2017: The year when incompetence saved America
Close your eyes for a few seconds and remember the despair you felt one year ago, while a Trump presidency was still a looming but unavoidable nightmare.
Donald Trump, a man with no empathy and even less grasp of policy nuances, was the president-elect. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), a man who literally fantasized about cutting health benefits for poor people during his college keg parties, had spent the Obama years rallying his fellow Republican lawmakers around a singularly cruel agenda.
A year ago, Obamacare repeal seemed like a near certainty, as did deep cuts to health programs created in the mid-1960s. Ryan’s plan to repeal Medicare and replace it with a voucher program would have driven up seniors’ out-of-pocket costs by as much as 40 percent. Republicans planned to cut Medicaid by as much as 50 percent in the first decade — then gradually phase it out entirely.
And that’s just what they proposed to do to health care. Ryan’s budget sought deep cuts to food stamps. It slashed Pell Grants. And there’s always a risk, whenever Republicans control the government, that Social Security will be privatized as well.
https://thinkprogress.org/2017-the-year-when-incompetence-saved-america-9371e73ec98d/
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