For their next act of malevolence after voting to take away health care from 24 million people, House Republicans are plotting to cut $500 billion from Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment benefits in 2018.
Bloomberg reported, “House Republicans are considering an ambitious target of about $500 billion in cuts to so-called mandatory spending in their fiscal 2018 budget resolution, according to two people familiar with the plan. The House Budget Committee is considering instructing Congress to pursue the cuts to a rarely-touched slice of the budget that totaled $2.4 trillion in 2016 and which includes spending on safety-net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and food stamps.”
The Republicans can pass these cuts, and avoid a Democratic filibuster, by using budget reconciliation which requires a simple majority for passage. The cuts that are being proposed would harm the most economically vulnerable people in US society. The vast majority of Medicaid recipients are children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Over 80% of households receiving food stamps contain a child, disabled, or elderly person. Cuts to unemployment benefits would harm anyone who lost their job through no fault of their own, and any Medicare cuts would harm seniors.
Republicans are targeting people on fixed or low incomes or dependents who have no income potential because they are children. These are the type of cuts that are based on an ideological cruelty that is unfathomable in world’s only superpower.
Taking away health care from tens of millions is just the beginning. There are other even more dangerous cuts coming.
The battles being fought in 2017 against the Republican agenda can only be decisively won at the ballot box in 2018. The fight is about more than health care. The very survival of millions of people is on the line.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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