Republicans rammed through their tax bill without Democratic or popular support. Buried within this trickle-down economic sham are a bunch of secret provisions that have little to do with taxes, such as dealing a lethal blow to Obamacare.
Secrets of the GOP Tax Overhaul
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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From what I understand, Mr Trump is engaged in bring the United States back to the moon. Is that where Mr Mueller’s headed or is he going to Mars ?
Henri
RE: Obamacare: Good riddance. All the mandate did was put extra financial and legal burdens on the very people proponents were claiming to help. It was a two-fer for conservatives – an extra boot on the neck of the working class to keep them in their place and they had the Democrats to blame for it. With the added bonus of having progressives spouting right wing terms and talking points about the poor when defending it.
All O’care ever was was a sop to the consciences of Ivy League limo liberals and a give away to crony capitalists.
Ah yes, «FlemingBalzac», that indefatigable defender of the interests of the poor has expressed her/his anathema over the so-called Affordable Care Act – nota bene, without endorsing an alternative, such as a tax-financed, single-payer plan, such as most OECD countries have (all of whom spend much less of the national GDP on health care than the United States, and most of which enjoy better results) and which Mr Obama and the US Congress should have adopted. Perhaps «FlemingBalzac»’s true constituency is not the poor, but the insurance companies which batten on the latter ?…
«FlemingBalzac» is a pre-existing condition….
Henri
You flatter me with such effort mon ami. I am wise enough to know when I’m ignorant and I wouldn’t know where to begin of fixing healthcare. I do know that Obamacare wasn’t it, though, Just the optics of frame-flipping the working poor from good people struggling under economic adversity into deadbeat moochers should have caused some liberals pause.
I would rather government do nothing than do the wrong thing just for the sake of doing something.
Your pose of modesty is not without its charm, «Fleming Balzac», but alas, it rings a tad false. Surely, an intellectually gifted person like yourself so concerned about the fate of the (deserving ?) poor would have taken the trouble to investigate how health care is apportioned and paid for in comparable countries ? My suspicion remains that it is the intervention of the US federal government into this particular arena which arouses your ire, rather than any concern for the fate of the poor….
Henri
All well and good but it’s going to take political will to do something actually useful. I’m sure you’ve noticed that political will is rather pointedly lacking among the American Left, these days.
As it has always been. Years ago, there was a plan afoot to help America’s mentally ill. The Grand Plan was in two basic parts. A) Close down most of the nations mental hospitals and B) Establish a wide network of doctors and community centers to aid the newly-deinstitutionalized people in joining the communities in which they would live and work. Part A went swimmingly but part B quickly ran up against reality of paying vast sums of money and rampant NIMBYism. The end result is that thousands of mentally ill people wound up homeless, in jail or dead (or all three).
By your measure, that’s still a victory because, hey, *something was done*. For the people whose lives and liberty were lost, they would have been better off if nothing had been done – or the plan went through as it was.
Single Payer can be done but if it can’t be done right, a half-assed solution is worse than nothing.
@FB
I like your example with the closing of the mental hospitals (“asylums”) without instituting an alternative system.
The “anti-psychiatrist” movement at the time rallied against the totalitarian character of the asylums where patients were “warehoused” for profit like prisoners and almost never released. However, they were unwittingly playing into the hands of the neoliberal assault on state programs for the general population.
Likewise, leftist critics of the Heritage-Romney-Obama-care certainly need to be aware of the dangers of letting our message be instrumentalized by the neo-liberals who run the Trump administration.
I’m confused though: you were the one who applauded the attack on Obamacare while mhenri cautioned against the exact instrumentalization. The government did something (running mental care facilities) and then stopped doing that (closing hospitals and kicking patients out into the streets). It has been doing comparatively little ever since. From your previous postings I’m not sure on whether you want it to do something, however problematic, or do you want it to stop providing services?
Likewise, government administers the Obamacare infrastructure and ensures compliance with its regulations, however piecemeal and rigged. It may well stop doing that and return to the status quo ante.
And unlike with health-care, where there arguably are somewhat reasonable large-scale institutions in European countries, Australia, and Japan, as well as remarkable programs in poorer countries such as Cuba, I’m not sure whether there even are large-scale institutional services for mentally ill people that work all that well… but clearly we agree that they certainly require and deserve some level of services…
«By your measure, that’s still a victory because, hey, *something was done*.» Hardly by my measure, «FlemingBalzac», but perhaps by yours, since closing mental institutions reduced tax moneys devoted to their upkeep, whereafter they could be diverted to more profitable pursuits (for those who share your ideological underpinnings), such as the military….
As a retired senior consultant in psychiatry, I am fairly cognizant of the process of closing the great mental hospitals here in Europe. The impetus came from Italy, where, indeed, conditions in the institutions were described (by colleagues and other observers whom I regard as credible) as «medieval». The movement also gained currency here in Scandinavia, where conditions were hardly as bad, but abuses had indeed occurred. Alas, here in Sweden it corresponded in time with the coming to power of the right, for whom «cutting taxes» is the very essence of good governance, and so the structures and networks required to help the former patients of these institutions were not in place when the latter – some of which had been the only homes these patients had known for decades – were closed. The result was entirely predictable, i e, misery and isolation….
Things are, I understand, slowly getting better, but huge problems remain – not least because we seem to be experts in creating a society in which alienation is our birthright. One thing is certain, however, good mental health care never comes cheap, and those who advocate «cutting taxes» (at least those to be used for other matters than the military and the police) are not going to lead us into a paradise in which vulnerable people receive the care they require….
But none of this has anything to do with the so-called Affordable Care Act in the United States….
Henri
Consider that a family of four who was too poor to afford the crappy ACA health care would have had to pay an IRS fine of up to $2,085 for 2017.
That’s compares to what a US minimum wage worker earns before taxes by working 40 hour weeks for over 7 weeks. That’s a part time job just to pay the fine without paying for any insurance at all.
After taxes, transportation, child care, and other work expenses, etc., it would take more weeks of work just to net the fine amount.
And minimum wage workers are lucky to get paid for 40 hours per week every week.
Deplorable.
A plan only a latte sipping liberal could love.
That is if he or she didn’t have $80,000 in college debt.
Ronnie Raygun cut taxes for the rich, increased spending and left office in a recession.
George Dumbo Bush cut taxes for the rich, increased spending and left office in a recession.
Hey, maybe this time it will work! … and as Ted points out in his recent editorial, maybe it will inspire a big enough backlash to actually accomplish something. Then we’ll all get on our unicorns and fly off to CandyLand!
From a pure poly-ticks standpoint, the way they undermined the ACA is brilliant. They’ve been calling it a failure for so long that many people actually believe it – now it really will be unsustainable.