Paul Ryan is probably running around in circles barking, seeing Donald Trump say this on TV. This is better than any trial balloon Ryan ever dared to float, this will starve Granny for sure. The disrupter in chief got up in front of his mini-rally in Bedminster today and announced a cut to the payroll tax — which sounds great, if you’re dumb as a rock and that’s evidently who he wanted to reach and impress. The Lincoln Project came along and shut it down in 19 words.

Here’s another.

 

It isn’t everyday that the president* of the United States goes on live television and declares war on programs that keep countless numbers of people alive and out of poverty in their old age. Common Dreams:

“Trump’s executive order, which seeks to defer Social Security contributions, is bad enough,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. “But his promise to ‘terminate’ FICA contributions if he is reelected is a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries.”

“Social Security is the foundation of everyone’s retirement security,” Altman added. “At a time when pensions are vanishing and 401ks have proven inadequate, Trump’s plan to eliminate Social Security’s revenue stream would destroy the one source of retirement income that people can count on. Moreover, Social Security is often the only disability insurance and life insurance that working families have. If reelected, Trump plans to destroy those benefits as well.”

This is why we need a unified Democratic government now more than we ever have, at least since the Great Depression.

One thing I can tell you, on a personal note, is that Murfster and I wouldn’t be here without our disability checks and without Medicare. I would have died, and that is not hyperbole. If you don’t know my story, I was malpracticed by a quack, starting 17 years ago. I had severe anemia for many years, necessitating frequent hospitalizations, and a hip crippled from arthritis. The first hospitalization was several months after I had returned to work after being on temporary disability for nine months. Long story short, I was deathly pale and horribly weak. I decided to go to the hospital, on a Thursday afternoon, which I could do, because I had Medicare. If I didn’t have Medicare, I would have just gone home. And I would have been dead by that Sunday, I was later told. My blood count was 3.3. I was in the hospital for five days and had to have a massive transfusion of five packs of blood.

A woman that I worked with did die, because she had no health insurance. She was feeling poorly, never went to the doctor, and died — we believe — of an aneurism of some sort suddenly one night. That part of it was never made clear. Point being, health insurance is crucial, Medicare is crucial, and disability and social security checks keep people alive. At least they have been keeping Murfster and myself alive. If you read his piece on the GOP’s unemployment assistance failure you get a vivid sense of how real this situation is for so many people. There but for the grace of God go a lot of us.

I’ve known Murf since 2016 and he and I have been friends through many personal travails, most particularly health and economic ones. We both became disabled before retirement age, and we both worked very hard in our careers out in corporate America before that happened. He put in a lot of overtime and so did I. Disability happens to the best of us. There must be a social safety net in place, or a lot of good, hardworking Americans, the kind that keep the country going — and I hope you’ll excuse me if I lump Murf and myself into that category — get sick through no fault of our own. We need help to keep going, so that we can return to productive work, albeit in other ways, and continue to be of value in our communities. Social Security, SSDI, and Medicare make that possible.  Lack of those things is a death sentence, make no mistake.

Donald Trump doesn’t get that, and even if you could explain it to him, he wouldn’t care. Empathy is not his strong suit and he doesn’t identify with the normal men and women of America, only with wealthy celebrities. The rest of us can drop dead.

I am alarmed at his stunt in Bedminster a few hours ago. I would be considerably more alarmed if there wasn’t a very strong possibility of a blue tsunami in the fall. The Democrats have to take back control of the White House and Senate or we are looking at an oligarchy in this country, and if you’re not in the ruling class, good luck. That is the message of Donald Trump and that is the message of the Republican party.

 

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1 COMMENT

  2. I spent a good deal of my life in social service and other service oriented jobs and returned to my social services roots in 2009. It’s a long story about how I was unable to find good paying work in the eastern panhandle of WV after dropping out of the beltway rat-race in 2003 but the upshot is the savings I’d built up were used up over the years before returning to social services. I had built up a modest amount of savings again after getting full-time, steady work with an agency that helped developmentally disabled adults and had planned to move up into management where, by age 70 I’d have a bit more than just social security to retire on. Then after beginning the move up with a transfer to NC I found myself forced on to medical leave which turned into short & then long term disability and eventually SSDI. I wound up homeless for a while but a veterans program funded by grant to VOA helped me get back on my feet and obtain a subsidy to be able to (barely) afford the apartment that’s now my home. I couldn’t afford to heed my sister’s pleas to move back to my hometown even if I was welcome there which I’m not. SSDI, and now (since I passed the age of 62.5 years) Social Security and a very small VA disability payment each month are it for me. Take away Social Security and I wouldn’t be able to even afford my medications from the VA, much less other co-pays and after two hospitalizations last fall and the development of some heart issues (mild and under control but still..) I’d be on the street and dead within months.

    The GOP doesn’t give a flying fuck about average and poor people. They are driven to take us all the way back to the feudal system. Of course, without enough workers eventually everything will go to hell and their gates will be stormed, but like so many of the top Nazis in the SS towards the end of WWII in Europe who saw the writing on the wall the GOP “Lords” will have carefully prepared to disappear to safe, remote enclaves as the country and world fall into dystopian chaos.

    Unless we can stop them.

    If you think I’m being hyperbolic consider how many decades they’ve spent steadily engineering the transfer of wealth from the masses to the very few. They’ve passed even the levels of the 1920s and they aren’t done yet. They have decided to go for broke – broke for 99.9% of us that is. Even their own constituents balked at privatizing Social Security and letting Wall Street steal all that money like they did to so many pension funds. Well, enough of them that Democrats have somehow kept things together with duct tape and baling wire. But this? Even if we win in court next year should Trump (and Putin) manage to steal the election the gaping hole left in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid will be a mortal wound. Which is exactly what they’ve decided to go for.

    • Denis, I’m sorry you had to go through all of that and are still hanging on by your fingernails! It’s so obvious what tRump and the GOP are up to. I’ve been making calls for the Minnesota Democratic party.which is frustrating because we get so many hang ups. But when I do talk to someone with functioning gray matter, they say, ” OH yes, I’m voting Democrat! We have to turn this thing AROUND! Or words to that effect. It really makes my day to talk to total strangers who “get it,” since I tend to hang only with folks he see things my way. The calls have helped me believe we can do this! ????

    • You should be getting your medications for free from the VA, unless you are making a lot more than my wife and I. Here is the link:

      https://www.va.gov/health-care/update-health-information/#:~:text=Update%20your%20VA%20health%20benefits,enrolled%20in%20VA%20health%20care.

      What is the income threshold for VA medical benefits?

      Annual Income Limits – Health Benefits
      Veteran with:
      VA National Income Threshold
      VA Housebound Threshold
      0 dependents
      $33,632 or less
      $16,540
      1 dependents
      $40,359 or less
      $20,731
      2 dependents
      $42,672 or less
      $23,044
      3 dependents
      $44,985 or less
      $25,357

  3. I’m waiting to hear the shrieking and howling from Republicans who called President Obama a “dictator” & said he was spitting on the Constitution for perfectly normal, legal executive orders tat were nowhere near the breathtaking power grab these are. This will not happen because he doesn’t have the funding and mechanisms in place to completely upend out education, health care, unemployment and Social Security systems by fiat which is what he is proposing. But these “executive orders” are probably one paragraph of aspirational nonsense, with nothing underpinning them.

  4. Fortunately they’re memoranda, not actually EOs, and he’s going to have to figure out a legal way to do any of that.
    The one EO he actually signed was on loans and evictions, and it won’t apply to a lot of people: it requires a federally-funded student loan or home loan.

    • Trump, figure something out? Neither nor his people could figure out a Rubik’s cube if you gave them a detailed cheat sheet.

      • A Rubik’s cube? ‘Shark, you’re seriously overestimating the talent pool there. This bunch would screw up “Hangman” (or the TV version, “Wheel of Fortune”) even with all but one letter showing. (If you’ve ever seen the “South Park” episode, “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson,” you’ll have an idea. If not, basically, Stan’s dad is on “Wheel of Fortune” playing the bonus round and the category for the puzzle is “People Who Annoy You” and he’s got the letters “N_GGERS” showing. You can probably guess what he blurts out–on live television! The correct answer is supposed to be “NAGGERS” Well, that’s the talent pool level floating around His Orangeness.)

      • They’d have a hard time finding their way out of a wet paper bag given scissors and a flashlight.
        (Some of the cheat-sheets for Rubik’s cubes are … less useful than they should be (the 2 and 4-cubes). Speaking from experience.)

  5. Literally bribes voters by stuffing money in their pockets and telling them if he’s re-elected, keep it.

    Trump would destroy these core social programs to save his hide, just as he has killed 162,000 plus Americans through gross incompetence, self-service, and malice. Seniors who manage to survive this pandemic can look forward to dying of exposure in cardboard shelters if he gets back in.

  6. How stupid does someone have to be not to realize what tRump is doing here?!?!? He will give that money to his rich buddies. But he actually won’t because the more BS he shovels out, the more people realize how cruel he is. BIDEN 2020! BLUE SUNAMI 2020! ????

  7. You are 1000% CORRECT!! At this point, I really do NOT care who Biden’s VP pick is, though I wanted Eliz. Warren from the beginning and still do. She is the ONLY one who can become President in a heartbeat if Biden can’t continue for some reason. I don’t like ANY of the other candidates (this is not racist, I’m an African American middle aged woman and I vote). The VP Contenders-Lovely & smart people but they can’t be president on “day two” if necessary- only E. Warren has the temprament and knowledge to step in and keep the changes needed throughout the country and government going strong. Donalddunce and his enablers totally wrecked this Democracy. I’m tired of hearing the political gossip about Biden’s “VP pick” when we’ve got a maniac at the wheel driving the whole train over the cliff!! And the idiotpresident’s latest crazed stunt at his golf club- signing Executive Orders like our US Treasury is HIS private bank/business account!?!? If people don’t see that he is a DANGER to the economic stability of this country and WILL bankrupt it just like he did his own businesses because he IS in fact a MORON and half-wit, then I don’t know what other proof people need. Thank you so much for all that you wrote in your article.Some of us ARE paying attention.

    • Agree completely and so glad to see someone else giving the same reasoning. And like you it has nothing to do with lack of esteem for any of these incredible women – it has to do with the core reason the VP office exists, which is actually not political. Politicizing the choice is understandable, but a grave error nonetheless.

  8. Former Senator Barbara Boxer said I think it was Friday night that seniors had been looking forward to their golden years but what it appears is on the horizon now is years of deprivation, terror, and of living in a country that doesn’t give a crap about anyone over 60.

    And as Denis says, at some point this will not work, but until then, all of us are in for a very rough ride. I’ve said this way more than once, it feels like a civil and human litany of burdens at this point, but in forgetting history we are doomed to repeat it. If Burke and Santayana and others had this nailed, and then my fave guy, Bob Marley, had it down: ya gots to know ya history. And we are headed towards metaphorical sabot, millions of them, being thrown into the machinery of government. The French threw their shoes into the machinery at the beginning of the French Revolution, and now we will be doing it with all our might, collective indignation and moral backbone unleashed on these useless excuses for human beings who are stealing all of us blind. Care not about us? At your own peril.

    There are no gates or fences or armed guards enough to stop us from storming your bastions of corruption. Even suppressing the vote will at some point not work. Enough. Enough. Basta. Basta. Genug. Genug. Dostatochno. Dostatochno. Jubuna. Jubuna. Assez. Assez.

  9. I’m so happy that you had Medicare to keep you alive.
    If only we had a presidential candidate that would extend that to all Americans. Oh wait, we did, his name was Bernie Sanders.
    Then the DNC screwed him over and installed a corporate tool named Joe who has promised to veto M4A if it reaches his desk.
    But hey, vote blue and they’ll screw you.

    • Not helpful. I was a strong Sanders supporter and still am. Put the country first. He is not the nominee. Put the country first now.

    • You must have missed the last 8 years. Bernie is a back-bench senator with a few ideas, but no clue that discrimination is a big part of economic inequality.

  10. My wife and I survived for ten years without health insurance, but when we finally were covered by Medicare she had many health problems. Had a couple of heart attaches and had a stint put in. The blood thinner caused her to bleed so much that she had to have a transfusion. Long story short she was able to end the anemia and hasn’t had a transfusion in over a year. The problem is, she has had so many they can’t match her antibodies anymore and the next one could kill her. They couldn’t guarantee the last one, but she did ok. Thank god for medicare and LBJ and all Democrats. She would be dead if not for them.

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