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MAGA Lie: Big Money Screws & Kills Americans
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Clearly, Republicans care about their superrich donors but not about us.
- Republicans spent $1.9 trillion on tax cuts for the superrich while refusing to spend a very tiny fraction of that for health care for 8.9 million disabled children, including those in the middle of cancer treatment.
- Just reversing Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the superrich could fund Social Security for an extra 10 years!
- Trump ran on raising taxes on the rich “so much my friends will hate me,” then once he got in power, cut taxes on the rich by $2 trillion.
For decades, Republicans have fought the American Dream, fighting against:
- paid sick leave, parent leave, and vacation leave for all
- increases in the minimum wage
- free college
- lower medicine prices
- money for childcare & elderly & disabled care
- consumer and worker safety protections
- unions
- regulations that protect health and the environment
- regulations stopping corporations from stealing wages
- rules making companies classify workers as employees instead of outside contractors and forcing them to provide benefits
- money for housing, schools & the internet
- money for manufacturing, infrastructure, replacing lead water pipes
- money for elderly care & veterans’ hospitals
Ever since 1980, every time they’ve had the chance, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
- In 1995, Republicans shut down the federal government and their main demand was large cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Republicans have told us their plans, again and again. They want cuts to:
- Social Security
- Medicare
- Medicaid (which increases employment & reduces death & disability for 50 years)
- the Centers for Disease Control
- childcare programs
- food stamps
- WIC (healthy foods for low-income moms, infants & kids)
- aid to the disabled
- the Children’s Health Insurance Program
- Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the blind, disabled & even children
The newest Republican budget proposal pushes the Social Security full retirement age up to 69 years old, forcing people to work longer.
Republicans also want to:
- lower taxes even more for rich people and corporations
- cut funding for K-12 education and eliminate 180,000 teacher positions
- eliminate the US Department of Education
- let many companies stop paying overtime
- make it more expensive to buy a home by increasing mortgage insurance on federal housing loans
- add new taxes on health care for workers covered through their employers
- ban free school lunches, even those providing nutrition in low-income schools
- block all student loan debt relief
- eliminate Head Start programs, severely restricting child care in rural areas
- cut affordable housing programs
- end all aid to poor families for heating and cooling their homes.
- eliminate the estate tax, which only affects people inheriting over $13 million in assets.
- cut monies to safeguard clean drinking water
- put a lifetime cap on Medicaid, threatening health care for 18.5 million Americans
- make government rules on toxic chemicals more “industry friendly” (dangerous)
- eliminate most climate research
- eliminate energy efficiency standards
Republicans Constantly Fight Health Care Benefits
Republicans just proposed several things guaranteed to make health care more expensive for regular Americans:
- turning Medicare into private vouchers
- turning both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) into state block grants
- repealing the Biden/Harris law that lets our government negotiate lower prices for prescription medicines
Turning Medicaid and CHIP into block grants would likely devastate these programs.
- Just read our free article on Big Money Politicians Like Trump & Clinton to see what happened to welfare when it became state block grants.
These Republican plans would cut federal spending on health care by $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years!
Republicans just proposed repealing the Biden/Harris price cut to $35 on insulin, to again force many people to pay $300 a month for insulin.
Republicans want to eliminate the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
- This would again allow health insurers to refuse to accept people with preexisting health conditions.
- This would force anybody with serious health issues to pay extremely high costs for insurance or to go without health insurance.
- It would also threaten the health insurance coverage for 40 million Americans.
- And it would end children staying on their parent’s health insurance until age 26—most would only have insurance until they turn 18 years old.
Determined Voters Had To Fight Republicans for Health Insurance
Determined people in 7 states voted for and won Medicaid expansion to give lower class voters more health care, against the opposition of their Republican legislatures or governors.
- The federal government pays over 90% of the cost of Medicaid expansion, over 95% for the first two years, plus another $1 billion in federal funds.
- When Missouri voters chose Medicaid expansion, the Republican legislature refused to fund it, basically telling their citizens “No thanks, we prefer to just let our people die!”
- Fortunately, a judge ruled the Republican legislature can’t refuse to fund what the citizens voted for, so the Missouri voters won.
90 Years of Democratic Kindness & Republican Meanness
Ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Democrats have agreed we need to take care of old, sick and poor people.
Republicans have wanted to cut all these programs, starting with Social Security.
- George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, which would sell it to huge corporations to profit off of it.
- Ronald Reagan tried to cut Medicare by $20 billion.
- Trump cut health care so much that in his first 3 years in office, there were 3 million more people without health insurance.
- When asked about Social Security and Medicare, Trump talked about “cutting” them and “theft and bad management,” “tremendous bad management,” and “tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do.”
- Trump would surely give Social Security and Medicare lethal cuts.
- The 2024 Republican budget proposal would force millions of Americans off health insurance and calls for cuts in both Social Security and Medicare.
The Economic & Deadly Consequences of Billionaire Puppet Politicians
Republicans (and many Democrats) always do whatever Big Money wants, constantly screwing and even killing average Americans.
- They are one of the main reasons we have worse health, worse maternal mortality, and far more child poverty than most other developed countries.
- Billionaire-puppet politicians have shrunk our middle class and expanded our percentage of working poor over the last 50 years.
- Republicans are trying to end and prevent regulations on clean air and water that save millions of lives and prevent millions of disabilities from toxic exposures.
- Republicans are trying to stop people from suing for cancers from chemicals like Roundup.
Research shows Republican policies in all the following areas kill more people than progressive policies in these areas do:
- the environment
- gun safety
- criminal justice
- health and welfare
- labor (minimum wages, paid leave, disability insurance, right-to-work laws)
- economic taxes (income taxes, earned income tax credits, taxes on tobacco)
The only area in which conservative policies save more lives is marijuana. Marijuana can help with chronic pain but can cause motor vehicle accidents and help trigger schizophrenia.
In fact, a study of deaths in all working-age adults (ages 25 to 64) from 1999 to 2019 found:
- If states followed liberal policies in all the above areas, more than 170,000 lives would have been saved in 2019 alone.
- If states followed fully conservative policies, over 217,600 extra people would have died.
- This suggests an estimated extra 387,600 people dying with all conservative policies versus all liberal policies each year.
- The very best result used liberal policies on everything except marijuana plus conservative policies on marijuana, which resulted in saving about 201,000 lives.
So liberal policies on increasing minimum wages, earned income tax credits, paid leave, health care, housing, pollution, and taxing tobacco saves lives.
Researchers also estimate that eliminating abortion nationwide would increase maternal mortality as much as 25 to 30%.
By eliminating rules on businesses and the environment, Trump increased deaths and diseases.
- With Trump in charge between 2016 and 2019, after years of steady decline, deaths from environmental and occupational factors increased by more than 22,000 each year.
Trump Promised To Fight For Workers But Shafted Them
Trump and Republicans made it easier for companies to:
- avoid paying overtime to low-wage workers
- steal worker’s wages and still get federal contracts
- hide workers’ injuries
- prevent workers from joining unions
- narrowed workers’ eligibility for unions
- classify workers as independent contractors and deny benefits and overtime
- steal as much as $640 billion in employee’s tips
Trump and Republicans also:
- changed overtime rules to eliminate overtime pay for 8 million workers
- weakened civil service protections and federal unions
- increased line speeds in poultry plants where workers already suffered high rates of repetitive-motion injuries
- froze pay for many agricultural guest workers
Trump wanted auto companies to screw their workers with pay cuts.
- Trump suggested auto companies should move out of Michigan to cheaper places, then move back later to force worker pay cuts, saying “because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.”
Trump fought as hard AGAINST better pay for workers, worker’s rights, and union rights as Biden/Harris fought for them.
- While Biden gave workers $1.5 billion more in overtime pay, Trump’s own driver had to sue Trump for years of unpaid overtime.
Trump’s Tariffs Hurt the Poor & Our Economy
- Experts estimate Trump’s previous tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines, Chinese goods, etc. cost over 300,000 jobs and $316 billion in higher prices.
- Trump has promised a 10% tariff on all products imported, plus a 60% or higher tariff on Chinese goods.
- Doing this would hurt the middle class and poor people the most.
Trump cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%. He recently told business leaders he wants to cut their taxes even more.
Trump wants to eliminate income taxes and make up for the loss of $2.5 trillion a year with tariffs!
- To do that, Trump would have to add 70% tariffs on all imports.
- Trump has also proposed lowering taxes on the rich and making up for it with a 10% tariff on all foreign goods.
- This 10% tariff would hurt regular Americans far more than the rich and hurt the poor the most.
Republicans Plan To Weaken Law Enforcement
Republicans, once the party of law and order, plan to weaken law enforcement!
The latest Republican budget proposes:
- cutting the Justice Department budget by nearly $1 billion
- cutting cutting federal funds for hiring thousands of police officers nationwide
- cutting all funding for community violence intervention programs
- cutting the FBI by 6%
- cutting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (responsible for battling gun violence and terrorism) by 7%
Republican’s Deadly Gun Policies
On average, Republican-run states have vastly higher gun violence death rates than Democrat-run states, due to poorly regulated Republican gun laws, often including right-to-carry laws.
After massacres, Republicans offer nothing but thoughts and prayers. But then they work to make things more dangerous!
Shocking research shows in the year after a massacre in a Republican state, their politicians are more likely to loosen gun laws than in other years without a local massacre!
Despite the skyrocketing massacres in recent years in the US, Republicans constantly keep expanding access to guns.
- In 2020, only 16 states let you carry a handgun without a permit.
- Now in 25 states, you don’t need a permit to carry a handgun.
- In various states, Republicans have recently pushed to limit gun-free zones, remove background checks, and roll back red flag laws that remove guns from dangerous people.
- Republicans want to expand concealed carry to all states.
Weakening concealed gun carry laws is dangerous.
- A 2022 study found right-to-carry gun laws are linked to a 13% decline in police solving violent crimes.
- Another 2022 study found states that passed concealed carry laws had a 129% increase in shootings involving officers.
- A 2019 study found police are less interested in investigating suspicious activities or fighting crime effectively when there are more concealed guns on the streets.
Leading law enforcement organizations against expanding concealed carry laws include:
- the Fraternal Order of Police
- the International Association of Chiefs of Police
- the Major Cities Chiefs Association
Republicans also want to eliminate federal and state laws to regulate silencers on guns.
The latest Republican budget proposes to:
- eliminate funding for red flag laws that take guns away from dangerous people
- destroy firearm records used by law enforcement to solve gun crimes
- cut billions of dollars from the Crime Victim’s Fund which helps survivors heal and break the cycle of violence
- eliminate Centers for Disease Control funding for gun violence research
Gun violence already costs our nation an estimated $557 billion and 50,000 lives each year. We REALLY don’t need Republican policies making our gun violence worse!