Some absolutely essential plain speaking about entitlements

Dr. Jane Orient at Caffeinated Thoughts nails it:

The Washington Post of October 18 says that the biggest issues in the midterm elections are the threat that Republicans will slash Medicare and Social Security, and maybe get around to repealing ObamaCare after all. It quotes a tweet from Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) that Republican statements about “adjusting” entitlements are “Washington-speak for cutting the Medicare and Social Security benefits you have worked hard to earn and making you pay for tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires.”

So, will rescinding the tax cuts and taxing the “rich” even more fix the problems?

Think about it for just a minute. Didn’t seniors already earn their benefits? If so, why the need to tax the rich to pay them?

The ugly truth is that the payroll taxes paid by today’s retirees were taxes, not contributions to a protected pension program. That money was spent immediately on yesteryear’s retirees—and any excess on reducing the deficit. The money in the “trust funds” is only a claim on future tax revenues.

There is no longer any excess. Payroll taxes from fewer than three working Americans are supposed to support one retiree, and the trust funds are being drained. Retirees’ and Medicare providers’ checks are coming from the wages of burger flippers, teachers, construction workers, or anybody else who is employed. Even if you think this is fair, it is a precarious and unsustainable situation. As the Baby Boomers retire, workforce participation by men of prime working age is shrinking, and wages have been stagnant.

The rich are not sitting in their counting houses counting out their money. The money is mostly invested in enterprises that create jobs (and payroll tax revenue) and produce the goods and services we all need. Even if a draconian increase in taxes produced an increase in revenue—and it usually doesn’t—it would likely crash the economy.

The situation for all of us, not just seniors, is deadly serious, and it requires economic realism, not name-calling, bickering, platitudes, and magical thinking. 

There is no disputing this. At some point, post-America must engage in a very grown-up conversation about it.

To say that Squirrel-Hair is no conservative is to utter an understatement of vast proportions

It will be interesting to see if Rush calls this one a "political home run."

I'd like to bring two pieces on S-H's proposal to expand Medicaid to your attention.

Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner:

Appearing on "The Dr. Oz Show," Trump said that if Obamacare were repealed, there would be a "fairly large" percentage of people who would still fall through the cracks and couldn't afford private health insurance. For those people, he said, "We have to go and we have to help them through the Medicaid system."

That's the same Medicaid system that was created as part of President Johnson's "Great Society," that was expanded by Obamacare, that has been crippling state and federal budgets, and that has been failing patients with limited choices of doctors and poor medical outcomes.

Of all government healthcare programs (save the Veterans Health Administration), Medicaid comes the closest to a single-payer, or socialized, system.

Again, Trump tried to touch up his statement with free-market rhetoric about instilling more competition by getting rid of state-based insurance monopolies. "Every state has a line wrapped around it," he said.

It's true that before Obamacare came about, a number of free-market proposals called for removing the restrictions on insurance carriers selling policies across state lines.

The purpose of this was to get around the onerous local benefit mandates (such as requiring that every plan in a state covered acupuncture) that could make insurance cost double in one state what it cost in neighboring states.
But the actual plan Trump released includes an important caveat — that insurers could offer plans in any state, "as long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements."

In other words, all plans would still have to meet local mandates, thus defeating the whole purpose of a proposal to get rid of state barriers — and giving no reason to believe he'd actually be ushering in more competition or driving down prices. 

Klein then puts this move in the context of the broader picture: S-H's enthusiasm for the minimum wage, his hands-off position regarding any serious reform of Social Security and Medicare, and his Most-Equal-Comrade-esque preoccupation with the infrastructure.

Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire points out that Medicaid is already huge and economically teetering:

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans opposed expanding Medicaid. As of 2013, Medicaid already covered nearly 60 million Americans and cost the feds $265 billion and the states another $192 billion. As Chris Jacobs of Conservative Review has written, “Both Medicaid’s size—currently 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, and growing—and its structure present fiscal difficulties.” Some studies show that Medicaid patients have worse outcomes than people without insurance altogether, Jacobs writes.

Shapiro further points out that S-H is overtly moving left because he knows his "conservative" shills will make excuses for him.

Bots, behold what you have wrought.