In the end, three Republican senators -- Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain -- torpedoed the monstrosity that was intended to put an end to Obamacare. And now they are faced with another monstrosity. E.J. Dionne writes:
The GOP bill that should be called the Cut Taxes on President Trump and Other Very Rich People Act of 2017 always had a secondary purpose: to jack up the deficit so Republicans could later cry out in horror, “Look at that awful debt!” They’d then use the pools of red ink they created to justify deep cuts in social programs.
But people who call themselves conservative are shovelling out so much money so fast to corporations and the privileged that they needed some health care cuts upfront — at the expense of coverage for millions of our less fortunate brothers and sisters.
And so on Tuesday, the Senate majority took an appalling bill and made it even more atrocious. To their ungainly concoction of tax breaks for the various interests that support them, they added the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.
Most Republicans are still trying to get rid of Obamacare. They're also pushing a huge corporate tax break. And, as with their health care legislation, they are rushing to pass it:
Let’s take a step back and ponder the exceptional irresponsibility of what’s transpiring here. The same people who complained that more than a year of hearings, analysis and debate around Obamacare constituted “rushing” the bill are now recklessly spiriting through the system a gigantic piece of legislation that would touch all corners of the American economy.
They are changing it willy-nilly, day-by-day, to accommodate this or that political problem. They are rationalizing their thrown-together product with false claims about everything from whom it will benefit to how it will affect the long-term deficit. They are using a tax bill to punish their political enemies (people in high-tax blue states, major universities, low-income Americans) and reward their friends and donors (corporations and the very affluent).
And, with all of the sound and fury about Judge Roy Moore, they may succeed in passing their legislation -- unless the same Republicans -- with a couple of additions -- stand up for their constituents.
These days, it's hard to find profiles in courage in the American Congress.
6 comments:
it takes only one drop of water to start a river
Americans should hope that there are more than one or two drops around, Steve.
I like to imagine there was a time when Americans wouldn't have tolerated these affronts. That would probably be pre-Reagan America. Social values and mores shifted incrementally after the adoption of neoliberalism and the adoption of a bubble economy promising vast riches for everybody capable of putting pen to paper. The Savings & Loan bubble, the Dot.Com bubble, the Enron/WorldCom scandal, the massive housing/sub-prime bubble. In the aftermath of those upheavals the scam transitioned into wealth accumulation at the very top and the rise of two companion realities, the precariat and the oligarchy.
Like the Tower of Babel, Americans no longer share a common tongue. There are soothing words for wage-earning Americans spiced up with calls of righteous indignation, paranoia and xenophobia. And there are words of action, legislated advantages, for the most privileged.
My worry is that the American public has been neutralized and will now grudgingly tolerate what is being done to them by the same cadre that pumps them with fear and anger. I would rather see a crushing weight of the destruction of healthcare, oppressive tax changes and perhaps even the loss of their Social Security all at once because I suspect it will take something utterly seismic to get Americans to realize what's being done to them, who is actually doing it and then, perhaps, finally, the sort of mass upheaval without which this will only get worse, one baby step after another.
Each new attack on their common decency seems to make no difference, Mound. Americans are sleepwalking to the abyss.
Re,
These days, it's hard to find profiles in courage in the American Congress.
Is it not time to look to a world without USA influence?
Politically, ideologically and socially the USA has become irrelevant.
As with kicking the tobacco habit or other drugs we must wean ourselves away from the 'American Dream' for it is just a dream , a dream that will destroy all that participate.
TB
It appears that what you're suggesting is actually happening, TB. Countries around the world are saying there's nothing here to emulate.
Post a Comment