Award winning economist Paul Krugman breaks down the incredibly cruel budget Republicans are trying to pass and the damage it’s going to do to the most vulnerable in our country. As we already discussed here, the bill would slash not just Medicaid and SNAP benefits, but also $500 billion from Medicare.
And as Krugman wrote in his Substack post, the cruelty is the point:
Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.
OK, news at 11. Isn’t this what Republicans always do? But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.
