The poor are being held hostage in the debt ceiling standoff
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
www.washingtonpost.com /opinions/2023/05/21/debt-ceiling-negotiations-biden-mccarthy-poor/
The poor are being held hostage in the debt ceiling standoff
E.J. Dionne Jr. 6-7 minutes 5/21/2023
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The moment negotiations over the debt ceiling with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy started, it was obvious President Biden would have to give in to Republican demands for some spending cuts. The question now is how big they’ll be and how long they’ll last.
Here’s what must not happen: Our country’s least advantaged citizens should not be forced to pay the largest price to prevent an economic catastrophe. Making the poor poorer should never happen; it certainly shouldn’t happen on a Democratic president’s watch.
That issue is at the heart of this needless and destructive battle. House Republicans decided to hold the economy hostage to slash assistance for low-income Americans while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy.
That’s a factual statement, not a partisan complaint.
McCarthy (R-Calif.) is not only refusing to put any of the Trump-era tax cuts for the best-off and corporations on the table; he also wants to make them permanent, adding $3.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade. So much for “deficit reduction” as the central purpose of this exercise.
In the meantime, the GOP’s desire to concentrate cuts on what is blandly called “domestic discretionary spending” would force the heaviest reductions on programs that help the least well-off, such as Head Start and assistance for food, child care and housing. Republicans mercifully say they want to protect veterans’ programs, but that only forces deeper reductions elsewhere.
A revealing example: The House appropriations bill for agriculture released last week guts the 2021 pandemic-era increase to benefits for fruits and vegetables under the Women, Infants and Children program, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported affect “nearly 1.5 million pregnant, postpartum, or breastfeeding participants and roughly 3.5 million children aged 1 through 4.”
Fewer fruits and vegetables for pregnant women? From a party that says it is “pro-life”? The title of Adam Serwer’s book comes to mind: “ The Cruelty Is the Point .”
Then there is the GOP’s insistence on “work requirements” for recipients of various government assistance programs. These would not help anyone get jobs but would tie up working people eligible for assistance in bureaucratic red tape.
“Despite rhetoric rooted in racist stereotypes, most people who can work do work,” said CBPP President Sharon Parrott. People turn to core government programs, she told me, “because their jobs don’t pay enough to make ends meet or they are out of work, often temporarily. If we want to help people succeed in jobs and have the freedom to thrive, we should invest in high quality job training and child care, not take away basic assistance they count on.”
Parrott’s view is shared well beyond the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) flatly declared last week that “work requirements are a nonstarter.”
This speaks to the difficulty of building majorities in the House and Senate for any accord McCarthy and Biden might reach. Because his party’s right wing will oppose anything short of its maximum demands, McCarthy cannot deliver a majority for a deal without large numbers of Democratic votes. They will be hard to get for a proposal remotely as draconian as his ultras want, one reason progressives are pushing Biden to bypass the debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government honor its obligations.
“Kevin McCarthy does not know how many votes he has,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Politico , speaking not just as a leading progressive but also a shrewd vote counter. “He can’t even go to the White House and say, if you give me this, I will have X votes.”
McCarthy also has to wonder if coming to terms with Biden would prompt a challenge to his leadership from hard-liners. He no doubt hoped that Friday’s brief Republican walkout from the talks would persuade his right flank that he’s taking a hard line.
Democrats once hoped that enough Republicans who represent districts the president carried in 2020 would be amenable to a clean debt ceiling increase. But these vulnerable members of the GOP had close ties to McCarthy and an aversion to handing Democrats a victory. So to get McCarthy into the room with Biden, they went along with some harsh cuts in the speaker’s bill even while saying they opposed them — clearly hoping that Democratic negotiators would save them from themselves.
Biden’s lieutenants and his allies in Congress insist that they are not repeating the errors of President Barack Obama’s debt ceiling strategy in 2011 . They say they have already pushed Republicans back from some of their more extreme demands, forced them to make public the sweep of the cuts they originally sought, and are trying to avoid binding future Congresses to budget decisions won through extortion. And they expect to save Biden’s signature programs on clean energy and student debt.
But this sorry episode, made possible by an irrational debt ceiling law that ought to have been repealed long ago, should never have happened. The fact that Americans with the lowest incomes are political pawns in this exercise is a moral stain on our country.
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From what I have read, "work requirements" that would prevent the relatively few "lazy" people from receiving SNAP or medicaid, will also and instead mire millions of eligible people down in paperwork and red tape that will cause many of those millions to lose their benefits in bureaucratic snafu.
As a society we should not do anything that affirmatively makes poor people poorer. It is immoral.
What these idiots don't seem to want to grasp is a lot of these people cannot work, which is why they are on Medicaid to begin with. A lot of them have severe disabilities or a mortal disease.
Like you said, punish a large amount over a small few.
Everything I read says it's just an estimate, it "could" happen. Not that it would. From the AP...
So the changes here don't seem all that much. To qualify for SNAP, if you are able-bodied and do not have dependents under the age of 18 living with you, you already have a work requirement of 20 hours a week if you are under the age of 50. This bill raises that age to 55. Currently there is over 42 million Americans who receive SNAP. Seems raising the age for work requirements here is a small matter as it impacts only those who are able-bodied and do not have dependent children living with them.
While I agree that everything should be done to protect those who truly need the assistance, I do think that those who are able to work should attempt to work.
I also would like more transparency into the negotiations as the only information we are seeing is what comes out in the press. As we all know, the press is rather biased which makes it very difficult to get any accurate picture of what is being talked about. A successful negotiation requires that both sides give and take but we don't get any information on the ongoing talks. All we really see is what the talking heads want to provide.
Joe Biden is getting rolled by McCarthy.
I think there is a better chance that Biden will take it to the brink than that he will give into all the Republicans demands.
I don't think he should give in to all the demands, that's not negotiation but surrender. But by taking it to the brink he risks more I think. The House Republicans did pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling and any default will IMO fall on Biden and the Democrats. If they want to avoid taking all the blame then they need to provide more to the public than just the talking points that we have so far seen. Negotiation means that both sides have to give up a little but we're not seeing any of that. And as the President, Biden will take the heat for it.
Seen from outside Washington, the debt ceiling battle might seem like an abstract argument between the political parties over federal spending and deficits. But for millions of low-income Americans who depend on the federal government for health care and basic nutrition, the debate is about their very lives. That’s because Republicans have singled them out, yet again, as a prime target in this year’s extortion scheme.The bill that Speaker Kevin McCarthy muscled through the House last month would impose tough new work requirements on Medicaid, food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and welfare for needy families. The demands would effectively cut off health care for 1.7 million low-income people and cut off food stamps for 275,000 people. House Republicans say that if their demands are not
It’s not that there is some crisis or scandal gripping those federal programs; Republicans are making these demands simply because the debt ceiling gives them the opportunity to do so. And they are going after the same group of people their party has demonized for decades.
“I don’t think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services for people who could make a broader contribution and instead are couch potatoes,” said Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. (His deep concern about excessive spending didn’t stop him from requesting a $141.5 million earmark for a helicopter training hangar at Naval Air Station Whiting Field in his district.)
“Couch potatoes” isn’t that far from the “welfare queen” myth conjured by Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich’s 1994 claim that a system of orphanages was necessary because low-income babies were being dropped off balconies or showing up in dumpsters. None of these slurs had any significant basis in reality, and all were intended to whip up fears among members of the white middle class that they were being played for fools by people of color who were lazily living it up on taxpayer dollars and ignoring their family responsibilities.
But these largely racist attacks, very much including the one now on the table, persistently ignore the little-mentioned fact that a vast majority of the people receiving these benefits are already working or are unable to work. In 2021, 61 percent of the 25 million people on Medicaid were working in full- or part-time jobs. The rest were retired or disabled or taking care of small children or in school. Similarly, most food-stamp recipients work, and able-bodied adults younger than 50 are required to work in order to get more than three months of benefits in three years, unless they are taking care of children.
The existing work requirements don’t get discussed by the drill sergeants who want to whip the vast army of couch potatoes into shape; they want more people to work and to work longer hours. Mr. McCarthy’s bill would require adults 50 to 55 to work at least 20 hours a week to receive food stamps, no matter that people in that age bracket often find high barriers to employment.
The bill would also require many adults 19 to 55 to work 80 hours a month to receive federally subsidized health coverage from Medicaid. (States could pick up the cost of those who are cut off, but many would not.) As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, this requirement would particularly hurt low-income beneficiaries in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and seems designed as a backdoor way of undermining the expansion. Republicans couldn’t repeal the act through the front door, so they are using the leverage provided by the debt ceiling to try to achieve their ideological aim. It’s yet another illustration of why the ceiling needs to be abolished.
It’s been clear for years that these kinds of work requirements don’t actually put people back to work; they just pry people away from the benefits they need. In 2018, Arkansas became the first state to impose very similar work requirements on Medicaid, before a federal judge ended the experiment the next year. A study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that 13 percent of Medicaid recipients there lost their health coverage — about 17,000 people — but that there was no significant change in employment.
One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that it’s very difficult for the subjects of these cruel experiments to report their employment or their search for a job to the state. Many people in Arkansas didn’t know about the work requirements or didn’t understand the rules or lacked internet access, the study found. But since the goal of Republicans is cutting spending, not putting people back to work, the burdensome rules do save billions through human suffering. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the work requirements in the McCarthy bill, which the speaker said on Tuesday were a “red line” for his caucus, would save $120 billion over 10 years.
Once President Biden made the unfortunate decision to negotiate on the debt ceiling with the House hostage takers, the work requirements were on the table, and the president has not been clear about his intentions. On Sunday he told reporters that he had voted for work requirements currently in the law, apparently referring to cash welfare, and was waiting to see what the Republican proposals were. That was not exactly a comforting sign, particularly because the proposals are quite clear, though he did suggest that Medicaid changes were off the table. After progressives raised concerns, he issued a tweet on Monday condemning the harsher requirements for food benefits.
But with the default clock ticking and lives on the line, Mr. Biden needs to do more than send out a tweet. The most important thing the White House could do right now is say explicitly that using the debt ceiling as a cudgel to change federal safety net policy is unacceptable and inappropriate and will not be the subject of negotiation. Mr. McCarthy shouldn’t be the only one at the table with red lines, particularly when the health of millions of people is at stake.
The left's only solution is to raise taxes on the rich and corporations. The problem with that is that there is a finite and not very large number of the really well off, and that corporations simply pass any increases in the cost of doing business on down the line by raising prices. These price increases end up affecting the poorest among us the most.
The Democrats are going to have to get serious and make an attempt to cut spending. A good start would be to quit wasting money on climate change programs and begin to find ways to reform social programs. They also need to stop their usual scare mongering and become a responsible administrator of our country's wealth and resources.
You actually believe that.
Amazes me the people that will defend the ultra wealthy when they wouldn't even spit on you.
When they can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on just elections forgive me for not buying the poor rich people mantra...
Your comment doesn't make sense. I don't hate nor envy the successful and wealthy among us.
Why does the left think they should be punished, and/or pay more than their fair share?
Because the left wants things they can’t afford and they aren’t smart enough to earn on their own, it’s easier to elect someone who will steal the money for them, then have to earn it themselves.
That doesn't apply to members of Congress however. Over half the members are millionaires and the number is about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
As the saying goes, it's good to be a prince....
The United States of America has to have a welfare state, there is no choice, because poverty can never be eliminated by capitalism. Capitalism creates poverty by depending on a wage structure that is a race to the bottom (paying workers as little as possible).
How can a welfare state be paid for? By taxes. Who should pay most of those taxes? The people who have benefited the most from our capitalist system.
Cuts to the budget should begin with defense spending waste. Our military is too large and too expensive, and too wasteful and in some cases the defense contracts are, I am sure, corrupt.
It is hard to cut waste in government because the very people who need to vote on such reforms benefit from the waste through campaign donations from industries that receive benefit from the waste.
True, poverty can never be eliminated by capitalism but capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other monitory system.
These people already pay most of the taxes.
Even as the highest marginal tax rate has dropped, the percentage of federal personal income tax paid by the wealthiest 1% and 5% has increased. So by the numbers the wealthy are already paying their fair share.
Try telling that to Swedes and Norwegians...
The increasing wealth gap also plays into consideration. When most of the wealth of the whole country is tied up within a relatively few amount of people it is to be expected.
You are trying to compare people that make 40k a year to people that make hundreds of millions.
Hell just a PAC for DeSantis had about 85 million in it.
Sorry but I don't buy that it is in any way a burden on them when they throw obscene amounts of money around just on elections.
Tell them what? A statement like yours in reply to a post is meaningless as you provide nothing to review and think about. If this is to be a discussion you need to be clear.
Try typing some more words in your replies. After all, you don't get a cookie based on the number of posts...
Aw somebody got a rich person's hand up their ass?
Said as much as you did. Only thing I got from your post is boo hoo, rich people pay more taxes than the guy making 20k...
My bad. I will give you that one.
Our tax rates top off at about 40%, which means if you make 10 million dollars a year the most you can pay is 40%. Many people with such incomes pay much less than that. People who make over a million a year should have to pay much higher rates, not on all their earnings, but on the amount that exceeds the designated cutoff. In other words , if you made one million the cutoff , all the income below one million is taxed at one rate , and all the income above one million is taxed much higher, say 60 or 70 percent. That is the way it used to be in America.
We also need a wealth tax. Billionaires , and those with 50 million or more, should be taxed not just on income, but also on wealth.
Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale
Sorry Snuffy. As someone pointed out, I had thought that was addressed to me. My apologies.
The wealth gap is a separate issue from income tax. The initial post was on income tax.
This country does not have a wealth tax and from some of what I read it would be a big attempt in order to start one. Only 5 countries in the world still have a wealth tax, most who started one dropped it over time.
IMO there are several issues with a wealth tax because the majority of the wealth held by these "really rich" people is not cash but tied to property, stocks, bonds, precious metals, etc. All of which the value fluctuates over time. And they don't actually realize any profit from it until it's sold and converted to cash. Secondly a lot of countries who tried a wealth tax discovered that the truly wealthy will go to great lengths to hide their assets if the tax man is gonna come looking. If you don't know where they have stashed their cash, how do you tax it. If they sell their property in the US and buy property overseas, who has the legal right to tax it? Does the US have legal rights to tax property in Brazil? This would create a huge bureaucracy in an attempt to track this and a huge increase in lawyers trying to find loopholes to hide assets.
While a wealth tax may be constitutional, it would have to be set up by Congress. In our current divided country there's no way I can see this being agreed to. I do dislike the money that is thrown at politicians for elections, it's always IMO a bribe for the politician to act or do a specific act once elected. I would love to see all money pulled out of elections and the only money that can be spent would have to come from the government grants paid for by a small tax on all citizens coupled with a mandate for the cost of advertising so that you cannot have a PAC come out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy an ad blitz. Of course I would also like to see the campaign season shortened to a reasonable length, there's no reason why the next campaign season has to start the day after the last election.
Deleting, I accept your apology.
If only the Democrats, who claim to believe in that, had filibuster control of Congress for a while, just passed a reconciliation bill without Republican support etc..
They've spend decades advocating this, but when push comes to shove the only thing they want is to cut tax rates on the wealthy by repealing the SALT cap. When, do you think, Democrats will realize they are the party of Wall Street?
I'm sure smart people with expertise in such areas could make it work.
I brought up the wealth gap to show disparity. When people say the wealthy pay most of the taxes, well of course they do as they have most of the wealth.
I believe that when people say a 'wealth tax' it is to stop means of them shielding money and using loop holes to avoid taxes.
Like pass through entities etc.
To balance a budget it takes the balls to collect the taxes to pay our bills. The Democrats can do it. The gop cannot...
So you want to raise the tax brackets. If you read the link I posted, table 2 shows that the percentage of federal personal income tax by the 1% and 5% wealthiest people has increased even while the highest marginal tax rate has decreased.
As for a wealth tax, I doubt that with our current divided Congress that one could be agreed on and set up. Out of the 36 countries that had experimented with a wealth tax, only 5 still have one. I don't know how successful such a tax would be and I believe it would create a huge increase in lawyers looking for loopholes to exploit. How much wealth would be hidden overseas? How would we tax assets that are legally held overseas? Hell, even today there are many large companies who hold money overseas to avoid US taxes.
Problem with that line is that smart people will go where the money is. So is there more money working for the government to figure out how to do this or for working for the very wealthy to figure out how to avoid this?
No, the democrats want to steal more from the successful to pay for the worthless. Intelligent people know that you shouldn’t spend more than you have, time to cut the handouts to the segment that returns nothing in return.
Its also unconstitutional. But that's never been a barrier to Democrats. As we are seeing yet again with the 14th Amendment boomlet.
We've seen it play out time and time again under Biden. Whack jobs on the left demand Biden do something unconstitutional. Rather than stand up to them and point out he would be violating his oath of office by the act, he meekly goes ahead and does it.
"Economics is just math" - Bill Clinton
As the rich reap rewards they can pay!
Why tax the rich? They have all the $...
I disagree. I believe that when most people are talking about a 'wealth tax' they are talking about taxing the assets of the wealth and not just the income. Jeff Bezos for example is worth approximately $141 billion, but his annual salary is about $1.6 million.
I don't know where the majority of that wealth is held, all I know is when he stepped down as CEO of Amazon he owned a lot of Amazon stock. Stock is great, but it's not cash that you can easily lay your hands on. If you need a chunk of money you have to sell some of the stock. There are just so many variables in trying to set up a wealth tax that I doubt if Washington could come up with a valid plan.
It's a great 15 minutes for a politician to stand in front of a camera and state the rich must pay their fair share. But we don't elect the best and brightest to Washington and they have so far been unable to come up with a valid and equitable plan for a wealth tax beyond the rhetoric.
Hell you can see it right here with some calling poor people worthless.
Nice try, that’s your bigotry talking.
I'm not so sure that it is unconstitutional but it would definitely have to work it's way thru the courts if Congress were ever able to pass such a bill.
For disclaimer, this is from the Roosevelt Institute which does have a strong center-left bias based on advocacy and funding for Democrat causes but they are also rated high for factual reporting. Any way you look at it, a wealth tax would go thru the courts before it ever made it into active policy. I doubt that we on this board shall see a wealth tax enacted during the remainder of our lives.
Democrats always want to punish success. Is that because so few of them are successful?
how about cutting spending for a change?
My idea is not a wealth tax per say. One of the tricks they use is outlined a little in the link I posted above.
Like Musk, when he needs cash he runs to a bank and basically takes out cash loans against his stock holdings which he never gets taxed on. That way he is not making a salary yet still gets all the benefits of using the stock value as cash money.
Was that not you?
what spending do you want to cut george ?
You are the one that extrapolated that to people.
What? You said something and then try to blame me...Unreal.
All grants to private colleges like Harvard, all subsidies to corporations, if you can’t survive you die. All foreign add to countries that hate us. Bring troops home, stop pretending we are the worlds police.
Then IMO you should not call it a wealth tax. When most people say 'wealth tax', they are talking about taxing a persons wealth.
You are talking about how to close loopholes. An interesting idea but not sure how that could be policed. When regular people take out a car loan, the bank is holding ownership of the car as collateral against the loan. If Washington were to pass a law that prohibits a class of people from using an asset as collateral against a loan and it is set up to prevent the wealthy from doing what you outline, would that even be constitutional? How would the unintended consequences work out for the regular people who try to buy a house or car using the purchased item as collateral?
Isolationism is a fools errand.
Yes, your translation is your fault.
Yeah, I don't believe in a wealth tax as some people define it. I am for closing all the loopholes. That was one example of how people can bypass paying taxes.
What you said is there for all to see. Denying it really strange...
So how much to countries who hate us will make you feel safe?
Ok, agree to disagree. I believe that we need to use the same identification as others to avoid confusion.
And I'm all for closing loopholes, but believe they need to be fair, equitable and enforceable. Not sure how your idea there would be enforceable.
If pass through entities can be given a tax break without any constitutional muster, it can just as easily be taken away.
I am bad about that. I get an idea in my head and I don't really explain myself. Haha
You are correct. My idea of a wealth tax and other people's are not the same.
The worthless are countries, colleges and corporations that contribute nothing, you immediately went to people because of your bigotry not mine.
Ok, but that's different than your idea that wealthy should not be able to borrow against their wealth. Pass through entities such as LLC's have to follow current tax code so get the tax code changed. Then it impacts every one of those equally.
However I'm sure we would hear pushback from both sides of the isle due to these changes impacting people in their areas.
Are they proposing a tax increase now?
Why did the approve the two Obama tax cuts?
You got something right!
Democrats?
Yeah...but confiscation of personal wealth is a tactic of repressive and socialist governments.
So....you would rather live under a system that believes in "to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability"
"Then undo the yacht and private jet tax breaks the GOP passed" AOC.
A large number of the very rich and powerful are Democrats and leftist supporters.
Do you think they would go along with that?
Exactly but didn’t Bill Clinton elected eliminate the yacht luxury tax and Blue Delaware, DC, and Rhode Island for charge sales tax or property tax for yachts.
When the stupid fucking democrats like AOC finish spending the riches money who is next?