think right now. It’s almost as if they’re counting on not having to worry about midterm elections, perhaps because those elections are already decided or just won’t happen.
It's even worse than that. What I don't hear enough about - even in the industry - is that, even though payments for Medicaid are lower than cost, it is large enough that it substantially pays for much of the foundation of the healthcare system. Take it away and we will all see even less access than we have now (which gets worse every year, particularly after COVID when many providers left the profession). Costs will go up and access will decrease for everyone. Hospitals will fail and there will be fewer doctors. It's just a financial reality.
Your point should be repeated everywhere. Rural hospitals and metropolitan (core city) hospitals will close because of the reliance they had on Medicaid for prevention and for infrastructure. Bomb.
This is an undercovered point about how the calamitous effects of this bill will cascade from the core action of kicking some people off of the health insurance rolls.
And it is likely to get worse once this first domino falls. When the GOP gets people comfortable with this move they will then feel free to let Obamacare subsidies lapse and rollback other provisions that have made the ACA effective and popular over time. I fear that people who are beneficiaries of all of this but do not understand that a large D Democratic law is the reason (like Social Security and Medicare as well), will wake up to the reality only after the pot begins to boil.
That is one side of the coin. The other side is that health care gets more and more taken over by private equity - for (more) profit. Which means less doctors and more nurse practitioners (of the limited education/experience kind). Each of these developments is scary, combined they are very scary.
I like my NPs. They have to be signed-off by a physician. So in essence there is a team working with the patient. But they're very knowledgeable.
The point about the bill affecting people who actually have health insurance is important. I feel that most of those people are thinking, the cuts to medicaid won't affect me since I have my own insurance. The effects on them are indirect but real.
Even relatively wealthier ACA enrollees who are currently not eligible for premium subsides will see their rates go up, possibly into the unaffordable range, as younger, healthier enrollees are pushed out due to loss of subsidies.
You have squarely pegged the corollary effects-that-may-be: in addition to the cruelty, the bbb budget bill would result in newly uncovered individuals presenting themselves at ER facilities and, at unnecessarily elevated cost, be treated at the expense of the public and those of us with coverage whose premium and co-pay rates will have to increase at an accelerated pace. It is, in all but name, a form of direct and indirect taxation not addressed by the ‘conservative’ party. Where, exactly, is the ‘beauty’ in this piece of legislation?
I made this same point up top, because it's exactly what used to happen with regularity in earlier times when a lot more people were uninsured.
Right. Which is why Obama pushed the affordable care act. I don’t think republican constituents (maga) get it. The republican congress and politicians just don’t care
I wish that every Congresscritter had to spend a few hours watching my mother-in-law trying to keep breathing on her last night alive. She died of lung cancer.
You have my sympathies. My dad also died from lung cancer. It's an ugly disease in the end. That's the LAST thing anyone wants to be worried about at a time like that: how to pay the bills.
Good summary! I often tell people how I had to educate my doctor about how Medicaid cuts would affect the balance sheet of the hospital where she works. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Specificity. Stories. Yes.
"People will die" is what these men (republicans, MAGA leaders, TechBro, Project 2025) want and are causing. They have said so.
The deaths of individual members of "the herd" will benefit them, just as ICE kidnapping people off the public streets and "disappearing" them benefits the Trump&CO administration: it terrifies the general populace. People know nobody is safe.
The government that Reagan warned against has been created by Reagan and his Owners. Its a glorious new era . . . for them.
Karen Hilyard - Bravo! You gave us a clear and concise example of how pulling Medicaid from a few increase the cost burden shared by all. Good analysis.
However. I HOPE (emphasis intentional) that your intimation that our elections will no longer be fair and equitable will not become reality.
Here’s how the opinion editors at the WSJ are spinning it. Of those who will lose Medicaid, some are unemployed. They say they watching TV and playing video games all day. Then there are working illegals. Their dislike of illegals is boundless. Bottom line: we don’t care, they deserve to lose it.
The Republican playbook is the same as it ever was...a white panic to gain power, then savage the vulnerable and give unneeded tax breaks to the rich. As bears shit in the woods, as the sunrises in the east, this is their one trick pony.
And it works year after year, and the voters never seem to realize what is happening. Or maybe the voters do know and approve. I have pretty much given up on politics other than as a spectator sport.
Best wishes.
People like Bezos need those tax cuts! He had to pay for that expensive wedding in Venice.
No empathy, no conscience… that would be Woke and we can’t have that. So. Says MAGA
Let's just call it what it is: mass murder.
I call it MBS: Murder By Statute
I asked a maga relative "who will take over your disabled sisters medical costs when these cuts are implemented?" Foxxx news people where shocked to learn cuts for people like her were possible/probable. I think this is the way in. Name a family member reliant on Medicaid and ask. (After recovering from his shock he spoke about $400 toilet seats.)
This is the simple, yet close to home, message that needs to be put out there. Yes, who WILL take care of those people?
Soylent Green is a fictional food product, initially claimed to be made from plankton, that sustains the majority of the world's population in a dystopian future plagued by overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion. However, the film's shocking twist reveals that Soylent Green is actually made from recycled human remains. The film serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked corporate greed, overpopulation, and environmental degradation, using the revelation about Soylent Green to highlight the depravity of a society pushed to its limits.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Dystopian Setting:
The film is set in a future, specifically 2022, where overpopulation, pollution, and resource shortages have created a desperate and impoverished world.
Soylent Corporation:
Soylent Industries is a powerful corporation that controls the food supply, offering various food products, including the titular Soylent Green.
The Deception:
Initially, Soylent Green is presented as a high-protein food source made from oceanic plankton.
The Revelation:
The film's climax reveals that Soylent Green is actually made from the bodies of the dead, recycled into food in a desperate attempt to sustain the starving population.
The Meaning:
The revelation of Soylent Green's true ingredients is a powerful commentary on the potential consequences of environmental destruction, overpopulation, and corporate control, emphasizing the lengths to which humanity might go in the face of resource scarcity.
In the current sequel, Soylent Green will be made of the people rounded up by ICE. When the original movie was made, the assumption was that revealing the truth would spark outrage. Today the revelation would prompt the meme, "Eveything tastes good with Tabasco sauce."
Please keep it real. Work-bound immigrants were disliked for many years already and treated accordingly. You just did not know it, or you did not care.
Sorry I didn't place the all caps SARCASM label on the post. The point was that, if anything, the movie missed out on the depths of dystopia that are currently being plumber.
So you have an AI program? What a way to wet-noodle one of my favorite movies. Sorry to say so. But yes, in the Soylent Green future the oceans are dead because of pollution and there is no plankton (or fish) anymore to turn into food. That revelation that was a real shocker when the film was released in 1973. As was the recycling of people. And a young woman being "furniture". We did not see it as the warning it could have been.
Sorry to be the wet noodle. I copied text from an explanation of the movie. It’s interesting in the movie this was taking place in 2020. Pretty close isn’t it?
Did you watch the movie or did you just ask an AI for "an explanation"? Hey! I would never call you a wet-noodle! Just the text the AI burps up. What makes Soylent Green so good is the actors, Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, who played the last role of his illustrious career - he died two months after completion of the film. If you have a chance please watch it!
The year 2022 has no real meaning - 50 years seemed probably a long time to the makers. (It is not.) The 1982 movie "Blade Runner" was set in the future of 2019. LA does not have "spinners" (flying cars) yet. "Running Man" portrayed the USA around 2018, when criminals are hunted and killed in a life TV show. That is not happening yet. Although our TV's etc. now show how unsuspecting, probably innocent, people are thrown in vans by ICE.
Worse, it seems to have been taken as a goal by many in the current administration.
Perhaps a seemingly large percentage of voters, like Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol", would reply, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Members of the GOP did call on America's elderly to fill the gaps after Covid kept most non-essential workers home.
Essentially, they would each contribute a little before they died horribly and alone of Covid, and to monsters in the GOP that was adequate reason.
Soon we’ll have workhouses for the “able bodied poor.”
However, there was a blow to the blowhard when Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that key health care issues in the "rich get richer, poor get poorer and sicker" bill need to be stripped out of the package, sending infuriated Senate Republicans back to the drawing board.
I have never heard of a parliamentarian before in previous majority republican negotiation of bills....do these politicians just pull legal terms/positions out of their ass for us uneducated-in-the-law, everyday lay people?
The Parliamentarian is the official advisor to the Senate on the interpretation of Standing Rules and parliamentary procedure.. An important role is to decide what can and cannot be done under the Senate's budget reconciliation process.
Make no mistake, this is a relentless policy of Social Murder. We speak of the individuals who will lose coverage, delay care, get care in Emergency rooms, and die preventable deaths, but many communities will lose rural hospitals (16 projected in WA alone). So even the uninsured will lack basic care, obstetrical units close first and women will have to drive hours to deliver babies, chronic disease complications, etc. etc. Just limiting the counting of deaths to the people losing Medicaid coverage will vastly undercount the preventable harms and deaths.
And, rest assured, there will be no federal agency tracking these deaths so they will go unreported. No enemy of the US could ever imagine causing such harm to the US population. The Republicans do not care this will hit their rural constituents like a neutron bomb, erasing whole towns of voters.
And the millionaires and billionaires who get the tax cuts? They will take the money and run.
Social Murder. Deliberate and cold blooded. With impunity.
Since Dobbs, women have died and been maimed and it’s barely covered by mainstream news. If I didn’t read Jessica Valenti’s newsletter on Substack I wouldn’t know the full scope of the war on women. We’re losing, folks! This needs to change.
Yes, everyone should read her.
"It's happening because our government has been taken over by fanatics who believe that, one way or another, they can escape the electoral consequences of making millions of Americans’ lives much, much worse."
Well, TBH, the GOP has made its mission immiseration of the lives of lower-income people seemingly forever, and it's seen its vote totals grow from exactly that plundered demographic, so it remains problematic if "consequences" will indeed redound to tRump and this GOPer Congress, and that the targeted electorate dependent upon Medicare and SNAP will continue to reliably vote against their primary and essential interests.
What you're saying, Paul, is that the Big Lie won't work anymore...a yuuge ask, and I wouldn't take that bet.
Americans with health insurance need to understand this will affect their healthcare too. Rural areas already have been losing providers, so cutting off a source of revenue that keeps practitioners available will accelerate the loss. Urban insurance holders will see their premiums increase as hospitals shift the cost of serving the uninsured onto the insured. The ACA was never really focused on the poor, it was a way of addressing the irritation increasing premiums caused middle class insurance holders. Considering the rampant narcissism of our era, Democrats top line messaging should be “your insurance premiums will increase”.
ACA was a gift to the insurance companies. More people could take out a policy, thanks to tax credits. People earning less than $ 16,000/year were not eligible. The big win for consumers was that they could no longer be refused based on an existing condition and the insurance co. could no longer cancel a policy for that reason. But for many the premiums as well as the co-pay/deductible were too high.
I never understood why Medicare was not extended, by lowering the required age over a number of years. Thanks to Gap Programs etc. the insurance companies can still make money.
Absolutely
Agreed.
Professor Krugman wrote recently about the impacts of imports on certain parts of the US and the fact that resource depletion has also devastated many towns that are now decaying and poverty stricken. He wrote that the Democrats failed to do enough about this. This bill is the RepublicRats solution to the problem - by killing most of these useless people off.
Once again, someone blames Democrats but not Republicans. Stop it. Now. Those small towns didn't die because one party forced business to relocate, factories to close, or big ag to take over. Those were choices that were made by those businesses in search of more profit. Republicans have failed us far more than Democrats. Why isn't more blame placed with them?
Because we expect better from Democrats?
Thank you, it is always annoying when the circular firing squad starts up.
Is this our Soylent Green ?
Just to be clear, I am not using the movie Soylent Green in the literal sense but as a metaphor that we, the poor, the people of color, the disabled , LBGQT are expendable.
But then again who knows??
Republicans believe that since everyone is going to die eventually, it’s a waste of money trying to do anything about it.
As Adam Sewrer suscintly put it, "The cruelty is the point."
To be more specific, Republicans in Congress want to cause suffering and death. They have no argument in support of doing so. They are simply evil people.
Congressional Republicans don't want to cause suffering and death. But if suffering and death are a byproduct of destroying effective governance, or reducing taxes, it's a trade off they're willing to make, or are being paid to make, which ultimately is probably worse than if they were simply evil.
I think that most good people cannot wrap their heads around the fact that some people are evil. I came to accept that fact only after I saw the actions of the current presidential administration and the current Republican Congress's refusal to stop the kidnapping of people without a warrant, deporting them without due process to be tortured, and breaking up their families. During the first Trump administration, I was willing to see these people as severely misguided, stupid, or mentally ill. No more. They are evil.
Yep.
Republicans like hurting people. And not just politicians or pundits or financiers; ordinary Republican voters like hurting people, and they demand it from their politicians. It's not the only thing they care about, but there's nothing they care about *as much.*
With respect to health care and food stamps, I disagree. Taking those away from people doesn't destroy effective governance. It causes people to get sick and be hungry and die. And they don't do it to reduce taxes, because they'd reduce taxes anyway. It's not as if they care about the deficit.
Some of them, maybe most of them, have this "belief" that some people are "undeserving" of life. They believe that only those born to wealth are "entitled" to live in some semblance of dignity, or even live at all for that matter.
Effective governance counteracts all of that, so they are indeed against effective governance for that reason.
Of course they don't care about the deficit - it's the excuse they use to cut benefits to the poor.
Sorry if I'm splitting hairs, but I agree that Republicans oppose effective governance. They show that, obviously, when they fire federal employees, illegally impound money that Congress appropriated, illegally destroy agencies like USAID, and so forth. Denying people health care and food doesn't seem to advance the end.
True. It's the end itself.
I think it's probably far less principled than that. Ultimately, I think these Republican politicians are simply opportunistic. They're being courted by Special Interests, and understand that if they just play ball, they'll be rewarded for their decisions.
It's interesting to me how Republicans can lure support for tax cuts from people who will never benefit from those tax cuts. It's Trickle-Down Economics all over again. I don't believe that there are financially insecure Republicans out there who feel that wealthy people deserve tax cuts, even if they themselves won't benefit from it. Call me cynical, but I don't. In that case, how are these poor Republicans convinced over and over to support tax cuts?
You're totally right. The poor Republicans don't really support tax cuts so much as they want to "own the libs". Tax cuts, along with the corresponding cuts to Medicaid and SNAP is one way to "own the libs".
They don't realize that they'll be hit by it too - because Faux Newspeak tells them they won't. They'll find out when the closest hospital to them - probably already 20 miles away - shuts down.
I have to pinch myself after having read this piece. Is this really true? I can’t fathom the cruelty of it all. Anyone feel the same way?
I'd say it's a varying combination of both.
Agree with Chris Lemon.
I don’t think (R)’s make any secret of the fact that they have an honest belief that the American safety net is to big and too broad. If you ask, they’d tell you they don’t *want* a particular person to suffer, but in aggregate they think society is better if individuals bear a higher level of risk. I think they’re wrong, misguided, underinformed…but I don’t think it’s somehow invalid to think that. Does that make them evil? I’m just not a fan of that framing…
I think the OBBB is terrible. I think (R)’s are hypocrites and ignorami. But let’s be clear…almost *every* public policy decision involves tradeoffs - and many mundane policy preferences alter the risk of injury/death to certain sub-populations. None of us wish suffering on others, but I doubt even the biggest hearted people here would be willing to pay an *infinite* price to reduce strangers’ suffering and risk of death. Agree? Then the difference becomes a matter of where you choose to draw your line…what price would you pay to reduce suffering? Are there things you’d rather do with your $$ to reduce suffering? We all have lines, it’s just that (R)’s draw theirs in a different place…how different does my line have to be from yours before you call me ‘evil’?
I mean, if you or I emptied our savings accounts today and sent that money to a charity feeding the poorest kids, it would doubtless reduce suffering. So does the fact that neither of us is on our way the bank right now an indication that we are somehow ‘pro suffering and death’? I don’t think so. Even though suffering and death is an unambiguous outcome of our choice not to help, I don’t think that makes us evil…
But that sort of begs the question: "What's the price of a clear conscience?"
And yet most of them claim to be good Christians.Jesus wept!
I just read that Prez Trump made 1,3 Million in royalties from the sales of the "God Bless the USA" Bibles. To good Christians I assume.
Yep. Necrophiliacs is how I refer to them. They love death. How else to explain cutting off healthcare, destroying our vaccine programs, stopping cancer research, etc.
And killing women whose pregnancies go awry by denying them abortions for non-viable fetuses. Another woman died in Texas the other day.
"Death Cult" is my go-to.
To their "credit", they would never have been elected as GOP otherwise.
Feature, not bug...
It's also to take down Obama care. The Joker vs. Batman.
The cruelty is so important to them that certain Republicans are calling for the Senate Parliamentarian to be removed -- because she is taking away some of their desired cruel provisions.
Yes Sandra,
Welcome to "The Shock Doctrine"
I think that my work here is done :)
All the folks who keep their insurance will also be affected as emergency uncompensated care still happens and those costs will be paid by other people's insurance.
Hospitals sunk by uncompensated care will close and not treat anyone.
Everyone should care. The leopard is indeed eating your face
well said.
“ The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members." Hubert Humphrey
I think he now would say "The true measure of any society can be found in how many vulnerable members it creates".
And that is before we get to RFK Jr killing medical research and eliminating vaccines. Another Apocalypse.
Indeed.
Just read your Bible and do not eat red food coloring.
Thanks to Obamacare, my pre-existing condition didn’t stop treatment of my cancer
My spouse has been saved twice because of our ACA insurance.
Professor Krugman: and so the rethuglican DeathCult marches on. how many thousands of deaths will be created by this nasty ass bill? how much will more misery will it create? how many thousands of bankruptcies? how many additional homeless?
Many poor people in the USA are not white. They will suffer and die. So will many poor white people. But, haven't all of these People been designated useless by men like Musk and Thiel? As they die off, won't the more well off white Republicans have as many babies as a woman can pump out in her lifetime and raise to adulthood? That will be her job. A job whose costs will be covered by her husband, just like in the old days. Project 2025 shows this. Their actions acquiring the 2024 election win and their actions since inauguration show this. They are taking over, and according to them, there is nothing we can do about it. We being those who support and value all the People. We are at about half and half now, given standard deviations, variability, and life experiences. Profit or People. They are part of the People, a fact they seem to have forgotten. Sure, that is a lot of data to correlate, to understand. Some of that data will be Likert (the life experiences). I am one Earth witness: I was poor and would have died without help from the system. Many are like me, but with education, we contribute to our society in many useful ways. The problem of sequestration of resources to a very small, 0.01% of Men, has persisted in various amounts by metric here on Earth for as long as we have text records. Text records are manipulated on Earth by time and location and tell the current narrative for humans in many forms. We are in a period where many folks are not wanted or needed by other classes of person. It will be okay with about half of us to get rid of that poor class of person. Unfortunately, their deaths will be seen as necessary. For the other half, they will be seen as allowed and not necessary with time and lucre investments that are reasonable, given the actual physical and fiscal existence of all The People, not just some. Crucial difference here.
This is what I do not get. Poverty costs money. To have a successful capitalistic society you need a rather well-to-do population. With these policies Republicans are digging their own grave.
Bytheway the women only good for house-keeping were invented many years ago already, when politicians decided that the wives of foreign workers could not be given the right to work. Democrats happily endorsed this idea. They also helped to put the "anti-immigrant" legislation of 1996 in place. A lot of the current issues originate from that law. Prez Trump c.s. are the pinnacle of migrant-misery, but they did not invent it. Welcome to my world.
I agree that the Republican position to funnel money away from consumers is not wise, but poor people and middle class people spend less on items than wealthy folks. If the wealthy kill off everyone who isn't already in the top 10% of the 340,000,000 folks in the US, those men and their women think this is good. These wealthy folks will spend enough to keep businesses doing well. Hence, kill or enslave anyone not wealthy. Women have been held down economically as housewives and caregivers for a very long time in most countries. As for immigration, that has been a rising problem for people in the US and Europe since rising population numbers, wars, and climate change all became drivers for mass migrations that were happening essentially to save people's lives. But, the people migrating out of their autocratic, violent, over-populated, and resource poor countries are also poor or middle class. The attitude of the wealthy (read Trump, Vought, Musk, and Thiel now, but all wealthy people before that): use the poor and middle class as servants, slaves, or they simply kill them through various means. That is the wealthy attitude to life. That does mean all US Republicans and conservatives, and it can mean the same thing to any country run by people who can afford to keep a society affloat money wise. All wars enrich the wealthy and kill off the poor and middle class who fight those wars for the rich. Now, the wealthy do need someone to grow their food, harvest it, and distribute it. They need someone to make all objects used. But, these maker people must remain servants or slaves, and they sure need to die in wars to enrich the wealthy. That seems to be how it works on Earth.
Teresa, I clicked "Like" but I really, truly "Don't Like" the picture you have described as our future.
I don't like it either.
How long will we continue to allow it?
The right has a military grade propaganda machine that will continue to genuflect at the feet of their criminal orange Dear Leader while blaming Democrats for every ill in society.
Enough people have been turned into True Believers of the fake right news empire to ensure there will be no consequences for their actions.
This is how empires fall.
At this point of time, I want the Empire to fall.
After today's ruling by the seditious 6 on the SCOTUS I think it is inevitable.
You can't both have federalism and a king at the same time, but that is what they have created with their rulings.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.
They do not care what the public things because they do not plan to have any more elections in this country
And when Emergency Departments at remaining hospitals are inundated with folks needing care who have no medical insurance, who will be paying?
~Emergency care will be compromised for those needing it,
~we all will be paying more for care to keep hospitals financially viable, and
~most importantly people who need healthcare will no longer have access to preventative care.
When will the thievery end? Who will stop this brutality? Apparently not our Senators in West Virginia where a major part of the population depends on Medicaid and Snap. No, Republican Senators Shelly Moore Capito and Jim Justice (yes, that is his last name) plan to steal healthcare and food from the very folks who voted them into office.
Which is a damming indictment of those voters.
Though I can appreciate why you might say such a thing, it does feel a bit like blaming the victim.
Trump voters are getting what they voted for, and non-voters are getting what they enabled through their inaction.
And many people will suffer from it, including (disproportionately) the people who selected Trump actively or passively.
Identifying a connection between cause and effect is essentially blaming, but sometimes it is also a simple matter of fact.
The situation is baffling. I'm not sure I'd describe it as blaming the victim. It's more like dealing with a really strange cult. LBJ had some less charitable comments on the phenomenon.
A cult, yes, I’d agree. WV, as do other societies reliant on extraction of natural resources for their economies, has a history of exploitation of the population as well as the land. Our political leaders have been bought and paid for by the exploiters as they sell off the peoples’ reliance on cooperating with the system to exist. Isolation, hero culture of mining, lack of excellence in education. It all could have been different. It still could be. Eliminating access to healthcare is not a step in the right direction.
But that's fine. America, as a nation of oligarchs, can't continue to go on like this, and thus, it has to be dismantled. American Empire has to end and start afresh. It would've been much better if the foreign power had controlled it.
All this talk about low information voter (or similar terms) maybe true from election to election. But what you have now is the failure of representative democracy. The members of the congress are not "low information" by any means; they know very well that the bill is not in favor of the people they represent. They sell out, not for the benefit of a "common good" but for the benefit of the paymasters of the electoral process.
I said failure of representative democracy. That concerns the legislative branch. On the judiciary side, you now have a Supreme Court ruling, which a member of the dissenting 3-6 minority calls "a travesty for the rule of law". The executive is what it is, Trumpian. What more does one need to describe a failed state?
Only three of the Justices have balls. All women.
Saying these as an admirer of the US constitution and the history of democratic development in the US with all its warts.
There was nothing to admire in the US Constitution. It's a failure through and through. America, still, has not achieved the purported dream of a free nation. It is all pomp and circumstances around the rhetoric of freedom, which ain't a thing in the US at least for the majority of the people. We aren't a multicultural, multiethnic liberal democracy.
At the time the US was founded, there were ZERO democratic countries on the planet.
ZERO.
The US Constitution has flaws, but it built on lessons from history and the US under the Articles of Confederation to create a stable democratic government.
Our existence and success enabled others around the world to argue that monarchy and its shorter term cousin dictatorship are not the only viable systems of governance.
The fact that we are still working toward a more perfect Union, and are not there yet does not diminish this milestone.
very true
Sorry. I disagree. It's a brilliant document. Admittedly, it has its flaws but we have tried to fix those with amendments. Unfortunately, the system has come off the rails after Trump 2.0 and the document flirts with becoming irrelevant.
That is the system this county chose for. No king, two parties only, and money does the talking.
MAGA won't care. Look at the red states that did not expand medicaid are they still Red? Why yes they are, Did the GOP lose any votes, not that I can see
What a hard-hitting, pithy, not-a-word-wasted summary of a coming catastrophe.
I remember when they complained about Obama’s so-called “death panels.” Here goes another projection in which they create something even worse than their accusation. America, you’re falling asleep on the job.
Every complaint is a projection
Is it because they will control future elections? It's only if they win that no one cheated?
The economic ramifications are simply enormous. The spending cuts this bill introduce will ripple out through the economy. It cuts nearly $1 trillion. That money supports families, feeds children, keeps people alive. This is the greatest experiment in Social Darwinism in our history. It is not going to be pretty.
The “electoral consequences” you reference rely upon elections occurring…
Therein lies the rub.