>It sounds like you're saying people want to hurt poor people.
Well, let me quote some recent news:
>Speaking to National Review editor Rich Lowry at an event hosted by the conservative magazine, House Speaker Paul Ryan made the case for the American Health Care Act by presenting it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cut Medicaid spending.
>“We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around,” Ryan says, before interrupting himself to clarify exactly how big of an opportunity this is, “since you and I were drinking out of kegs.”
Yes, the current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives wants to hurt poor people. He's been dreaming of it since he was doing keg-stands in college. He said so.
If Ryan wanted to say we've been dreaming of [cutting spending] since you and I were drinking out of kegs he could have said that. But he didn't. He was talking about cutting Medicaid. He wasn't talking about canceling the F35. Indeed FY18 procures 46 more F35s.
He only ever wants to cut the social state. Nothing else. His agenda is clearly that the real moral "good guys" of the United States are big business, and everyone else should basically subsidize them, being mere hangers-on.
Ok. So he wants to cut spending and also keep his party's donors happy. That second constraint prevents many kinds of cuts, but not all of them.
My point was that he's not malicious, merely apathetic. Hurting people by cutting their benefits is not the goal. Cutting spending by cutting their benefits is the goal.
And I'm supposed to believe that his donors have no interest in an employer-friendly labor market? Questions about how to spend money are rarely neutral, value-free ones.
To put it another way, George W. Bush wildly expanded spending with his Medicare Part D program, but that was supported by the Republicans because it achieved other goals (the main one was ensuring no cost control was built into the measure, since it was suspected that if Democrats passed a similar measure it would allow negotiation to drive down costs). Is this the move of a group whose primary concern is fiscal discipline? https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/medicare-part-...
Cutting spending without addressing costs just shifts the burden to people less able to pay for it. And I, for one, am not convinced anything is good just because Obama advocated for it.
Well, let me quote some recent news:
>Speaking to National Review editor Rich Lowry at an event hosted by the conservative magazine, House Speaker Paul Ryan made the case for the American Health Care Act by presenting it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cut Medicaid spending.
>“We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around,” Ryan says, before interrupting himself to clarify exactly how big of an opportunity this is, “since you and I were drinking out of kegs.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/17/14960358/p...
Yes, the current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives wants to hurt poor people. He's been dreaming of it since he was doing keg-stands in college. He said so.