Nasty, Brutish, And Short Again -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/05/14/nasty-brutish-and-short-again/

Beauty is in the eye of the bondholder

Republicans imagine a return to halcyon days when America once was “great.” But they are rather vague about when that was, who it was great for, and what was so great about it.

There are clues, of course. Movement conservatism arose in the 1970s to roll back the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s: to before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts ended Jim Crow, before Medicare and Medicaid. Conservative moneyed elites have worked to roll back the New Deal since the 1930s: to before the U.S. banned child labor, before the minimum wage and the 40-hour week, and before Social Security. The felon-in-chief imagines a return to the Gilded Age of William McKinley over a century ago, a time when tariffs were big and beautiful. Before the income tax. Before direct election of senators. Before women could vote. Read between the lines.

But about Medicaid. While Donald Trump gushes with envy toward the Gulf State potentates pouring billions into his pockets, Republicans supporting Trump 2.0 are hard at work trying to make American non-billionaires’ lives nasty, brutish, and short again. Their proposed cuts are part of a bill the president himself named big and beautiful. But then, beauty is in the eye of the bondholder.

From The New Republic:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

“The math is not adding up. They’re trying to convince people that they are cutting millions of undocumented people from [Medicaid],” Ocasio-Cortez said. She noted that the GOP is claiming that one million undocumented immigrants are collecting Medicaid payments, but their cuts would result in 13.7 million people losing their health insurance.

“They’ve asked us to read this bill, and we have. This bill bans the people that they kick off of Medicaid from even buying their own insurance from the Affordable Care Act exchange,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, adding that the bill “increases costs for people they do deem eligible and who are low income and forces them to pay even more.”

. . .

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Life expectancies in red states have pretty much stalled for a few decades. . . . . nt