Republicans (and many Democrats) always do whatever Big Money wants, constantly screwing and even killing average Americans.

• Every time anyone talks about even the tiniest increase in rich people’s taxes, billionaire donors like Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X) and Rupert Murdoch (Fox News) donate millions more dollars to Republicans.
• Billionaire-puppet politicians have shrunk our middle class and expanded our percentage of working poor over the last 50 years.
• They are one of the main reasons we have worse health, worse maternal mortality, and far more child poverty than most other developed countries.
• One study found if our social policies were as generous as those in the 4 major Scandinavian countries, US life expectancy would increase by 5.56 years!

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!

Ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Democrats have agreed we need to take care of old, sick and poor people and Republicans have wanted to cut all these programs, starting with Social Security.

• Barry Goldwater wanted to weaken Social Security by making it voluntary.
• 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.

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:

• 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

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 internt
• 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
• Head Start early learning 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

Republicans also want to:

• lower taxes even more for rich people and corporations
• raise the age of retirement, forcing people to work longer
• ban free school lunches
• block all student loan debt relief
• 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.

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.

Since 2017, the determined citizens of 7 red states have voted for and won Medicaid expansion to give lower class workers more health care, against the opposition of their Republican legislatures or governors.

• The federal government pays over 90% of the cost, 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.

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.
• Republicans want to eliminate federal and state laws to regulate silencers on guns.