Tag: GOP attack on Medicare

Trump’s Budget Director Reveals Plans to Attack Social Security and Medicare

Mick Mulvaney, Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

Americans will not be fooled into allowing Mick Mulvaney to make what he deemed “easy” cuts to earned benefits.

Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.

Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.

Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.

View the complete November 30 article by Nancy J. Altman on the Common Dreams website here.

GOP’s pathetic new pitch to voters: Cut Social Security and Medicare

The following article by Oliver Willis was posted on the ShareBlue.com website April 25, 2018:

Republicans in Congress are pushing plans for their most unpopular ideas, even as the party faces major challenges in upcoming elections.

Congressional Republicans have released an election year proposal targeting massive cuts to government programs that millions of Americans, including the poorest people, have relied upon. Continue reading “GOP’s pathetic new pitch to voters: Cut Social Security and Medicare”

Tax Plan Aims to Slay a Reagan Target: The Government Beast

The following article by Eduardo Porter was posted on the New York Times website December 5, 2017:

President Ronald Reagan, with a replica of a federal income tax form, promoting his tax legislation in New Jersey in 1985. Credit Scott Stewart/Associated Press

It was the spring of 1985 when President Ronald Reagan first proposed to put an end to the state and local tax deduction. The idea was, to be sure, politically tricky. The provision had been around since the creation of the federal income tax in 1913, the budgetary expression of America’s celebrated federalism. As Justice Louis Brandeis might have put it, it was the federal government’s way to help pay for policy experimentation in the nation’s “laboratories of democracy.”

And yet to a Republican Party embroiled in a fundamental debate on how to shrink the government, it was an idea hard to resist: a direct shot at states’ capacity to spend. Bruce Bartlett, then a conservative tax expert who would go on to serve under Reagan and his successor, George Bush, estimated that without federal deductibility, state and local spending would fall 14 percent.

Nixing deductibility “threatens the political livelihood of spendthrift lawmakers across the nation,” Mr. Bartlett exulted at the time in an article for the Heritage Foundation. And it “would become more difficult for states to finance programs of doubtful benefit to their taxpayers by ‘hiding’ the full cost within the federal tax system.” Continue reading “Tax Plan Aims to Slay a Reagan Target: The Government Beast”

Disastrous Republican Tax Plan Is Only the First Step in Long Term Effort to Cut Social Security and Medicare, Exacerbating Inequality

The following article by Steven Rosenfeld was posted on the AlterNet website December 2, 2017:

Great damage is being done, even as the Trump mob is targeted by Robert Mueller.

President Donald Trump walks with House Speaker Paul Ryan, November 2017. Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

The wheels of justice might be turning with the guilty plea by Trump campaign and White House aide Michael Flynn and the reality that the presidents’ team are real targets, but that will not stop the GOP Congress and White House from gutting essential social safety nets.

The GOP tax plan, which passed the Senate 51-49 early Saturday with no Democrats voting yes, now moves to the phase where differences in the House and Senate bills get ironed out. That will prompt fierce lobbying and protests, but a major bill transferring wealth from the middle-class to the best-off Americans will be passed and signed by Trump.

If all the Republicans were doing was lining the pockets of the already rich, that would be bad enough—pick your adjective. But that’s not the endgame. Before the Senate voted, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a past presidential candidate, said the Republicans must make additional cuts to Social Security and Medicare, both federal programs for those over age 65 as well as people with disabilities and parentless children (such as Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan as a youth). Continue reading “Disastrous Republican Tax Plan Is Only the First Step in Long Term Effort to Cut Social Security and Medicare, Exacerbating Inequality”

The GOP’s Tax Cut Bonanza Is a Major Attack on Medicare

The following article by Nancy Altman and Linda Benesch was posted on the AlterNet website November 20, 2017:

Credit: www.speaker.gov/blog

Do you trust Paul Ryan to protect your Medicare benefits? How about White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former member of the House Freedom Caucus, and like Ryan, a longstanding foe of Medicare?

If the just-passed House tax bill, its Senate counterpart or some compromise of the two is signed into law, the enactment will put Medicare’s future in the hands of Ryan and Mulvaney.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP tax bill will instantly trigger $400 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare in the next 10 years, including $25 billion in the first year after enactment alone.

Continue reading “The GOP’s Tax Cut Bonanza Is a Major Attack on Medicare”

Republicans May Use Cuts in Entitlement Programs to Reduce Deficit

The following article by Alan Rappaport was posted on the New York Times website November 15, 2017:

© Greg Nash

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers have largely dismissed concerns about how their $1.5 trillion tax cut would add to the federal deficit. Now, some Democrats are warning that the tax rewrite would ultimately be financed by gutting entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The possibility of cuts to safety net programs appeared more likely on Tuesday, as the Congressional Budget Office warned that the tax bill could set off an arcane budget rule that would make deep cuts to Medicare over the next decade.

Republican lawmakers have turned a blind eye to the effect of the tax bill on the deficit, saying the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves through increased economic growth. Continue reading “Republicans May Use Cuts in Entitlement Programs to Reduce Deficit”