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The coming Republican assault on the safety net
The vision is one of an America that's more unequal and more cruel, where the wealthy and powerful accrue more wealth and power, and the rest of us find more obstacles in our way. In other words, "freedom."
The tax cut will most certainly have this effect. At a moment when the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of America's wealth — a higher portion than at any time in the last 50 years — and corporate profits are near all-time highs, Republicans are about to pass a gigantic tax cut that mostly benefits the wealthy and corporations. And it isn't just that they're larding benefits on those who need it least; to pay for it, the bill will increase taxes on those making less than $75,000 and take health coverage away from millions.
But that's just one half of the plan. Once the tax bill is done, we get to phase II: an all-out war on the safety net. In an act of positively awe-inspiring shamelessness, they plan to argue that our high national debt demands that we cut back social programs, right after they voted to increase the debt by $1.5 trillion.
That's the rationale, but we know beyond any doubt that they don't really care about the debt. Republicans, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in particular, have long dreamed of taking a chainsaw to the social programs that emerged from the Great Society. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps — it will all be on the chopping block. "We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit," says Ryan.
Eviscerating social programs has long been Ryan's dream, ever since he was a wee pup excitedly reading Ayn Rand novels, his mind expanding to take in this intoxicating perspective on how most of your fellow human beings are contemptible drones worthy only of serving your grand ambitions. The average college dudebro who thrills to doorstopper "philosophical" justifications for selfishness eventually grows up and gets over it, but Ryan never did ("I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it," he once said), and his career has been a single-minded project to translate those ideas into policy.
There is one problem, though: President Trump has a populist impulse on some of these questions, driven less by ideology than by his sense of what's popular and what isn't. That's why he repeatedly promised during the 2016 campaign not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. So how do Republicans convince him to break that promise? They seem to be trying to do it through the use of a magical incantation, the words "welfare reform."
The tax cut will most certainly have this effect. At a moment when the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of America's wealth — a higher portion than at any time in the last 50 years — and corporate profits are near all-time highs, Republicans are about to pass a gigantic tax cut that mostly benefits the wealthy and corporations. And it isn't just that they're larding benefits on those who need it least; to pay for it, the bill will increase taxes on those making less than $75,000 and take health coverage away from millions.
But that's just one half of the plan. Once the tax bill is done, we get to phase II: an all-out war on the safety net. In an act of positively awe-inspiring shamelessness, they plan to argue that our high national debt demands that we cut back social programs, right after they voted to increase the debt by $1.5 trillion.
That's the rationale, but we know beyond any doubt that they don't really care about the debt. Republicans, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in particular, have long dreamed of taking a chainsaw to the social programs that emerged from the Great Society. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps — it will all be on the chopping block. "We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit," says Ryan.
Eviscerating social programs has long been Ryan's dream, ever since he was a wee pup excitedly reading Ayn Rand novels, his mind expanding to take in this intoxicating perspective on how most of your fellow human beings are contemptible drones worthy only of serving your grand ambitions. The average college dudebro who thrills to doorstopper "philosophical" justifications for selfishness eventually grows up and gets over it, but Ryan never did ("I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it," he once said), and his career has been a single-minded project to translate those ideas into policy.
There is one problem, though: President Trump has a populist impulse on some of these questions, driven less by ideology than by his sense of what's popular and what isn't. That's why he repeatedly promised during the 2016 campaign not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. So how do Republicans convince him to break that promise? They seem to be trying to do it through the use of a magical incantation, the words "welfare reform."
http://theweek.com/articles/741952/coming-republican-assault-safety-net
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