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Facts are hard….From The City Journal:
Last week, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers published an article in the New York Times entitled “This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country.” While he had previously covered the dangers of deficits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), Summers wrote, he had only recently come to appreciate the “human brutality” of its Medicaid cuts.
In 2000, when Summers was Treasury secretary, federal Medicaid spending ran slightly over $200 billion in today’s dollars, or around 1.1 percent of gross domestic product. By 2034, after the putatively brutal cuts in the OBBB, the Congressional Budget Office expects Medicaid spending to exceed $800 billion. Medicaid as a percentage of GDP will be slightly below 2 percent.
In real terms, then, Medicaid spending under the OBBB will be four times higher than it was when Summers was overseeing economic policy—and nearly twice as large relative to a much bigger economy. Yet Summers felt no shame in helping fund a far smaller Medicaid program back then.
Yellow Fever v2.0 (aka OrangeManBad Syndrome) has infected everyone to the left of Marco Rubio. It’s incredible how dumb they think we are (and how dumb some of the TDS crowd actually are.)
The facts are clear. Real spending on Medicare has more than doubled, but any cut, any cut at all, is draconian. As long, that is, as it’s supported by Trump.
The left routinely asserts that the Trump tax cuts are for billionaires. Yet an analysis of what happened in Trump v1.0 makes clear that the lowest tax bracket got the biggest breaks.
The US income tax system is still a progressive tax system where those with the most income pay not only the most taxes but also the highest tax rates. I went to the IRS website (You can Google IRS TAX STATS) and found the breakdowns for income taxes paid for several years. Let’s look at 2020, Trump’s last full year in office.
The richest Americans — those with incomes over 2 million dollars in 2020 — paid an effective tax rate of 26.68%. The middle class — those with incomes between 75,000 and 200,000 dollars — paid an effective tax rate of 10.12%. The poorest — those with incomes less than 25,000 dollars — paid an effective rate of 1.04%.
How does this compare to, say, Obama’s last year? Let’s look at 2016…
The poorest Americans paid an effective tax rate of 1.7%. Between 2016 & 2020, their effective tax rate went down by almost half, from 1.7% to 1%. The middle class paid an effective rate of 11.69% in 2016. Their taxes also went down, but not by nearly half. They went from an effective tax rate of 11.69% in 2016 to 10.01% in 2020.
And the richest? They got a break, too. But a tiny one. Their effective tax rate went from a rate of 27.0% to 26.67%. But the lies continue unabated. All we can do is continue to point out the facts and label the liars for what they are.
Discussion (6)
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Yep. And some of 'em, you can tell they are lyin' by when their lips move.
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Thank you for laying out the information so clearly. I wish we could convince the brainwashed population of the facts!
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Take Medicaid, Please, as Henney Youngman might have said.
When I practiced in El Paso, Texas, a poor community with the very large majority of young women and mothers on Medicaid, as the only Endocrinologist in the community seeing diabetes patients, I wound up seeing virtually all of the young women with type 1 diabetes who were pregnant. That was before tort reform in Texas, and pregnancy with type 1 diabetes was a high risk disease state, and essentially no other doctors would see those patients. The OB docs would refer all such patients to the only high risk OB doctor in the city, who referred them all to me for diabetes management while he managed the pregnancy otherwise. They were all on Medicaid.
IN those days, Texas Medicaid defined type 1 diabetes as "juvenile"diabetes,and construed from that that once you were over 21,you no longer had "juvenile" diabetes, as if it resolved magically at age 21. Type 2 diabetes was "adult" diabetes, and, per the misunderstanding of the time, did not require insulin, but oral medications. And then, since "adult" diabetes did not require insulin, Medicaid would not cover blood glucose test strips to check sugars in "adult" diabetes. Thus, a 25 year woman with type 1 diabetes, insulin dependent, pregnant, on Medicaid,would not be allowed test strips.
Type 1 Diabetes management in pregnancy, as shown many decades ago by Lois Jovanovic, requires virtually normal blood sugars throughout pregnancy to avoid complications. In the first trimester, the higher the blood sugars, the higer the risk of dire fetal malformations such as cardiac anomalies, or craniofacial anomalies, or limb anomalies in the developing fetus, or fetal demise. In the later trimesters, tight blood sugar control is essential to avoid excessive fetal growth, early delivery with infant respiratory distress, post partum hypoglycemia, or craniopelvic disproportion. Tight blood sugar control virtually eliminated such complication risks. And,as Insulin requirements increase during pregnancy, insulin adjustment on almost a weekly basis was needed to maintain control. This was a time when continuous glucose monitors were not available.
To achieve such tight control of virtually normal blood sugars, blood sugar testing up to 8 times a day was essential. Texas Medicaid disagreed entirely. THere never were any more compliant patients than pregnant women with type 1 diabetes. They were all willing to test however many times a day they were told, in order to have a healthy infant. But, being poor, they couldn't pay out of pocket for test strips. And Medicaid literally forbid their use. So we begged reps,sought out help from family members, begged borrowed and stole strips wherever we could get them.
Every time I got a new consult for a pregnant young woman on Medicaid with type 1 diabetes, I would call the office of Nancy McDonald, the State Representative from El Paso. She was a nurse, a mother, and a close friend of the Governor, Ann Richards. I would say that I could save Texas Medicaid a million dollars a year in my practice alone by preventing the complications of diabetes in pregnancy if they would cover test strips. The response was always cold: The Governor says NO CHANGES TO MEDICAID. As a consequence we wound up sending an infant to Dr.Starzil in Pittsburgh for a heart transplant for a hypoplastic left ventricle, and other patients for limb and craniofacial abnormalities.
The situation was insane. Alan Garber, one of the top diabetologists in the nation, then at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, was an advisor to Texas Medicaid. I cornered him at a meeting and demanded to know what was going on with Medicaid. I was insistent and obnoxious. I thought he was going to punch me in the nose, but to my surprise, he commiserated with me, and would only repeat, We are trying, we are trying. But he did not succeed. Eventually those insane definitions were changed, but that was after I had left Texas.
My experience with Medicaid in other States has been similar. So outrageous is State Medicaid that it is, in my view, a clear and present danger to a beneficiary's health. I wouldn't wish Medicaid on a dog. Particularly not on dogs. Medicaid is for me a constant reminder of the barbarity and insanity of our so called advanced civilization. And a manifestation of the wisdom and insight of Mel Brooks, such as in Men in Tights, wherein Robin, on watching his merry men hand out booty to the peasants,noted that after the individual peasant was handed his silver goblet or platter, would have to step forward and receive a powerful punch in the face. Robin enquired of his men if that second step was necessary, and his men responded, Oh yes, Robin, yes, they expect it.
Such is the state of our Medicaid beneficiaries.
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It seems like there's a good argument that "cuts" in Medicaid go along with removing the illegals that are largely receiving those benefits. So nobody who isn't here illegally, should be affected. And those here illegally are the responsibility of their home countries, not ours.
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My (admittedly loose) understanding is that the Medicaid "cuts" are (as is common in government liar accounting) a reduction in the rate of increase in spending.
And the "cuts" come from two categories: 1) removing illegal aliens from the rolls, and 2) able-bodied adults who choose not to fulfill the new work requirement for receiving Medicaid benefits.
But the way, I separately (again loosely) recall several years ago studies suggesting that the "health outcomes" for people who received Medicaid medical "insurance" were no better than the "health outcomes" for completely uninsured people. In other words, receiving Medicaid medical insurance produced no measurable health benefit for the covered people. Which then raises the question: Why spend the money if the supposed beneficiaries receive no actual benefit?
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