Working class whites want cuts in those programs, but they do not understand the federal budget or how small the programs they want to cut really are. They want cuts in programs that they do not feel benefit them directly. Foreign aid, welfare to poor people and single mothers, programs that benefit blacks and latinos, etc. Polls show most americans think something like 20% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. It is very easy to convince some socially conservative white republican to oppose a program that benefits non-americans with a different culture, race and religion, esp if s/he thinks 20% of hte budget is devoted to doing that.
But the biggest social programs in the US are medicare, medicaid and Social security. And the bulk of medicaid’s spending goes to the elderly and disabled (many of whom are or were middle class whites). State and federal spending on those programs is probably close to 2 trillion.
Plus education, if you count that as a social program. We spend about a trillion in federal, state and local public funds on education. And working class white republicans, for the most part, don’t want to cut that either if they have kids.
I think if people had a better understanding of the budget they would vote differently. The programs that make up the bulk of gov. spending (the ones listed above, plus defense), aren’t really things people are willing to cut since unless you make 200k a year or more, you depend on them for a middle class lifestyle.
I didn’t want to start a new thread, so I’ll ask here:
I’ve been ‘paying into the system’ for 30 years on the promise that the system will pay me back when I retire. The Ryan Plan says, ‘Sorry. We’re not going to live up to our promise. Sucker!’ How is it that Ryan et al. think they should breach the government’s contract?
I occasionally lurk at another board that’s full of Teabaggers, and they all say that they’re entitled to SS payments because they’ve paid into the system all of their working lives. Not one says, ‘Well, if I have to sacrifice my share, it’s for the Good of America.’
If you were around back then, it was when Greenspan and the Libertarian types were their riding high. They actually convinced people that all regulation was bad and the market was self correcting. it was stupid and I screamed at my Tv when they bought it. But they we have all paid for their lack of sophistication.
How do they think they should? There isn’t really any legal reason they can’t, there’s no actual contract, Congress is free to pass a law abolishing Medicare. But there is a strong political protection of the system, as people like yourself are unlikely to vote for a party
that will remove a program that they’ve spent their working lives paying for with the understanding that it will still be around for them to benefit from when they retired. so while they can legally repeal it, politically its never going to happen.
Ryan’s plan is to try and exempt current seniors from the planned change, and to replace Medicare with a much less generous voucher program with the same name and hope the younger set won’t notice the difference, and the older set won’t care since they’ll still get “theirs”. I don’t think it will work, both because Dems still control the Senate and Presidency and will never let it pass, because the elderly support the program for reasons other then pure desire for their own expenses to be covered (after all, they’re the generation that voted it into existence in the first place) and because I think workers are concoius enough of what Medicare is not to be hoodwinked by replacing it with a voucher system.
Indeed, its really bizarre that, 50 years out, the GOP is still trying to undo Medicare. Its a popular program, and pretty much everytime they go after it, they end up getting burned with little or no progress made in rolling the program back. I get that they don’t like it, but after a half-century of trying and burning political capital to get nowhere on the issue, you’d think they’d move on.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Here’s a little clip of a behind the scenes conversation between Paul Ryan and Bill Clinton. What democrats say publicly and what they actually intend to do about a given thing are, I think, two very different things. I think it will end up much like the public option in HCR. With the Hochul victory in NY26, I almost got sucked into being hopeful again. That clip disabused me of my optimism. Politics is, I think, a dog and pony show.
Meh, Clinton spent much of the latter half of the nineties fighting off GOP attempts to defund Medicare. To try and twist his saying that Democrats shouldn’t do “nothing” on Medicare into some sort of endorsement of Ryan’s plan is silly.
Nothing resembling the Ryan plan will get anywhere in a Dem Senate or be signed by a Dem President.
Thing is something does need to be done, just not this atrocity.
In 1965, when Medicare was passed, the average life expectancy in the United States was just over 70 years. Now it’s over 77. And the care that keeps people going that long aint cheap and it aint getting cheaper. People retire younger and live longer.
Taking care of people for five years in an era of less expensive medicine was one thing; taking care of them for twelve years or more in an era during which medicine can cost much more is another.
I am 52. Making my cohort wait a few extra years to be eligible would be fine by me. Creating some means testing such that I get have to pay in some extra token for coverage after that because I have the ability to do so much better than do some others is also fine, so long as it is not so dramatic that it discourages saving for a self sufficient retirement.
We cannot create a system that burdens the next generation excessively in order to pay to keep me alive an extra year or so and neither can we have a system that cannot be sustained.
Ryan’s plan is radical and mean-spirited, but the concept behind it, that something significant needs to be done, is valid. The Dems are in a tough spot. They need to play the hand in a way that makes it clear that this particular approach is too radical, place the GOP as bad cop, and play the good cop offering more rational reform themselves. If they take the easy talking point of “don’t touch it” then they do the country as much harm as Ryan would.
/me watches Dseid touch third rail and looks away, grimacing, as he is fried.
A few days later, dressed in black, stands in front of an open grave and says to the mourners, “DSeid, or “seedy” as he liked to be called, was a great supporter and fan of Medicaid. What a shame he did not live to collect any of it!”
I agree in general, but think your wrong on some of the specifics.
This is actually misleading. Much of the change in life-expectancy in the last 50 years has been from reduced child mortality. But since children neither pay-into or collect from the system, their death-rate doesn’t really matter to Medicare solvency. Life expectancy for someone that actually reaches the age of 65 has only jumped0three or so years since 1970 (pdf).
The main drivers of the increased cost of Medicare is the falling birthrate and the increase in general medical costs. The falling birthrate is easy to deal with as it causes predictable and slow demographic changes that can be compensated for by raising the payroll tax or increasing the eligibility age or means testing or some combination therefore.
The increase of medical costs, on the other hand, is very difficult to deal with. You can’t make cuts to solve it, because even the most draconian cuts will still only buy a couple years before insolvency, as the nature of exponential growth will cause whatever is left to quickly make up the difference. You can’t raise taxes to solve it, as the growth will continue and you’ll just be left needing to raise taxes again. And while there are a lot of different theories on whats causing the increase how best to stop the growth of costs, no one really knows which, if any, will work.
Perhaps they should pass some-sort of law that combines capping Medicare payouts to the rate of GDP increase plus 1%, utilized a large number of experimental measures to decrease total medical costs in both the private and public sector and got rid of those parts of medicare such as medicare advantage that had been shown to be inefficient and wasteful.
Evil thanks Gott I am not in politics. But will that be the take, that it is just too easy to demonize anyone who proposes anything, even rational things?
Simplico, a valid point on the less dramatic rise for those who reach 65.
Are the changes that are part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act enough? I am not getting the impression that most think they are. (And I don’t know what they are well enough to have any strongly held thoughts myself.)
Thats sort of the problem, there isn’t really anyway to know what “enough” is when it comes to balancing the gov’ts health programs. Any extra money saved through cuts or raised through tax increases are swallowed through the ever increasing rate of medical costs. And no one really knows what to do to stop those increases.
Compare Social Security, which due to falling birthrates, will develop a deficit of .6% GDP, which for thirty years will be covered by the SS trustfund, but then will lead to a shortfall. In that case its easy to see what “enough” is, enough is a set of changes that raise revenue and cut benefits by a total of .6% GDP. The demographic changes driving the shortfall are easy to calculate and slow to change, so there’s unlikely to be any major change in that situation, or at least, any change will be of the sort that can be predicted several decades in advance.
So the affordable care act basically passed limited versions of almost of the various ideas that people were considering to cut the growth in costs, created an independent board that had the authority to expand any of those changes that work, and mandated that the growth of the program be held to GDP+1 (its average rate of growth has been something like GDP+6). How well this will work remains to be seen, but it at least addresses the actual problem in a realistic fashion.
Anyhoo, my main point was that I think its unfair to say that the Democrats might ignore the problems with Medicare, or will just criticize other peoples plans and do nothing. The Democrats have a plan which they payed a hefty political price for sticking with, and that plan is now law and being implemented.
Of course people can argue that that plan won’t work, but its silly to pretend it doesn’t exist. Its an actual law on the books, while I doubt even Ryan seriously expected the Ryan plan to get anywhere close to being passed.
Social Security is not broke. it has tons on T-Bills. It continually collects tax money every single week .
Social security will pay 100 percent for about 3 more decades. Then, if we do not tweak it, it will pay 80 percent. It can not hit the treasury. It can not cause deficits. It is run on about 1.5 percent of its income. It is a great [program that save older people from poverty.
The right lies.
I read a Ryan Paul editorial piece on bloomberg a few days ago and sadly can’t find a lnk now. He was basically saying that once American’s understood his plan, then they accept it.
I hope he keeps trying to convince America that
Seniors will vote Republican as long as they are guaranteed to keep their Medicare unchanged.
Seniors are gullible enough to believe that the Medicare “social contract” will be broken only this one time and that in the future all those 55 and under getting screwed won’t try to rebalance the game.
Voters 55 and under think that somehow “vouchers” won’t suck too bad
Only this will solve the deficit and budget woes
And that supply side economics really does trickle down and the rich and corporations should have their taxes cut
We have a host of problems that need to be addressed at once such as universal health care, health care reform, tax reform, decreasing the military budget, and raising taxes (and that includes me personally) in an equitable way.
So, I hope Paul Ryan keeps with his condensending transparent attempt to fleece the American people.
Under the circumstances, yes, because nobody trusts Republicans and conservatives on these issues any more. Medicare and Social Security are both tremendously successful programs, and nobody believes that anyone who tries to tinker with them really wants to improve them, even though they clearly could use some tinkering with in some areas. It’s just a conservative/libertarian agenda to get rid of both programs.
On edit, take what China Guy said and transfer it to “The American voting public.” It’s what we all think.
Not really. They have to oppose. Medicare is stark, empirical evidence that some things are better done by the public sector and will instead suck, when private industry runs it.
This is part of reality’s bias against the GOP, contradicting a tenet of the ideology. If they were to simply concede to those facts it would be game over, for a generation or more.