Slate - "The Brink of the Unthinkable" (it is about the dismantling of the social safety net)

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/07/obamacare-repeal-is-the-first-step-in-scaling-back-entitlements.html

The Senate has Started Down a Path America has Never Taken: a Wholesale Dismantling of the Social Safety Net)

by Jamelle Bouie



JULY 27, 2017 COVER STORY
On Tuesday, the Senate—with the late, dramatic arrival of Sen. John McCain, who cast a deciding vote—opened the floor to Obamacare repeal. A procedural vote, it was the remarkable capstone of an unprecedented effort to pass major legislation without hearings, independent testimony, or public input. What makes it potentially history-making, and not just noteworthy, is that it also marks a milestone for our country: the beginning of what is, thus far, one of the most aggressive attempts at revoking a broad guarantee of the American welfare state. A door that, once opened, may prove difficult to close.

Conventional wisdom says that, once passed, entitlements never go away. They may shrink and they may change, but they never quite end. That conventional wisdom is rooted in the history of the federal social policy. Since the creation of the American welfare state with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, its broad story has been one of expansion. In the 1940s, lawmakers passed a sweeping expansion of federal support for private and public housing, to say nothing of the GI Bill, which helped create the (white) American middle class; in the 1950s, they expanded Social Security, covering millions more American workers; and in the 1960s, they guaranteed health care to both the poor and the elderly under the Great Society. It’s not that these weren’t hard-fought battles—Ronald Reagan made his first major splash in national politics as a staunch opponent of Medicare, slamming it as the harbinger of “statism” in America—but that, once in place, Americans saw these benefits as tantamount to rights, entitlements of American citizenship.

If welfare reform was a sucker punch to low-income families, then Republican Medicaid cuts constitute a crippling blow.
Major expansion ended in the 1970s and wouldn’t resurface for another 40 years. But fundamental retrenchment never came, despite the rise of the conservative movement and its vocal crusade against “big government.” Eight years after President Ronald Reagan called government the “problem” of American life, and four years after his successor took the reins of government, the core programs of the New Deal and the Great Society remained intact. Republicans would strike one blow against the safety net, working with President Bill Clinton to enact “welfare reform” in the 1990s. Still the structure of the welfare state would endure, surviving the larger turn from state guarantees that characterized Clinton’s presidency. Welfare was vulnerable to cuts, but the core entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—were popular among all Americans, left and right. They were all but untouchable, a fact made clear when President George W. Bush pushed for Social Security privatization in 2005, an initiative that promptly collapsed in the face of broad opposition. Eventually, under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party would return to a program of expansion, reinvigorating the guarantees of the safety net with the Affordable Care Act, which expanded Medicaid and put the United States on the path toward universal health coverage.

If successful, the current Republican drive to repeal Obamacare would represent an almost revolutionary shift from the direction of American history. I say “almost” revolutionary because the repeal drive isn’t entirely anomalous. In some respects, it is similar to the push for welfare reform. Aid to Families With Dependent Children welfare reached about 12.6 million Americans in 1996, or just less than 5 percent of the total population, before it was refigured as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, where help hinged on meeting work requirements and actual benefits were stingy. By 2012, after nearly 20 years of this reform, the number of beneficiaries was down to just 4.6 million people, or roughly 1 percent of all Americans. In percentage terms, the Republican Party’s proposed cuts to Medicaid are of a similar scale. According to the Congressional Budget Office, those cuts would remove 14 million people from the program. That’s 4 percent fewer Americans who would receive Medicaid services, an impact similar to welfare reform.

snip - much more to read

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. kick - did anyone read this?

[dhill926]

2. repubs....especially the orange one and his minions...

are nihilists....