another angle on it, if you don't mind:
Mike Johnson Is Talking About Cutting Social Safety Net Programs, Again - TPM via Yahoo Austerity only matters when Democrats are in charge.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) signaled this week how Republicans may begin stonewalling and messaging about Democrats should the party succeed in taking back the House this fall.
Buried at the bottom of a Washington Post piece about how the Social Security trust fund will begin running low on money by 2032, an insolvency problem that Trump's immigration policies and tax cuts for the wealthy have contributed to, was a quote from Johnson about his supposed plan to cut social services in order to decrease the deficit and, apparently, save the program:
"The reason we are in trouble is because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot, mandatory spending," Johnson reportedly recently told a Louisiana radio station. "That's your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed."
It is hardly worth pointing out hypocrisy at this point amid Republican leadership's utter capitulation to the Trump regime, but for posterity's sake: Johnson was a key figure in ensuring the passage of the first reconciliation package of Trump's second term — the Big Beautiful Bill that slashed Medicaid funding in order to help offset the impact of making Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that that legislation alone will add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years. Early CBO estimates show that the immigration enforcement package that Congress just passed via reconciliation (instead of the normal appropriations process) will add another $72 billion to the national debt over 10 years. In Republicans' eyes, the trillions of dollars that those pieces of legislation will add to the deficit are not a factor in whether or not the legislation should be passed.
= new reply since forum marked as read