ThinkProgress

Paul Ryan admits the GOP will gut Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts

GOP lawmakers are driving up the deficit, then claiming the deficit’s too high to support safety net programs for poor people.

Credit: AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite

Zack Ford    December 7, 2017

Republicans in Congress are openly admitting they plan to use their tax reform bill to justify slashing funding for essential social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

The bill — which is expected to balloon the national deficit by at least $1 trillion, and which only benefits the country’s wealthiest in the long-term — has not yet been reconciled or signed. But Republicans aren’t wasting any time laying out what they see as the next step.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) laid out the plan in an interview Wednesday on Ross Kaminsky’s radio show. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said, adding that health care entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid are “the big drivers of our debt.”

He defended this by claiming the bill would generate $1 trillion dollars in revenues, which is a common talking point in support of the legislation. But a recent analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation found that the nearly $1.5 trillion tax plan will only generate around $400 billion dollars in growth, meaning it’ll actually fall $1 trillion short of breaking even. In other words, it’ll grow the deficit, not shrink it.

Now, Republicans in Congress are admitting they’ll use the deficit they’re working to create to justify cutting some of the most important programs in the country.

Ryan is not alone in admitting this. Rep. Rod Blum (R-IA) claimed that to achieve the growth the tax plan forecasts, “we have to have welfare reform.” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) said, “If we pass tax reform, we have to have welfare reform.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) directly admitted that the plan all along has been “to do two things,” because “the driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries.”

Cuts to social welfare programs would be far more unpopular than the tax bill already is. A recent Pew Survey found that 94 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans oppose cutting Medicare. President Trump has also repeatedly promised not to cut programs like Medicare and Medicaid — though Ryan said, “We’re working with the President on the entitlements that he wants to reform, that he’s supportive of.”

What’s perhaps most insidious about these admissions is that the Republican lawmakers are also blaming poor people for their own failure as they prepare to cut programs that help the people who need it the most. Ryan suggested that the programs are “paying people not to work.” Higgins referred to Americans who “suffer on welfare.” Blum went so far as to say, “Sometimes we need to force people to go to work.”

These remarks are akin to the more candid comments some other lawmakers have recently made. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claimed during debate on the tax bill last week that entitlements “help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) defended repealing the estate tax — a move that almost exclusively benefits the wealthy — by bemoaning “those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

But as the Washington Post notes, the programs Republican lawmakers want to cut actually help people who are struggling get back to work. For example, nearly 90 percent of working-age parents who receive food stamps are back to work within a year. But two thirds of the people who receive those benefits are children, people who have disabilities, or people too old to return to work.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders — US Senator for Vermont

Occupy Democrats

HuffPost

This Church Banner Perfectly Captures How Progressive Christians Feel Right Now

Carol Kuruvilla, HuffPost      December 7, 2017

An Episcopal church is causing a stir in Washington, D.C., after putting up banners that attempt to capture the mood of many progressive Christians in the nation’s capital.

The signs from St. Thomas’ Parish express frustration over some of the political positions taken by conservative Christians on topics such as gun rights and science. The banners feature an image of Jesus holding a hand to his face, a gesture that some are calling “faithpalming.”

One sign, which went viral on Twitter last week, illustrates the congregation’s feelings about President Donald Trump. Trump is a Presbyterian (though faith doesn’t appear to play a large role in his life), and has continued to enjoy the support of many conservative Christians in the country.

The Rev. Alex Dyer, the priest in charge of the 126-year-old parish, is the one who designed the banner campaign. He told HuffPost that his congregation saw the signs as an “opportunity to give voice to a side of Christianity that many people may not associate with Christianity.”

“There are many people who think Christians are close-minded, judgmental, and oppose science,” he said. “This is not the people in the congregation or many congregations around the country.”

He believes the signs capture the feelings of a lot of people in D.C. about the state of American politics.

“We are a very progressive church in a very progressive city,” he said. (The District of Columbia has voted Democratic in every presidential election it’s participated in, and went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.)

The signs were placed around the construction site of St. Thomas’ Parish new church building in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.

Dyer said his congregation has been troubled by what he called a “constant attack” on their core Christian values.

He described his church as a spiritual home for people who’ve had bad experiences with other churches, or have been discriminated against based on gender, sexuality or race. The church has a long history of welcoming queer Christians. In the past, it’s also expressed support for refugees and immigrants.

“Jesus reached out to those on the margins of society,” Dyer said. “He did not build walls. Rather, he broke down the walls that divide us as people.”

In response to the president’s policies targeting marginalized groups, Dyer said his congregation has participated in marches, protests and vigils.

Avoiding politics is not really an option for a progressive Christian church in Washington, D.C., he said.

“The hope is that people will walk by and think about things a little differently,” Dyer said of his banners. “It will remind people of a God who loves them and feels their frustration.”

The Seattle Times

A union body blow in what was once an organized-labor bastion

Cho Tak Wong, chairman of the Fuyao Group, speaks during the grand opening of the Fuyao Glass America plant, Friday, Oct. 7, 2016, in Moraine, Ohio. The Chinese company’s completed automotive glass-making plant serves as its North American hub for recycled glass manufacturing. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A critical loss for organized labor shows the economic angst of the Heartland is more complicated.

By Jon Talton, Special to The Seatle Times     December 7, 2017

One of the tropes of the 2016 election was that the white working class felt slighted by globalization and voted heavily for the “populism” of Donald Trump. And perhaps that — instead of white-identity and culture-war issues — drove at least some. But in the Heartland, where Trumpism gained heavily, the messages are mixed.

Last month, employees at Fuyao Glass America in suburban Dayton, Ohio, voted by a wide margin to reject joining the United Auto Workers. The factory, which makes auto glass, is located in the shell of the former General Motors Moraine Assembly (and the reader should know I was the business editor at the Dayton Daily News from 1986-1990). The “no” vote represents a stunning turnaround for organized labor.

From 1951 to 1979, this factory made appliances for Frigidaire, a GM subsidiary. When the appliance manufacturing operation was shut down, the plant was saved by a collaboration among state and local government, GM, and the union. With big tax breaks and an adaptable local union, it was transformed into an auto assembly plant, turning out the popular small S-10 Blazer SUV. It was the only GM assembly represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a holdover from Frigidaire days.

This is part of the Rust Belt story that’s rarely told: How the region reinvented itself after catastrophic losses in the late 1970s and early 1980. Dayton was no stranger to this: When NCR ended manufacturing of mechanical cash registers, it cost some 30,000 good local jobs and left a swath south of downtown empty as former factories were torn down. But often places were able to adapt, even with the headwinds of ’80s-style vulture capitalism.

Moraine was one of the success stories. And the union was essential. Often its members had the best ideas to improve productivity and innovation — the bottleneck was then-CEO Roger Smith’s bureaucracy. Unions were still popular — people understood that, even with their flaws, they had been essential to building the middle class and spreading benefits across workplaces everywhere. In 1989, more than 21 percent of Ohio workers were union members. By 2016, it was 12.4 percent. Nationally, only 6.4 percent of the private-sector workforce was unionized last year, compared to more than one-third in the 1950s.

The Moraine Assembly was shut down by GM in 2008. Automation, moves to non-union plants in the South, and China’s rise in the world economy have cost Ohio 376,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990. Fuyao, paradoxically, is a Chinese company, one of a small number that have opened factories in the United States. In the New York Times, Cao Dewang, the company’s founder, blamed “excessive union power for American industrial decline” and said, “To be brutally honest, up to this moment, my investment in the U.S. has brought no good to Fuyao.”

Don’t be a sore winner.

In reality, the decline of unions goes far beyond their sometime corruption or overreaching (and that never happens with businesses, right?). Blame the savaging of key industries by decades of “rip, strip and flip” capitalism, weak antitrust enforcement, deregulation and anti-worker bias on the National Labor Relations Board and elsewhere in the federal government. Globalization played a role, but unions are strong in Germany. America’s story is more complicated.

One of the chapters is about workers voting against their self-interest. How many at Fuyao voted for Trump? They got the wealthiest cabinet in history, more deregulation and hostility to workers, and soon tax legislation that will cause lasting damage to the middle class. “Great Again,” in the minds of Trump voters, was the Nifty Fifties. But apparently without the strong unions.