“It Won’t Affect Me”
The more oblivious among us may still be deluding themselves into thinking they won't be negatively impacted by Trump's big miserable budget bill that Congress just approved.
If I were a numerologist, I’d be thinking about the number 4 today.
It’s Independence Day — more frequently referred to as simply July 4. It’s a day that has symbolized the promise of the United States — freedom from the oppression of a unitary ruler, instead reaping the benefits of a government of, by, and for the people.
The horrific budget bill that passed in Congress did so with a four-vote margin.
And for this July 4 holiday, our president-turned-dictator has divided the population into four unequal parts with the imposition of policy of hatred and division, thinly disguised as a budget bill, on the nation. There are now four distinct groups of citizens:
Those who will be directly impacted (Medicaid recipients, ACA beneficiaries, people who are food insecure, immigrants and their families)
Those who understand the damage the passage of this bill will do but aren’t in the direct line of fire
Those who mistakenly think they won’t be impacted
Those who truly won’t be impacted (the extremely wealthy)
With the exception of that last group — folks who have sufficient resources to weather the coming storm (and who are of the “correct” race) — the rest of us will be dealing with the repercussions and the secondary effects of this bill for generations. Even they may suffer through the torment of arugula shortages or substandard service at their favorite five-star hotels but, try as I might, I’m afraid my sympathy does not extend quite that far.
With cuts to Medicaid, we’ll all experience:
Overloaded hospital emergency rooms
Closures of hospitals, especially in rural areas
Increased insurance premiums to offset the additional costs of healthcare
Shifts of overall healthcare costs to state budgets, resulting in higher state and local taxes
Shuttering of an estimated 25% of nursing homes
With reductions to social safety net programs, we’ll experience:
Reduction or cessation of HeadStart programs
School lunch programs
Reduced funding of the SNAP program literally will take food out of kids’ and families’ mouths
With defunding of clean energy initiatives, we’ll experience:
Increased energy costs
Further environmental damage
Further lagging behind other countries in manufacturing electric vehicles
With the tenfold increase in ICE’s budget, we’ll experience:
Food shortages and increases in grocery prices resulting from agricultural workers being deported
Reduction in quality throughout the hospitality industry resulting from staff shortages
Decreases in housing starts, increases in housing costs, and stalled or abandoned housing development projects, all due to staff shortages
This is by no means a complete list of the damage that this bill will do. This bill articulates 900+ pages worth of damage.
There’s one more thing that Republicans suddenly don’t want to talk about — the national debt. For multiple election cycles, reducing the federal debt has been a standard Republican campaign issue. It’s a talking point that virtually every Republican politician has trotted out in one form or another. It’s the cause for which they invented a whole new department of the federal government and staffed it with unqualified technology junior rangers.
Now, however, they’re in denial that this bill will massively increase the national debt by trillions of dollars. They’ve disparaged the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which conservatively estimated the bill would trigger a $3 trillion increase in the debt. They’ve stopped holding town halls and they’ve run from journalists’ questions, choosing instead to deny this reality.
Some of them have even trotted out the battle-weary and completely disproven talking point about how the bill will stimulate the economy because of “supply side economics” (also known as “trickle down economics”). It didn’t work when Ronald Reagan introduced the concept on the campaign trail in 1980 or in his eight years in office, it hasn’t worked in all the decades since, but now somehow it’s magically going to make everybody wealthy.
Alongside all of those immediate negative consequences, we'll watch the further degradation of our democracy right before our eyes. We'll watch as those concentration camps that Trump and his cronies are salivating over become normalized or ignored. We'll watch as more families are destroyed through forced separation. We’ll witness poverty levels increase. We’ll see billionaires’ fortunes soar and we’ll see the wealth gap widen. The so-called promise of America is now merely another broken promise, built on the dozens and dozens of broken promises from this low life who somehow wheedled his way into the White House.
This missive wouldn’t be complete without highlighting the disgusting hypocrisy we’ve witnessed among Congressional Republicans. Congress has had numerous opportunities to kick Donald Trump and his hateful policies to the curb and they have universally failed to do so. Instead, they’ve relinquished their power and abdicated their responsibility as a co-equal branch of our government.
So it should come as no surprise that this budget bill — which most, if not all, Congressional Republicans know will damage everyone — got enough Republican votes to pass. The only time this current crop of Republicans ever speaks the truth is when they leave office and no longer have anything to lose.
There’s not a shred of integrity or decency among the lot of them. Not only do they not give a damn about the nation or democracy, they don't give a damn about the constituents they purport to represent, the very people who put them in office. They would rather pledge their allegiance to an ignorant, racist career conman and criminal than do what they were elected to do.
On this Independence Day, it’s important to remind ourselves and each other that we are still a representative democracy. The power to vote these fear-based sycophants out of office is still in our hands.
Over the next 16 months, the thought of unseating these folks should never be far from our minds. We’ve seldom seen a better opportunity to clean house, given how completely unpopular this budget bill is. There has not been a time in recent history when the Congress has worked so diligently and so blatantly against the will of the American people.
It’ll take a few election cycles to completely rid the nation of these cowards. But if we don’t, we won’t likely have the opportunity to restore the nation as a place that truly lives up to the aspirations of our founders.