880 billion dollar for would literally be eliminating Medicaid, hope everyone who voted trump and Republicans are good with this, especially those who are poor and have kids with special needs.
Why is everyone surprised? This what republicans wanted. This is what they campaigned for. If you haven't been listening carefully for the past few years, this is exactly what they've always wanted.
Willfully ignorant. They know they'll never reach whatever passes for the American dream these days. But as long as people with darker skin are hurt more they'll be happy to watch wealthy people on TV. **Voyeur Capitalism ** is what I call it.
It's no surprise, but what confuses me is why they would want to kill off their most loyal supporters? Maybe they really are all in on no more fair elections so it doesn't even matter if the rural poor die or become homeless
Because contrary to what they say in public, they actually do believe a global climate disaster is coming. They all have extremely well-stocked doomsday bunkers the size of small towns with a host of servants to keep them fat and happy, and they’re now trying to juice us for all we’re worth before we die.
Some of them are dominionists, too, and are either convinced Jesus is coming back any day now or are determined to kick off WW3 like it will be a signal flare. They’re desperate for the rapture, and they’re more than willing to kill us all to get it.
The really dangerous ones are a mix of both, and now they’re fully in charge.
The whole aim of the GOP is to benefit rich people. They're bought and paid for by the 1%. All of their culture war fear mongering is set up as a distraction from the fact that we're losing the class war.
The thing I don't really get is that we've got a few people on their way to being trillionaires. That's more money and assets than the human brain is capable of fathoming, I can guarantee it. What's even the point? Anything they could possibly want or need is provisioned for, they've got enough money to do all the fun little side projects their hearts desire, and they've still got far more money beyond that. They literally can't even give it away fast enough if they tried. What on earth is more tax breaks for the wealthy going to achieve, even for the wealthy? It just feels pointlessly evil at this point.
I think they're like mold or cancer cells, or even a fire. You can't decide to be a billionaire just like a plant species can't decide to grow in crack in the pavement. It's a system of interactions that decides that. Pure chance and a lot of failures that had as much right to succeed as any other.
Billionaires are byproducts of our system weaved into a physical human body. It has a human life to confuse you and camouflage what it really is. It has a human brain and human emotions to generate reasons why it deserves to exist. It looks and feels like a person.
Reminds me of mandrakes from Harry Potter. They scream like they're alive but they're just there to be harvested.
Remember that those evil billionaires don't actually care about the money itself. If they did, they would have stopped at $100 million or some much lower number, because that's already more money than anyone could ever spend. To them it's about power, prestige, and control. They are addicts, and they'll never give up the chance for more.
It's a very strange phenomenon, where people are doing things that appears to help them short term, while actually just screwing themselves entirely. Dooming their entire segment of the population because they simply don't have anyone standing there with violence on hand, telling them: NO!
Pretty fucking weird, it would be like me, a dude angry from actions taken against me, harassing my neighbors by stealing their packages. It's definitely going to get the wrong kind of attention, and no ones gonna be on my side for doing it... That's what the GOP is doing. Fucking morons.
I'm almost 40 and my whole life I've always known I would NEVER see a dime I paid into social security or medicare or anything taken from taxes. 30% of my life robbed because old greedy people are always in charge and can't see beyond their last 2 years on earth at all times.
It's worse than that. If wages had kept pace with productivity (thanks Reagan), we would have been working 2-3 day workweeks at full wages for over twenty years by now.
They literally stole over half of our lives. That amounts to class genocide.
I have family members who moved from state to state around 20 years ago until they found one that would approve their disability statuses so they no longer had to work and would qualify for the whole smorgasbord of government assistance programs including medicaid.
They think most people who are receiving these benefits are just lazy and that there would be more money for people like themselves who need that money if these programs were slashed. They believe only those other (i.e. lazy) people will lose benefits.
There's literally no reasoning with that mentality. They seem to think this is all entertaining.
I guarantee you that once they are personally affected, and I'm pretty sure they will be affected at some point, they'll turn on this administration.
I have many problems with this, but the hardest pill to swallow is that I'm going to have to be the bigger person and accept them with open arms because at the end of the day there's no stopping this unless we're all united.
Public assistance does not pay anything but poverty wages. Certainly not enough to move from state to state shopping for the best food stamps and Medicaid deals. While I don't disagree with your judgement of their character I do take issue with "smorgasborg" of government assistance.
Adult public assistance, SNAP, Temporary Assistance for needy families are all very limited. They are resource tested and income approved as well. Not to mention work requirements for any cash assistance except APA. BTW APA benefits are usually around $400-600 a month. Sounds very lucrative considering it is designed to supplement people making less that $1,200 a month in Social Security Benefits.
Anyone who has had to apply for disability knows it is a crap shoot as well. It is common for people to apply over the course of several years before being approved for an amount no human can live off of without subsidized housing. That is if they can even find subsidized housing.
If my statement could be interpreted in any way congruent to your first paragraph, then there's clearly been a significant degree of miscommunication and/or misunderstanding.
I've reread my statement and there's no mention of shopping around for the best deal, so I'm going to chalk that one up to you misunderstanding what I wrote. As for the use of smorgasbord, I understand that it might suggest abundance in some way, though in my part of the world it generally conveys the concept of variety more so than abundance. Either way I chalk that up to miscommunication on my part.
I hope they get what they voted for. And I will NEVER accept them. They made this mess, it’s on their shoulders, pocketbooks, and well-beings to fix it.
I guarantee you that once they are personally affected, and I’m pretty sure they will be affected at some point, they’ll turn on this administration.
Will they?
What are their news habits? Facebook? Cable TV? Are they politically active?
A root cause of all this is that scamming/influencing is extremely effective with modern tech, especially on vulnerable people. If something bad happens, they will just get pushed down the rabbit hole waiting to suck them in.
Nothing will change until that’s regulated away, which is not going to happen now that The owners of Twitter and Truth Social are president, and Meta has their ear.
I already mentioned it: I firmly believe that if there's any chance of stopping this mess, it's going to require working together and finding common ground with everyone who has been harmed, regardless of voting history, political affiliation, morals, and rationale. Divided we fall. We've already seen how being divided works out.
41% of births and the biggest portion of maternity care are covered under Medicaid. Highest is Louisiana at 64%. Combine this with abortion restrictions and potential loss of access to labor and miscarriage related drugs and you're looking at lots more dead pregnant people, dead fetuses, and dead infants and far fewer rural hospitals handling any sort of reproductive care.
Don't worry, many people in those situations will blame Obamacare when they get the bill (Edit: \s on the don't worry. Do worry, because this will absolutely happen)
I once stumbled on a discussion, on Reddit I think (or maybe it was Twitter) from a small-time farmer who basically admitted that most farmers in his position realized regulations were important and could be a force for good, but large agri-businesses constantly flouted rules and never got anything more than a slap on the wrist when caught. A sort of "rules for thee, not for me" situation. And so all the small time farmers had to cut corners and ignore regulations to remain competitive and viable.
Overly complex regulations could increase the barrier of entry for newer companies, small time entrepreneurs, etc. In some instances it can actually be in the interest of large, established companies to maintain overly complex regulatory environments as it keeps competition out of the market.
Insightful simplification of regulations that increases their effectiveness while reducing unnecessary burdens might be feasible, and also, beneficial for society as a whole.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to get that with this administration. They're just going to smash and break, and at best, they might realize they broke some important things and perhaps repair it to a limited extent.
They say that as if destroying programs that benefit the common people and instituting policies that benefit the 1% are some sort of unexpected consequences rather than the exact and explicit point.
Of course it won't, but they're incapable of thinking it through that clearly.
Hierarchical systems like capitalism effectively reward and thus select for psychopaths who are laser-focused on their short-term, shallow self-interest, since they have the fewest constraints on the choices they're willing to make. Anyone else might refrain from an otherwise effective course of action if they recognize that it's ultimately destructive or self-defeating or immoral or unethical, but the psychopaths who only think in the short term won't, so all other things being more or less equal, they have an advantage.
That's a lot of what we're seeing right now. Trump and Musk are making so much headway toward destroying the United States in large part because people are having a hard time working out how to even respond, since their actions are so corrupt and so destructive and so self-serving. They've jumped right past any ordinary notion of corrupt and self-serving and destructive to a brazen and egregious level that for many really is, in a simple, practical sense of the term, "unthinkable."
And yes - crushing the common people in order to maximize the wealth that can be extracted from them and the privilege granted to the wealthy few is self-defeating in the long term, since the common people are the ultimate source of that wealth. But that won't stop people like Musk and Trump, because they're quite simply neither sane nor rational enough to let it.
I liken it to people living in penthouses in apartment buildings cannibalizing the lower floors to expand their penthouses. Not only are the buildings eventually going to collapse under the weight of the penthouses, but they're actually hastening that by weakening the lower floors.
But Musk and Trump and the like just aren't equipped to see that, or to restrain themselves if they do. So that's not only what they will do, but what they are doing, right now, this minute.
I like your optimism. I don't think anything could change these people's minds though. Somehow they will be convinced Obamacare took away their Medicaid, and Trump is working his ass off to fix it, but all these regulations and taxes and government employees are gumming up his operation.
Just watch... Like I said I like the optimism. Hopefully one day I can call some of the hundreds of thousands of hicks in my state comrades.
I think its more likely than people on here think. I hear whispers within the party. Theyre about to be rudely awakened I think with this medicare social security stuff