Tag: bill clinton
Republicans Beware! Medicaid Is Not A Soft Target

Republicans Beware! Medicaid Is Not A Soft Target

Does anyone remember the 1995 government shutdown and why it happened? Basically Newt Gingrich, fresh off a big Republican victory in the midterm election, was trying to force Bill Clinton to make big cuts in Medicare. He failed, in large part because Medicare was and is an immensely popular program.

A decade later, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. But he, too, failed, because Social Security is also immensely popular.

But the Republican quest to rip up as much of the social safety net as possible never ends. And for the past 15 years or so that has meant steering clear, for now, of Medicare and Social Security, which are middle-class programs, and going after Medicaid instead. If the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which is, incredibly, the legislation’s actual name — goes into effect, Medicaid will be cut by around a trillion dollars over the next decade. (As of this morning, the fate of that bill remains uncertain.)

What is Medicaid? Like Medicare, it’s government-provided health insurance. But unlike Medicare, it’s “means-tested”: your income has to fall below a certain level before you’re eligible. This makes Medicaid a program for the poor or near-poor — and that, for many on the right, suggests a political opportunity.

Ostensibly, the right attacks Medicaid because it costs too much. I mean, it’s a government program, which means that it must be riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse, right? And surely there must be millions of lazy people getting health care through Medicaid who should be getting up off their couches and going to work.

The reality is that none of this is true.

No doubt there’s waste and fraud in Medicaid, as there is in any system created and run by human beings. But overall Medicaid provides essential health care relatively cheaply. Once you adjust for the generally poor health of the average Medicaid recipient — chronic illness can make you poor! — Medicaid appears to have significantly lower costs than private insurance:

Actually, in some ways Medicaid resembles the health care systems of other advanced countries, which are much cheaper than U.S. health care (while achieving equally good results) largely because they’re more cost-conscious, willing to bargain hard with drug companies, say no to expensive procedures of dubious medical benefit, and so on.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Medicaid recipients either are working or can’t work — they’re disabled or need to stay home to care for others:

Oh, and one thing we know from repeated experience is that adding work requirements to Medicaid does not, in fact, lead to more people working.

I don’t know how many of the right-wingers clamoring for drastic Medicaid cuts believe the stories they tell about waste and lazy Americans who won’t get a job. My guess, though, is that they don’t care whether these stories are true. They’re going after Medicaid because they see it as a soft target — a program that helps lower-income Americans, and who cares about them? Medicaid’s beneficiaries, they imagine, are the new welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

But a funny thing has happened to public opinion about Medicaid. The share of Americans covered by the program has increased a lot over the past 15 years:

And the fact that so many Americans now receive Medicaid means that many people have either benefited from the program or know people who have. And as a result the program has become remarkably popular:

83 percent favorability — 74 percent among Republicans! — is incredibly high. In fact, Medicaid appears to have slightly higher favorability than apple pie.

What this suggests is that Republicans who consider Medicaid a soft target, a program that only benefits inner-city rats, are going to be shocked by the blowback if they do manage to eviscerate this key piece of American health care.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Trump's 2017 tax cuts

Trump's Tax Cut Will Lead To Fiscal Disaster

First off, let's drop the Republican claim that not extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts is a tax increase.

Many of these tax cuts were purposely designed to expire and for a sneaky reason. Making them permanent would have hiked the bill's cost by more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Add to that the interest payments tied to the higher borrowing, and the number rises to $2 trillion.

The ugly bottom line is this: Trump's "big, beautiful" tax and spending bill is expected to tack another $3.8 trillion to budget deficits over the next decade.

Recall Elon Musk's vow to cut $2 trillion in spending a year ago? The amount actually cut was about $100 billion. Sorry to throw more numbers at you, but that's only 5% of $2 trillion.

Balancing the federal budget without added borrowing can be done. It was done when Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president. Clinton had raised some taxes, notably on the wealthy, in his 1993 budget. Republicans demagogued those tax hikes, which helped them win big in the midterms that followed.

By 1998, the federal budget was in surplus. Republicans rightly insist that they helped by forcing lower spending. But the added tax revenue brought in more money than the spending cuts saved.

Most Americans got richer under Clinton. Despite higher tax bills, the rich got richer, too. They benefited from a stock market lifted in large part by the growing belief that the federal government had become a responsible financial steward.

During Clinton's presidency, the S&P 500 stock index rose a legendary 208 percent. Had dividends been included and reinvested, the total return would have been higher.

George W. Bush took over the presidency in January 2001 and squandered the surplus with tax cuts and dramatically higher spending. He also oversaw the reckless deregulation that led to the financial collapse at the end of his two terms — and a 40% drop in the S&P 500.

Anyone who has done a household budget knows that two numbers matter. One is for spending; the other is for money coming in. For the federal government, money coming in is the tax revenues.

Ronald Reagan bought into the idea that tax cuts would pay for themselves through greater economic growth. He quickly saw that his 1981 tax cuts didn't come close to covering the lost revenues plus higher defense spending. To his credit, Reagan acted to stabilize the financial picture by signing a tax increase the following year and then other increases in 1984 and 1986. Nonetheless, the national debt tripled during his eight years.

Trump is pushing hard for both tax cuts and higher spending. And that has the financial markets fearing a new era of financial irresponsibility. Moody's has just lowered its credit rating for the United States from triple-A to double-A. That's contributed to a global selloff of U.S. Treasury debt, as it is no longer seen as the ultra-safe investment it was. The U.S. must now offer higher returns to compensate for the higher risk. Our annual interest payments, meanwhile, now surpass the defense budget.

All this doesn't fully count the growth-killing effects of Trump's tariff plans. JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon says investors may not have fully digested how much of a threat to their portfolios the tariffs pose.

Trump's tax-and-spending bill has a long way to go — the Senate after the House. But the financial markets obviously don't like what they are seeing.

Republicans should not be extending and adding to the 2017 tax cuts. Responsible lawmakers would just let them expire as they were scheduled to do. Alas, they clearly don't have it in them to be responsible.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

Praising Biden, Bill And Hillary Clinton Vow To Elect Harris

Praising Biden, Bill And Hillary Clinton Vow To Elect Harris

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he is ending his campaign.

“We are honored to join the President in endorsing Vice President Harris and will do whatever we can do to support her,” the Clintons said in a joint statement.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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