If Republicans are looking for spending cuts to offset their huge tax cuts, the only big pot of money plausibly open to them is Medicaid. Guess what?
President-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun preliminary discussions about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year.
....House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told reporters Wednesday that a “responsible and reasonable work requirement” for Medicaid benefits resembling the one that already exists for food stamps could yield about $100 billion in savings. He also said another $160 billion in reduced costs could come from checking Medicaid eligibility more than once per year.
....Republicans have long denied that they are trying to reduce benefits for low-income Americans on either Medicaid or food stamps.
"Republicans have long denied." Ha ha. That's hilarious. Of course they want to reduce Medicaid and food stamps. Poor people are not a constituency they give a shit about.
The only good news here is that Arrington is presumably talking about 10-year savings, which means his Medicaid proposals come to about $26 billion a year. That's not huge even if they go through with it. Medicaid may be the only big pot of money around, but even it's nowhere near big enough to pay for their stupendous, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich.
If democracy survives, Democrats will easily turn these changes back in few years.
Not sure how big an if that is, but I'd guess it will be harder to restore benefits than it will be take them away. Will Republicans get enough votes for this? I'm skeptical.
Also skeptical about Vivek Ramaswamy's plans to reduce the federal workforce.
The ignorance and the evil are running neck-and-neck in this guy.
Aside from knowing nothing about the geographic distribution of SSNs, take the SSA, for example.
Today: 60,000 employees, $1.3 trillion annual budget.
Assume payroll is $10 billion per year, and you eliminate all workers.
What to you get? 0 employees, still a $1.3 trillion annual budget.
Or you can eliminate IRS employees, and the net result is less federal revenue.
They're all freaking nuts.
FFS, even if 25% of people do 80-90% of the work, it isn't a random 25%. Even if we accept his premise, cutting 75% of the workforce randomly would cut 75% of the presumed productive 25% in the process. The only people that believe this kind of drivel are those that fundamentally don't understand how just about anything works.
The "geographic distribution" part of social security numbers is the first two sections (the first three and the second two). The last four are just sequentially assigned to a specific geographical bucket, typically over six to twelve months. So, using the last digit would be relatively random, though using the first would be a problem regionally for the second cut.
The question is, is zero even or odd, since "even" means "divisible by 2 with no remainder"? I bet Vivek! has not thought about that. There are SSN's which begin with zero. They're in New England typically.
Zero divided by two equals zero with no remainder. Zero is an even number.
Gee this sounds like a great idea! Let’s start with the police! How about prisons! Oh boy, we can cut the number of prison guards by 75% and not notice a difference! How about firefighters? Oh, oh, I’ve got a great idea, let’s cut crews on aircraft carriers! And why do we need so many pilots?
I think I know Ramaswamy’s favorite song:
https://youtu.be/P_OPpfaFlUI?si=8t8lefnpEMU-PipJ
Astonishingly brilliant of Vivek to realize that it's easy to fire 75% of the federal workforce--all you need do is simply fire 75% of them.
Why, his logic is so airtight, it's practically circular!
The level of "thought" put into these proposals honestly sounds like a middle school mock government assignment. "I'm gonna raise a gazillionty dollars with tariffs then everything will be perfect!", "I'm going to get rid of 75% of the government and there will definitely be no negative affects at all!"
Yes, republicans have been lying for decades about how the american people don't care about government services. And then they shut down the government, and learn there is not 1 iota of truth to the claim and are forced to cave in their nonsensical budget battles.
As someone who works in the Medicaid space, poor folks gonna get hurt including a HUGE amount of white folks
it's time to put all those little kids on Medicaid to work!
Thats certainly not what leader Donald intends. But if it does happen, we know who to blame. The immigrants. Maybe the DEIs too! Then we will re-elect Donald in 2028 to fix this mess the Democrats created!
AMERICA!
And why should I care? It's what they voted for.
Unfortunately a lot of poor black people who are not Republicans will be badly hurt by this too.
Our mathematically illiterate media really need to make this fact clear. There are about 16 million poor white Americans compared to 8.5 million poor black. Instead of just reporting the rate of poverty per group giving the absolute number might make working class white people realize they are the bigges group of what they see as “takers” and a lot more of them will be hurt by Trump’s policies.
It’s like these people cut off their faces to spite their ears.
Should have said that I grew up in the Appalachia in the 50s and 60s before LBJ’s War on Poverty programs. Our town was in good economic shape but abject poverty of kids from rural areas of our county was far worse than the level of poverty that still exists there. Many had no indoor plumbing. They rarely bathed so were filthy and smelled bad. They were malnourished and not very healthy. Most dropped out at 16. When I visit my hometown today there is still a lot of poverty but nothing like was common before foos stamps, Medicaid, etc
People forget and/or remain deliberately ignorant.
The vast majority of people don't realize that a big role for Medicaid is as the payer of last resort for most nursing home care at the end of life. So I guess we'll see what brings down the senior care industry first -- expelling all the immigrant workers or slashing Medicaid. Should be fun to watch. That is, unless you have a vulnerable family member who needs that care.
ETA: for some reason I wasn't seeing KenSchulz's comment right below as I wrote this. But yeah, what he said.
I'm sure the Project 2025 folks are perfectly happy to make women leave the workforce to care for elderly people.
Yes and I work in the LTSS industry which is underfunded and over stressed. There will be a huge shift to managed care for the states that still have a fee for service system which I don't have an issue with. Nursing facilities and Home Care agencies are barely surviving so I'm not sure how all this plays out. I guess Republicans can build put the elderly and disabled in the deportation camps after they expel the immigrants.
In 2020, Medicaid paid ~$180 billion in long-term care for elderly, and disabled children and adults. Got to put them to work!
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/long-term-services-supports/index.html
That long term care for the elderly piece is substantial. There's a whole sub industry built around helping middle class get their olds into a Medicaid funded care facility while still preserving family wealth.
I don't blame 'em. In a better country, publicly funded care facilities would be available regardless of whether you were a middle class old or not.
The working, middle and upper middle classes are just going to *love* taking care of their older relatives without Medicaid there to cover assisted living costs.
i get your point, but Medicaid doesn't usually cover assisted living. It does cover nursing home care. Medicare does not cover either, except for rehab for a limited time.
Correct, and you have to have divested yourself of most of your savings and assets before it kicks in. But millions around the country (and their families) depend on it to not get bankrupted by nursing home care, especially for dementia patients.
The same nursing homes that private equity has been buying up in droves and raising prices while cutting care.
They might fight cutting this benefit pretty darn hard.
Now who are we going to hire for aids?
Take from the poor to give to the rich -- MAGA
Yep. The Robbin' Hoods.
Apparently, there are lots of Americans who don't realize that the state healthcare program they're receiving is Medicaid, and that Republicans are always chomping at the bit to cut them off.
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin....
They'll mean $260 billion a year, not over the 10 year budgeting cycle. Medicaid spending is ca. $880 billion (granted, that may include state contributions), so plenty of money to cut--it's only ca. 30% or so of the total.
https://www.kff.org/state-category/medicaid-chip/medicaid-spending/
"He also said another $160 billion in reduced costs could come from checking Medicaid eligibility more than once per year."
With rock solid information like this, I don't see how they could miss their target.
The Trump Organization is being investigated over their handling of Trump Tower in Chicago. Allegedly, it was written off as a complete loss by one of their companies, which was subtracted from their taxes, then transferred to a different company, declared a complete loss again for more tax savings.
I'd guess "new math" will be used in the upcoming budgets, along with the tried and true "dynamic scoring" and "tax cuts pay for themselves".
About 25%, a little less, are on Medicaid/CHIPS. We'll see.
Defence is a plausibly available pot of money to cut. Halving the defence budget would reduce American ability to project power around the world, but would not detract from national security one iota.