Senator Elizabeth Warren appeared on All-In with Chris Hayes, where they called out debt ceiling hostage-taking Republicans for attempts to cut Social Security & Medicaid as they impose a national sales tax on everyone.
Elizabeth Warren dings Republicans on cutting Social Security & Medicare
Chris Hayes started the segment by reminding Americans that the new Republican House Majority intends to hold the country, hostage by attaching their vote to increase the debt ceiling to cutting Medicare and Social Security. He brought up Florida Senator Rick Scott‘s plan to sunset Social Security and other social programs every five years. The Washington Post reported the following.
House Republicans have started to weigh a series of legislative proposals targeting Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, part of a broader campaign to slash federal spending that could force the new majority to grapple with some of the most difficult and delicate issues in American politics.
Only weeks after taking control of the chamber, GOP lawmakers under new Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have rallied around firm pledges for austerity, insisting their efforts can improve the nation’s fiscal health. They have signaled they are willing to leverage the fight over the debt ceiling — and the threat of a fiscal doomsday — to seek major policy concessions from the Biden administration. …
In recent days, a group of GOP lawmakers has called for the creation of special panels that might recommend changes to Social Security and Medicare, which face genuine solvency issues that could result in benefit cuts within the next decade. Others in the party have resurfaced more detailed plans to cut costs, including by raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, targeting younger Americans who have yet to obtain federal benefits.
“We have no choice but to make hard decisions,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the leader of the Republican Study Committee, a bloc of more than 160 conservative lawmakers that endorsed raising the retirement age and other changes last year. “Everybody has to look at everything.”
Chris highlighted Elizabeth Warren’s latest article in the Boston Globe titled “The Republican con on the debt ceiling,” which everyone should read.
For generations, Republicans in Washington have relentlessly driven up the national debt by shoveling tax breaks to the rich. The cumulative impact has been staggering. In the 1950s, corporations paid 6 percent of the cost of running our country; today, that number has fallen to 1 percent. The 2017 Republican tax cuts were the latest blow — a $1.9 trillion giveaway to wealthy individuals and multinational corporations. And, as icing on the billionaire cake, decades of Republican attacks on the Internal Revenue Service have cut the risk of an audit in half for multimillionaires and corporate tax cheats.
Republicans don’t really care about the national debt. In fact, the first bill that House Republicans advanced would increase budget deficits in order to protect wealthy tax cheats. And new House rules say that additional tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations don’t need to be paid for. It seems that more debt is fine with Republicans in Congress, so long as it profits the wealthy and well-connected.
But that’s not enough. Republicans have committed to vote on a MAGA tax plan to slash total taxes for the wealthy and corporations, while hiking overall rates for everyone else. The Republicans’ 30 percent national sales tax will increase the cost of everything that families need, from food to diapers to gasoline — a hard punch in the gut for families already living on a budget.
Elizabeth pointed out why Republicans are happy to inflict pain on the American masses. In their warped thinking, they think Americans will run to them after they would have ruined the economy.
“Joe Biden is sitting on a strong economy that has started to work for middle-class families, for working families, and for the Republicans, particularly for Donald Trump, that is a political problem for them,” Warren said. “Donald Trump himself has said the reason the red wave didn’t occur was that Americans weren’t feeling enough pain. But if they can push enough pain on American families over the next two years, they believe it will help Republicans and in particular, help put Donald Trump in the White House. Democrats are not going to fall for this again.”
And that is it in a nutshell.
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