How Can the Democrats Be Losing to These Cruel, Stupid, Inept People?

The Senate Republicans do not have a “big, beautiful” bill. It is not close to the finalization. The Senate parliamentarian, painting through the details and determining what arrangements will need a supermajority to pass, hammers them. They are locked in a fierce internal debate on the Medicaid cups. They did not hold any hearing on the bill in any committee.

And they say they will start to vote tomorrow.

Worse still, the complete hypocrisy of the thing, which was true for each republican tax bill which returned to 1981. Since Arthur Laffer sold the GOP on its ridiculous curve, they lied to the American people on the way in which their tax cuts produce more income. It never happened. Never. Some of the more stupid Republicans can believe it, but the most intelligent know that Laffer’s theory is a lie, and they say it anyway.

And so we look at the Senate republicans arguing on the extent to which they want to destroy Medicaid. You have read and heard of that, I am sure, and you may have even familiarized with the expression “providers’ tax”. Journalistic stenography generally does a bad job to explain what it really is. Stay with me for this brief explanation, because it clearly shows how cruel and deliberate these cuts are.

The health services which are reimbursed by Medicaid are, well, provided by a range of different “suppliers”. The main ones are hospitals, but the category also includes nursing homes, other long -term care establishments, doctors, physiotherapists, even chiropractors: all kinds of people. But the big money revolves around hospitals, and in particular rural hospitals, which are strongly based on the dollars of Medicaid because they are poorer than the other hospitals. They tend to be executed for non -profit. They are less likely that urban or suburban hospitals to have commercial insurance, and they depend more on Medicaid revenues because their customers tend to be poorer. In the United States, there are approximately 1,800 rural hospitals. Here is a card.

ALL RIGHT. From the 1980s, during a previous funding crisis, the congress authorized states to start taxing providers. In many states (it becomes very complicated, and I will not enter it deeply), the tax on the tax that states can charge hospitals represent 6% of patient money money (this is called “maximum safe refuge” in Wonkspeak). The Senate bill seeks to reduce this ceiling over a few years to 3.5%.

To make a long story, when you reduce a tax, you reduce the amount of the income it reports. It is also worth keeping in mind here that Medicaid reimbursements rarely cover the cost of care to start, so these cuts will worsen the already disastrous situation. Governors and States’ legislatures will look at a fairly substantial reduction in Medicaid tax revenue. They will then face three choices: one will increase another kind of tax; Two, cut another state service, such as education; Three, cut the Medicaid services.

As the Republicans of Congress know well, most states will choose number three, because it is the simplest way. And that brings a devastation. If you want to see why the republican senator Thom Tillis is so panicked, click on this card above and zoom in on his condition, North Carolina. You will see in detail the number of rural hospitals that work at a loss and how much have already closed.

This is therefore what the Republicans debate – and say deliberately and dishonestly to the American people that it is a simple case to cut “waste, fraud and abuse”, as if they had no choice in the matter.

It is a monstrous lie.

They have the choice. But of course, this is a choice they will never make. What is this choice? In theory, they could reduce tax reductions to the rich. The problem would be instantly resolved.

The proposed Medicaid cuts reach around $ 800 billion. The cost of reducing the drop in income tax in 2017 is permanently about 2.2 billions of dollars. So, in other words, the cancellation of tax reductions would covered more than the proposed Medicaid cuts. In fact, the Republicans could leave nearly two thirds of intact tax reductions, and simply remove them, and leave Medicaid intact.

In a fantastic world, they could dare to say it, completely eliminate tax reductions. They would have 2.2 billions of dollars with which to play, and they could extend rural health care – you know, do something substance to all the people who vote for them, in addition to frightening them by thinking that Democrats want to steal their weapons and neutralize their children.

But you notice: nobody, never, never, never discussed tax reductions. Person. None of the, ahem, not moderate – Senator Susan Collins, not the representative Mike Lawler (at least I heard). Tax reductions are not written in ink and paper, to the Republicans. They are written in lightning on tablets from Mount Sinai. They cannot be discussed.

And it’s not just your usual GOP tax reductions. They are worse. These are the most redistributive tax reductions in modern American history, and by redistribution, I do not want to say from top to bottom. I mean at the top of the rest of us.

Here are some facts on the version of the Bill Chamber, the Tax Institute and Economic Policy, or ITEP:

• The richest 1% of Americans would receive a total of $ 121 billion in net tax reductions in 2026. The 20% means of taxpayers on the income scale, a group which is 20 times the size of the richest 1%, would receive less than half of it: $ 56 billion in tax reductions that year.
• The 121 billion dollars in net net tax discounts ranging to the richest 1% next year would exceed the amount ranging to all 60% of taxpayers (around $ 79 billion).
• The fifth poorer of the Americans would receive less than 1% of the net bill reduction in 2026, while the richest fifth of Americans would receive 70%. The richest 5% would receive 45% of net tax cuts that year.

There is much more. The richest 1% ($ 916,900) will obtain an average drop of $ 68,430, or 2.5%. The poorest 20% (up to $ 27,000) will obtain a huge drop of $ 30, or 0.2%. As a percentage, the reduction of the rich is 10 times The cup for the poor.

But wait – you keep getting worse. ITEP believes that when you add the costs of Donald Trump’s pricing proposals, the net impact on the 20% lower will be a tax increase 2.2%. The prices are not finalized, of course, so we cannot really know the difficult number, but as a rule, the prices cost the poorer, as they spend a much higher percentage of their income on imported necessities.

The whole thing is just shame. A political shame. A moral disgrace. Rural hospitals will close and people in the working class will die so that Trump golf friends can get tens of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The American people do not know all the facts and characters above, but they seem to know in their bones that this bill is a breakage. It is deeply unpopular. But even so, the Democrats could do much more here. Why do they not stand out across the country one day next day and organize events in rural hospitals that lose money that face potential closure? In the spring, when they made these anti-doge events in republican districts, it seemed to have an impact. At least they obviously did something. There are rural hospitals in each state. Democrats could do much worse than trying to show rural Americans that they care.

But it’s like Jon Lovitz, playing Michael Dukakis, said on Saturday Night Live in 1988: I cannot believe that we lose against these guys. If the Democrats were more aggressive, this bill would kill the Republicans in 2026 And 2028. It’s cruel, it’s so stupid, it’s so inept. Democrats must find dramatic ways to say it.