Welfare Spending: Medicare vs Corporate/Business Subsidies:
Last edited Wed Dec 26, 2012, 06:57 AM - Edit history (1)
(or does the GOP really support WalMart's behavior in Bangladesh?)
As most readers know, the federal government is currently in what passes for negotiations between the President's Democratic Party Senate and House members and the GOP members that control the House.
The Tea Party and its right-wing rhetoric has of course had a radicalizing impact on the GOP positions, with members not only beholden to Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge (all strongly supported by various right-wing propaganda tanks like the Tax Foundation, Heritage, American Enterprise, and other organizations) but also to the anti-social welfare corporatists like David and Charles Koch, the Wal-Mart heirs, and other oligarchic families that constitute the top 1% of US income and wealth. As a result of these two strong influences, the GOP now stands for
•tax-cuts-no-matter-what (and for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy most of all, as reflected in the rigid position in favor of the "carried interest" scam used by private equity profits partners and the extraordinarily preferential rate for capital gains and dividends included in the "net capital gain" definition under section 1(h)(11)); and
•so-called "entitlement reforms", by which GOPers generally mean reduction in benefits and/or privatization of social welfare programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (All of this is argued in terms of caring about "saving" the programs for the future, but the truth lies in the ways that the right proposes changes to the programs--not changes in costs related to profits taken out by Big Pharma and similar interests, but changes in benefits to ordinary Americans (such as raising the working age for eligibility even though those who work at the hardest labor need benefits earlier, not later, or lowering the cost-of-living-allowance adjustment to benefits for Medicare, even though seniors generally have a HIGHER cost of living because of their increased medical needs, including prescription drugs for diabetes, high blood pressure, and similar diseases particularly prevalent in the elderly population.)
The sum of those positions stands for a corporatist philosophy of benefitting the oligarchy and their business enterprises at the expense of everyday Americans who work for a living.
http://ataxingmatter.blogs.com/tax/2012/12/welfare-spending-medicare-vs-corporate-subsidies.html
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