Nina-Bytes: Theft, Murder, and the GOP Reconciliation Budget

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Republicans Are Trying to Pass a Class War Budget

There will be those who accuse me of hyperbole, but at this point I’m utterly convinced the Republican Party is actively trying to rob and murder even their own voters to pay for tax cuts that benefit their wealthy sociopathic donors and the companies they own. After repeatedly and openly lying about how they intend to pay for a nightmare reconciliation bill that will destroy the American labor class while enriching the uber-wealthy, the GOP quietly released some of their budget mathematics in the dead of night yesterday. To the surprise of nobody who actually pays attention to government spending bills, Republicans are planning to slash $715B from Medicaid over the next ten years; just like critics who pointed out they were objectively lying about preserving healthcare funding said they would do.

‘Under Cover of Night,’ GOP Unveils Plan to Kick Over 8 Million Off Medicaid

“The legislation includes major changes to Medicaid that, if enacted, would kick millions from the program, including work requirements for some enrollees and new payment mandates for adults living above 100% of the federal poverty level—which, for a single individual, is $15,650 in annual income for 2025.

A snap analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the healthcare section of the new Republican bill would cut spending by at least $715 billion over the next decade and leave at least 8.6 million more people without insurance.

“Many of the Medicaid proposals from House Republicans are technical and wonky, and will be difficult for the public to absorb,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “What won’t be difficult to absorb: CBO’s estimate that the changes will increase the number of people without health insurance by at least 8.6 million.”

This discussion is going to get a little wonky, so let’s just start off with the bottom line stuff you need to know:

• Swine Emperor Trump, his administration, and the entire Republican Party repeatedly promised that they’d deliver a permanent tax cut for rich people without touching Medicaid.
• Now they’ve shown their work and independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office says it’s going to cut $715B from Medicaid funding; again, to pay for massive tax cuts for rich people.
• The proposal uses the lie that the government is coming after “waste, fraud, and abuse” to drastically increase the amount of red tape required for recipients to confirm eligibility for their healthcare; in practice this means a lot of people who think they’re covered, are going to find out they’re not covered at the worst possible time. Over the course of thousands and thousands of applications mistakes will be made, and large numbers of people will be thrust into medical debt or receive no care at all.
• The scheme also increases the amount of “cost-sharing requirements” for coverage; in plain terms this means Medicaid recipients will pay more out of pocket for coverage, full stop.
• The plan also adds an 80 hour per month work requirement for Medicaid coverage, despite the fact that similar efforts at the state-level in GOP controlled areas have not produced the desired savings, and have been a health coverage disaster for poor people in those states.
• In summation, the Republican Party is literally going to take life-saving healthcare and support away from 8.6M of the poorest people in America, so guys like Elon Musk can hire more social media influencers to birth his children. In the plainest possible terms, this budget is class warfare built around theft and murder.

Okay, so now that we’ve got the basics of this absolutely terrible bill covered, we can get into the political weeds surrounding it. As mentioned above, the Republican Party is doing all of this to pay for $880B worth of tax cuts for the wealthy. Because they don’t have the seats in the Senate to get a bill like this through the normal legislative process without being filibustered by Senate Democrats, they intend to use the reconciliation process to force a straight majority vote; but to do that, the budget has to be spending neutral. Which means permanent tax cuts for the wealthy have to be offset by equal cuts to spending elsewhere. If they can torture the math hard enough to accomplish that, the Republicans can pass this awful class war bill without Democrats being able to stop them at all.

Since killing your constituents so rich people can buy another yacht isn’t a popular policy decision, Trump and the GOP promised to pay for these cuts by hunting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” through DOGE cuts and the implementation of tariffs that were going to make us rich enough to end income tax; predictably neither of those schemes worked out. The most generous verifiable estimates have DOGE finding $63B worth of “waste” to cut with a difficult to confirm promise the department will save $160B by the fiscal year 2026. I understand that might sound like a lot of money to you or I, but it’s miniscule compared to the $2 trillion Elon Musk claimed DOGE would find and also isn’t enough to pay for $880B in tax cuts for rich people. Trump’s unhinged tariff policies have predictably been an even bigger joke, and Der Leader is already trying to roll back most of his trade war. These numbers simply don’t add up, so now the quest to find “waste, fraud, and abuse” to pay off the billionaire donor class means throwing poor people off Medicaid and calling that efficiency.

Of course, none of this can reasonably be called a surprise. Way back on the 2024 campaign trail when Donald Trump and the Republican Party were promising to give billionaires outrageous tax breaks, and increase military spending without touching Medicaid, numerous policy experts pointed that the numbers didn’t add up without cutting vital social programs typically demonized by conservatives (in both parties) as “entitlements.” The reason critics were able to predict the GOP would have to come for vital healthcare and social aid programs like Medicaid is because there was nowhere else to find that much money to give to rich people, and the entire Trumpenreich knew that. These monstrous class war cuts were always the plan; but the question of whether or not they can even get Republicans to pass the bill remains unresolved. Due to how Medicaid funding works on a need basis, this is going to affect the poorest “red” states in America the most and many GOP officials, including Missouri Senator (R) Josh Hawley have indicated that they are, at least for now, strongly opposed to Medicaid cuts. Whether pressure from the Trump regime, and Musk’s deep wallet to fund primary challenges against GOP dissenters can threaten them enough to force compliance, remains an open question.

 

More Budget Coverage

As horrifying as the Republican Party’s planned Medicaid cuts are however, the plain truth is that ripping health coverage from nine million labor class people isn’t even remotely the extent of the theft and murder these fascists and their rich donors are trying to accomplish with this bill. This is class warfare and it has nothing to do with combatting an irrelevant debt crisis; as demonstrated by the fact that passing it would reportedly increase the U.S. deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next ten years. The bill also includes $290B worth of cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that will cause millions of Americans to go hungry; it doesn’t get more openly homicidal and greedy than starving poor people to fund tax breaks for the rich.

Furthermore the bill includes all kinds of goodies, bonuses, and assistance for fascist ideological projects and business opportunities; stuff like creating tax shelters for the Christian Nationalist donors behind the quest to privatize American schools, a ten year ban on state-level regulation over the broligarch-run “AI” industry, and granting the president the power to rip the tax-exempt status of NGOs he doesn’t like under the guise of “fighting terrorism”. In fact, the bill is so complicated, and so objectively terrible, that analysts are finding new and horrifying things about it to discuss all the time. Although I can’t cover every twist and turn in the “Big Beautiful Bill” carnage story here on NIDC, I am keeping up with developments on my fediverse blog; you can find a link to that ongoing thread here.

 

 

– Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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