"Trump’s budget is the opening shot in a
stage-managed tussle between the two big
business parties over social cuts that will end
with the most massive attack on core social
programs in US history."
AMERICA: One paycheck
and two illegals away from homelessness.
"The economists found that the pre-tax share of
national income received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut nearly
in half since 1980, from 20 percent to 12 percent, while the income share of the
top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 20 percent."
SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA’S OPEN
BORDERS
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH:
“In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike
any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long
social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The
incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries.
It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every
remaining gain won by workers over the past century.”
23 May 2017
The Trump administration will unveil a fiscal year 2018 budget today that includes $1.7 trillion in cuts to major social programs. The plan marks a new stage in a bipartisan social counterrevolution aimed at eviscerating what remains of programs to fight poverty and hunger and provide health care for millions of workers.
The unveiling of the budget underscores the reactionary
character of the Democrats’ response to a gangster
government headed by a fascistic-minded billionaire and
composed of Wall Street bankers, far-right ideologues and
generals. The Democratic Party has chosen to base its opposition to Trump not on his assault on working and poor people, his attacks on democratic rights, or his reckless militarism, but on his supposed “softness” toward Russia.
character of the Democrats’ response to a gangster
government headed by a fascistic-minded billionaire and
composed of Wall Street bankers, far-right ideologues and
generals. The Democratic Party has chosen to base its opposition to Trump not on his assault on working and poor people, his attacks on democratic rights, or his reckless militarism, but on his supposed “softness” toward Russia.
In the political warfare in Washington, the Democrats are aligned with those sections of the intelligence apparatus and the “deep state” that are determined to compel Trump to abandon any notion of easing relations, and instead continue the Obama administration’s policy of escalating confrontation with Russia. As the Democrats and the so-called “liberal” media pursue their anti-Russia campaign, the Trump administration continues to advance its brutal domestic agenda.
Trump’s budget is the opening shot in a stage-managed tussle between the two big business parties over social cuts that will end with the most massive attack on core social programs in US history.
The budget includes a cut of $800 billion over a decade in Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people jointly administered by the federal government and the states. More than 74 million Americans, or one in five, are currently enrolled in Medicaid, including pregnant women, children and seniors with disabilities.
Like the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed earlier this month by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Trump’s budget plan would put an end to Medicaid as a guaranteed benefit based on need, replacing it with per capita funding or block grants to the states.
The AHCA would also end the expansion of Medicaid benefits under Obamacare and allow states to impose work requirements for beneficiaries. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that an earlier version of the Republican plan would result in 10 million people being stripped of Medicaid benefits.
Trump’s budget would also cut $193 billion over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, a 25 percent reduction to be achieved in part by limiting eligibility and imposing work requirements.
Welfare benefits, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, would be cut by $21 billion. Spending on the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which benefit mainly low- and middle-income families, would be reduced by $40 billion.
The budget reportedly includes changes in funding for Social Security’s Supplemental Security Income program, which provides cash benefits to the poor and disabled.
While gutting social programs, Trump proposes to sharply reduce taxes for the wealthy. In addition to slashing income tax rates for the rich, he is proposing to dramatically cut estate, capital gains and business tax rates. At the same time, he is demanding a huge increase in military spending.
While Democrats will make rhetorical criticisms of the Trump budget, the fact is that the administration is escalating a decades-long assault on the working class overseen by both big business parties.
The outcome can be seen in the reality of social life in America:
Poverty
More than 13 percent—some 43.1 million
Americans—were living in poverty in 2015. Of
these, 19.4 million were living in extreme
poverty, which means their family’s cash
income was less than half of the poverty line,
or about $10,000 a year for a family of four.
The poverty rate for children under 18 was
19.7 percent.
Americans—were living in poverty in 2015. Of
these, 19.4 million were living in extreme
poverty, which means their family’s cash
income was less than half of the poverty line,
or about $10,000 a year for a family of four.
The poverty rate for children under 18 was
19.7 percent.
These are the official poverty rates, based on absurdly low income baselines. In reality, at least half of the population is living in or on the edge of poverty. These are precisely the people targeted by Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid, welfare and food stamps.
Hunger
Almost one in eight US households, 15.8 million, were food insecure in 2015, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members. Five percent of households had very low food security, meaning the food intake of household members was cut. Three million households were unable to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children.
Lack of health care
In 2016 under Obamacare, 28.6 million people of all ages, or about 9 percent of the US population, remained uninsured. Many of those insured under plans purchased from private insurers on the Obamacare exchanges were unable to use their insurance because of prohibitively high deductibles and co-pays. Many who gained insurance under Obamacare did so as a result of the expansion of Medicaid. Trump plans to reverse this, throwing millions of people back into the ranks of the uninsured.
A bipartisan assault
In the wake of Trump’s budget proposal, the Democrats have responded with their standard empty rhetoric. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer—one of Congress’ biggest recipients of Wall Street campaign money—decried Trump’s “hard-right policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the middle-class.” Just three weeks ago, Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were hailing the passage of a bipartisan fiscal 2017 budget that cut food stamps by $2.4 billion, slashed funding for education and the environment, and added billions more for the military and border control.
Obamacare paved the way for the present assault on Medicaid and the coming attacks on Medicare and Social Security by further subordinating health care to the profit demands of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and imposing higher costs for reduced benefits on millions of workers.
Nothing less than a mass movement of the working class will prevent the destruction of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, public education and every other social gain won by the working class. But this movement must be completely independent of the Democratic Party, the historic graveyard of social protest in America. That includes left-talking demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
It is not a matter of appealing to or seeking to pressure the Democrats or any other section of the political establishment. They are all in the pocket of Wall Street.
The working class needs its own program to secure its basic social rights—a decent-paying job, education, health care, a secure retirement. These rights are not compatible with a capitalist system that is lurching inexorably toward world war and dictatorship.
Workers and youth must intervene in this crisis with a socialist and revolutionary program geared to the needs of the vast majority, not the interests of an obscenely rich and corrupt financial oligarchy.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
“The greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American
citizens are the Mexican drug cartels.”
Much more here:
……post
on your face book
“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to
America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the
United States. Mexican drug
cartels are now accomplishing
that mission – from within, every day, in
virtually every
community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH
THE LEGACY OF
BARACK OBAMA:
Final Death of the American White Middle Class
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level.
Millions more now live in “high poverty”
districts
of 20-40 percent poverty, according to
recently released report by the
Brookings
Institution.
THE OBAMA BOOK DEAL: Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5
million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made
to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s
geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the
wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.
HOMELESS ELDERLY in AMERICA UNDER
MEX OCCUPATION
A Nation dies young, poor, addicted
and homeless…. It’s the American dream as the rich get super rich!
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number
of elderly persons who are homeless in the US will have doubled by 2050.
America’s Super-rich Live 15 Years Longer!
………….. America’s Bludgeoned Middle-Class Dies Young, Addicted and Poor!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/04/americas-super-rich-live-15-years.html
TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING
OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS
“CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WILL CONTINUE TO RULE
AMERICA!” Twitter Trumper
OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics: The
Massive Transfer of Wealth to the Super Rich Ratcheted up!
*
The American oligarchy, steeped in
criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social
reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions
for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary
demise at the hands of the working class.
*
BUT WE KNOW WHERE THEY LIVE!
“The massive transfer
of wealth will not go to investment, but to acquiring bigger
diamonds; more
luxurious mansions, yachts and private jets; new private
islands; more security
guards and better-protected gated communities to
segregate the financial nobility
from the masses whom they despise
and fear.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike,
has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.
This is the way a
great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
CUT MEDICAID AND SOCIAL SECURITY TO FINANCE TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics: America’s Road to REVOLUTION
….. but will they finish off the
American middle-class first???
“The Tax Policy Center finds
that for the top 0.1 percent of income earners—those making more than $3.75
million annually—repealing this investment tax would amount to an average tax
cut of $165,090.”
White House Budget Cuts Entitlements $1.7 Trillion, Slashes EPA 30%
The White House will release its “taxpayer-first budget” on Tuesday, which includes $1.7 trillion in cuts for entitlement spending and a 30 percent reduction in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget.
The Trump budget proposal will balance over the next ten years by cutting both mandatory and discretionary funding for agencies such as the EPA and State Department. The budget proposal assumes that the economy will grow at three percent compared to the 1.6 percent growth that America experienced in 2016. White House staffers explained that the proposal is a “post-policy” budget, meaning that the budget assumes that Trump signed the health care overhaul known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) and tax reform into law.
The budget proposal will make substantial cuts into four entitlement programs, SNAP (food stamps), CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), and SSDI (Disability Insurance). The Trump budget assumes that the AHCA becomes law, which would roll back Medicaid expansion. White House staffers told Axios that the budget would cut entitlement costs through an “emphasis on work requirements for able-bodied people.”
The Washington Post’s Damian Paletta stated, “The White House also will call for giving states more flexibility to impose work requirements for people in different kinds of anti-poverty programs, people familiar with the budget plan said, potentially leading to a flood of changes in states led by conservative governors.”
Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, explained that giving states the flexibility to impose work requirements could to lead to significant changes to programs such as Medicaid or public housing assistance.
“One of the encouraging things about putting this in the budget is that states will see if it works,” Archambault said. “States will try it.”
Michael Tanner, a welfare expert at the Cato Institute, admitted that despite the United States spending roughly $700 billion a year on entitlement programs, the country does not experience significant reductions in poverty.
Tanner said, “We’re not seeing the type of gains we should be seeing for all that spending, and that would suggest its time to reform the system.”
Although the budget will include cuts to food stamps and disability insurance, President Donald Trump told his budget director Mick Mulvaney that he does not want any cuts to Medicare or Social Security.
President Donald Trump’s budget would also cut the EPA’s budget by a third and slash the agency’s operational budget by 35 percent. The budget would reduce environmental grant programs by 35 to 40 percent. The proposed budget for the EPA would limit the EPA’s budget to $5.7 billion from roughly $8 billion.
Trump’s budget cuts for the EPA coincide with the EPA’s $12 million buyout and early retirement plan to reduce the agency’s workforce under the Trump administration.
Trump made campaign promises to eliminate the EPA, and has already taken great strides to limit the agency’s workforce. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed half of the scientists on its Board of Scientific Counselors earlier this month.
White House staffers told Axios that the Trump budget proposal will be a victory for conservatives, much to the chagrin of moderates and Democrats.
“Conservatives will love it; moderates will probably hate it.”
$1.4 trillion in cuts to health program for
the poor
Whatever its immediate fate, however, the Trump budget
serves a definite political purpose. It lays down a marker
for a phony budget “debate” in Congress, in which both
Democrats and Republicans will claim to oppose Trump
cuts as too drastic while they settle for a “compromise” that
imposes devastating and unprecedented cuts and serves as
the prelude to the destruction of Medicare and Social
Security.
Trump budget aims to fatally cripple Medicaid
By Patrick Martin
25 May 2017
25 May 2017
The budget plan announced by the Trump administration on Tuesday would cut more than $1.4 trillion over ten years from Medicaid, the main federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled, according to detailed analyses of the budget document by both conservative and liberal think tanks.
While White House officials sought to conceal
this truth, the impact of the budget would be
to dramatically worsen access to health care
for the 74 million people now covered by the
program, half of them children. The
inevitable result will be greater sickness and
suffering, and earlier deaths, for vast
numbers of Americans.
White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney initially claimed that the $610 billion in cuts in Medicaid proposed in the budget overlapped extensively with the $834 billion in Medicaid cuts already mandated by the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Obamacare repeal legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month and is now to be taken up by the Senate.
However, studies by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and other think tanks confirm that there is actually little overlap. The White House has proposed massive additional cuts to Medicaid on top of those in the AHCA. The two numbers should be added together, bringing the total level of cuts to more than $1.4 trillion over a ten-year period.
By 2027, the end of the period covered by the Trump budget projections, annual Medicaid spending will be reduced by 47.2 percent, nearly half.
The budget document presumes that the AHCA will be passed by the Senate and signed into law by Trump. The AHCA effectively repeals the expansion of Medicaid that was a major component of Obamacare and led to the enrollment of 10 million more people in the program, mainly by raising the income ceiling for beneficiaries to 133 percent of the poverty line.
The AHCA converts Medicaid from an entitlement program, where every eligible person is able to enroll and receive guaranteed benefits, to a program based on block grants to the states, the value of which will be capped, forcing states to tighten eligibility, limit enrollment and cut benefits. Under the AHCA, the Medicaid caps would rise at the inflation rate of health care costs generally, a figure much lower than the inflation rate of spending for Medicaid recipients, who are generally poorer and sicker than the general population.
The Trump budget makes the caps even tighter, allowing them to rise only at the general rate of inflation for consumer prices as a whole. Since health care costs have outpaced the Consumer Price Index by a wide margin every year, this amounts to decreeing an annual cutback in the level of Medicaid coverage.
Who depends on Medicaid? About 18 percent of Medicaid spending is for elderly people confined to nursing homes, whose care is not covered by Medicare, the federal health insurance program for those 65 and over. Medicaid pays all or part of the cost for 60 percent of all US nursing home residents, more than a million people.
Another 42 percent of Medicaid spending is for the disabled: the blind, the deaf, those physically crippled and unable to work, and those suffering from serious mental illness.
The remaining 40 percent goes mainly to low-
income parents with children, although some states
have extended eligibility to childless adults. More
than half of all births in the United States are to
mothers covered by Medicaid, with the figure rising
to as high as 65 percent in a poor state like
Louisiana.
In addition to the gutting of Medicaid, there are other health care-related cuts that will affect millions of working people and their children. One of the most nefarious is a reduction in spending for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The budget proposes to reduce funding by about 20 percent over the next two years, and $6 billion over ten years. CHIP covers the children of working people whose incomes are slightly above the level for eligibility for Medicaid, but still far too low to be able to afford coverage on the private insurance market.
The budget also cuts $1.2 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the premier agency in the world for detecting and fighting epidemics like Ebola and Zika. The resulting CDC budget would be its lowest in 20 years. The cuts include a 26 percent reduction in research on birth defects and developmental disabilities, under conditions of a Zika epidemic in the US territory of Puerto Rico, and a 10 percent reduction in the CDC’s office of public health preparedness and response.
In an angry tweet, former CDC Director Tom Frieden said the Trump budget request for the agency was “unsafe at any level of enactment.” He added that the cuts “Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs.”
Budget Director Mulvaney spelled out the real concerns of the Trump White House when he responded to criticism that the budget was heartless in its treatment of the poor, sick and disabled. “Compassion needs to be on both sides of that equation,” he said Tuesday. “Yes, you have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for the folks who are paying it.”
“Compassion for the billionaires”—the new mantra of the Trump administration and of American capitalist politics as a whole!
But not even the American corporate media could sell such a political slogan. Instead, press reports have sought to muddy the waters and dispel popular outrage by dismissing the Trump budget as unlikely to be enacted. There has been much attention to declarations by congressional Republicans that Trump’s budget plan was “dead on arrival,” and that the budget committees in the House and Senate would write their own budget plans without regard to the White House document.
Whatever its immediate fate, however, the Trump budget serves a definite political purpose. It lays down a marker for a phony budget “debate” in Congress, in which both Democrats and Republicans will claim to oppose Trump cuts as too drastic while they settle for a “compromise” that imposes devastating and unprecedented cuts and serves as the prelude to the destruction of Medicare and Social Security.
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan hailed the Trump budget document as a starting point. “At least we now have common objectives,” he said, adding that the “last president never proposed, let alone tried, to balance the budget.”
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said Republicans “dislike this budget almost as much as we do.” He continued: “Democrats and Republicans will tell President Trump and his minions to stay at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Let us work out a budget together that will make America a better place.”
The top congressional Democrat thus held out the prospect of bipartisan collaboration with Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican reactionaries, whose main objection to the budget plan is Trump’s refusal to call openly for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Health care, pensions, food stamps, education, housing, science, art, environmental regulations are being gutted to pay for a multitrillion-dollar tax cut for the rich and increased military spending. Programs that are
essential to maintaining the rudiments
of civilized life in a modern, complex
society—enacted under the pressure of
mass struggles of the working class—
are being destroyed by two political
parties of big business and a
government of, by and for the financial
oligarchy.
No comments:
Post a Comment