GOP cuts to poor offset by tax breaks for millionaires

GOP budget cuts against the poor are being offset almost dollar for dollar with tax breaks for millionaires.

The republican attack on the poor is targeting food for low income women and children.

“The House Appropriations Committee approved more than $830 million in cuts to WIC and millions more in cuts to the Emergency Food Assistance Program,” according to Think Progess.

The deal to cut funding to food programs for women and children is being offset by $860 million in tax breaks for those earning more than $1 million dollars a year, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

The loss of revenue for the low income food program was caused by the extension of the Bush tax cuts late last year.

Do tax cuts for the rich really create jobs?

There is little evidence to suggest that low tax rates for the wealthy and corporate welfare does much to create jobs. Data supports quite the contrary. Historically, when tax rates on the rich are higher, the economy does better. "In the 1950s, which had one of the sharpest periods of economic growth in all of American economic history, the top marginal tax rates for the richest Americans stretched above 90 percent. Read more.....

Is there an easy way to solve the budget deficit and healthcare crisis?

There is an effective way to address the US budget deficit and deal with the healthcare crisis at the same time. The problem is, it would require a level of political strength that no one in Washington appears to have.

Healthcare costs continue to rise because insurance companies looking to make a profit by cherry-picking who and what they will cover are controlling everything from legislation to pricing. Nowhere else in the civilized world is this allowed to happen except in America.

Escalating healthcare costs are driving up the federal deficit. However, the single payer healthcare system that conservatives are fighting would go a long way toward stabilizing costs. In a Medicare for all scenario, the negotiating power of the US government to stabilize costs would dramatically increase. Medicare already has set fees in place for what they will pay doctors and hospitals.

In a more perfect world, lobbyists would not be running America by writing their own legislation and throwing money at the candidates that they believe will then force them into law. And that is exactly why the United States may never enact the legislation needed to solve both the budget deficit crisis and healthcare crisis, which are very much related and easier to fix than most politicians are willing to admit.

Paul Ryan Medicare vouchers are designed to be worthless

There is a giant hole in the Paul Ryan end Medicare voucher plan that has been hidden under the darker side of the debate. The Medicare vouchers are designed to be completely worthless.

The Affordable Care Act, which is the proper name for what the GOP has dubbed Obamacare, contains a provision that bans insurance companies from excluding people with pre-existing conditions.

The Fact Sheet of the Affordable care Act states: “Starting July 1, Americans locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition can begin enrolling in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP). This program offers insurance without medical underwriting to people who have been unable to get it because of a preexisting condition. It ends in 2014, when the ban on insurers refusing to cover adults with pre-existing conditions goes into effect and individuals will have affordable choices through Exchanges – the same choices as members of Congress.”

If the republicans manage to repeal or de-fund the Affordable Care Act, (Obamacare) insurance companies will once again shut the door in the face of ailing seniors, and everyone else with pre-existing conditions. Furthermore, since the Paul Ryan budget plan claims it will not turn Medicare into a voucher system until after the 2014 Affordable Care Act deadline, it means that by the time the voucher program kicks in, people with pre-existing conditions would be unable to get health insurance.

The deck has been stacked against seniors and the details of the Paul Ryan Medicare voucher plan have been purposefully kept hidden. In reality, the only goal Ryan's plan will achieve is the fulfillment of the Republican Party's long time dream to repeal Medicare once and for all.

It’s not hard to do the math, and once you do, the fact of the matter becomes obvious. The Paul Ryan Medicare voucher plan is deliberately designed to be completely worthless.

Paul Ryan's scheme to end Medicare is deadly

While everyone is busy talking about whether or not America will adopt the Ryan plan to end Medicare, no one has bothered to discuss in detail what would happen if Medicare did indeed disappear.

Foremost, people must look past the rhetoric. A voucher to buy private health insurance does not ‘save’ Medicare for future generations; it ends it.

Medicare is a single payer healthcare system where the government acts as a broker in establishing guidelines on what doctors and hospitals can charge for services for a segment of the population that is otherwise uninsurable. Medicare pays the health care providers and collects affordable premiums through Social Security deductions.

Now take the government away. Most elderly people have pre-existing conditions and are uninsurable. So what kind of health care system do you have left?

Here is what I believe will probably happen if the republicans win their 50 year battle to end health care through the Medicare system.

The removal of government pressure on insurance companies through standardized Medicare pricing will cause insurance rates to skyrocket. Employers struggling to cover employees now due to rising costs will be forced to drop coverage, thus adding millions to the ranks of the uninsured.

The vouchers the elderly receive from the government will not even come close to the astronomical rates insurance companies will charge them, so they will end up using the money to pay for as much medical care as they can while the money lasts. Those in assisted living facilities will be forced to move in with relatives, if they have any that will take them.

Hospitals no longer receiving guaranteed payments from the government through Medicare will refuse to treat elderly patients knowing they will not get paid.

In short, people will die at a much younger age than they would have if they had access to health care in their old age. Children born with birth defects or who develop life threatening diseases will die as well.

We have made amazing advances in medicine over the past two decades, but they will do no one any good if they don’t have the money or insurance to benefit from them.

While the concepts of what America would be like without Medicare are strictly speculation at this point, but they do need to be considered because medicine, surgery, and treatments are the difference between life and death for millions of Americans of every age.

“To senior citizens at town hall meetings angry or worried about their plan to convert Medicare to a private insurance scheme, Republicans have a simple answer: It’s not about you. You’ll be fine. This is for “the next generation,” according to The New Republic.

However, Paul Ryan has no right to decide who gets to live and who should die. But that is exactly what is he proposing by pulling the plug on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. In the real world outside of the millionaires of Capitol Hill, people who need surgery or medicine will die if they don’t have insurance or enough money to buy time for their own lives.

One might expect to see old people dying in the streets in a third world country, but not in America - until now.

GOP does not want voters to know what they really want to do to America

For a party that represents the views of only a small percentage of Americans, the Tea Party has taken center stage on Capitol Hill. However, recent polls have shown that Americans do not support the radical changes Tea Partiers like Paul Ryan have proposed, especially on issues like turning Medicare into a voucher program and increasing tax cuts for the rich. Rather than commit political suicide with their extreme radical views, Tea Party Republicans are beginning to hide their plans to transform the United States into a fascist, corporate run society.

At a recent press conference, Tea Party Republican governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) was asked by a reporter if he would “defy the state Supreme Court if it rules against him and orders him to restore $1.7 billion in funds for poor school districts?” According to NJ.com, Christie’s reply was ‘buzz off.” When asked about his views on evolution, Christie said, "None of your business."

Other extreme right wing republicans have been forced to back off on elements of the widely unpopular Paul Ryan budget plan after constituents lashed out at them at recent Town Hall meetings in their districts.

Many Americans are beginning to feel that the republicans won control of Congress under false pretenses and are misusing their power to promote corporate interests over public interests.

Cuts to education, health care and women’s rights in numerous states, as well as proposals on the federal level, are being offset by more tax cuts for the rich, blowing a hole in the argument that the GOP is working toward deficit reduction. In fact, redistribution of wealth plans and new policies that raise legal questions over individual rights, are adding more debt – not less.

Florida governor Rick Scott recently signed a bill that will cost taxpayers $5.8 million for random mandatory drug testing of public employees and anyone receiving public assistance. Furthermore, any savings Scott’s budget plan raises from cuts to education and health care for the poor are offset by corporate and property tax cuts.

Cases of shifting money from the poor to the rich are happening all over the country, as republicans prove that the path to prosperity will only make the wealthy prosper at the expense of everyone else. This is not what American’s voted for, but they seem powerless to stop the train wreck the Tea Party Republican’s are forcing down the throats of Americans under the guise of fiscal responsibility.

If this is what American’s are seeing from the GOP, what they are hiding is likely to be an even deeper assault on personal freedom and redistribution of wealth.

In reality, new republican laws are making the government bigger and more invasive than it has ever been before; quite the opposite of what the GOP claims to be their goal.

GOP debt ceiling threat: Political suicide?

This week House Speaker John Boehner threatened the White House with refusal to vote to raise the debt ceiling unless $2 trillion in budget cuts are part of the package. Some are calling the republican demand economic terrorism.

“White House spokesman Jay Carney said both Democrats and Republicans agree on the need for deficit reduction,” according to the Daily Kos. “But it would be tantamount to holding the U.S. economy "hostage" by tying the debate over the debt limit to budget cuts.”

Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and other noted economists, as well as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have warned republicans that causing the United States to default on her debts would have worldwide catastrophic effects and should be avoided at all costs. But republicans pandering to the 

Tea Party and corporate lobbyists are defending their threats to destroy the economy in order to get their way. Boehner is also insisting that tax increases on the rich and cutting big oil government subsidies is “off the table” and not negotiable.

“The amazing thing here is that the GOP is making this threat despite having passed a funding bill that adds $1.6 trillion to the national debt, and they've passed a budget resolution that would add $6 trillion to the national debt,” according to Alter Net.

It is painfully obvious that the republicans are not at all interested in reducing the debt. They are pushing a radical right wing agenda that punishes the poor and working class so more money can be shifted through tax breaks to corporations and the rich.

In the mean time, the jobs the republicans promised during their campaigns have still failed to appear.