Yes, I said that both parties are just like ammosexuals. Let me explain. I was reading an article that talked about how republicans’ answer to everything is tax cuts, while democrats’ answer to every problem is taxpayer funded subsidies. That is a completely accurate assessment. Since the article I was reading was in a mainstream newspaper, it didn’t go into the obvious: both approaches are monumentally stupid and ineffective.
I don’t think I need to go into why tax cuts are useless. Most people who aren’t in the top 5% have figured that out by now. I will say that there’s one aspect of the tax cut fever we’ve been infected with for forty-five years now that a lot of people haven’t figured out: when taxes go down, fees and fines go up because that money still needs to be collected. Licenses (driver’s, marriage, fishing, etc) cost exponentially more to obtain than they used to. Parking tickets and moving violations cost waaaaaay more than they used to. Parking meters cost more than they used to. As we discovered when the stray doge found its way into our government, there isn’t actually that much “waste” that needs to be dealt with. Most of it is in the one place they didn’t look: the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit and still gets more and more money every single year. There’s a reason why no legislator or president hasn’t been screaming about the Pentagon’s inability to account for the money they’ve gotten: they’re running expensive covert operations all over the world that the American people know nothing about. That’s the only possible explanation for why we haven’t heard a peep of outrage from our representatives and yet, we constantly hear some of them crow about the “fraud” and “abuse” in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA which amount to less than 3% of their operating budgets.
Taxpayer funded subsidies are also a bullshit “solution” to problems that ultimately makes them bigger, although that approach does temporarily act as an opiate for the masses. Here’s the deal: when you funnel taxpayer dollars to a for-profit business, that business just keeps raising the price. We should never have replaced tuition-free universities with tuition grants of any kind (including GI grants). What we got for a significant chunk of that cash is people (a lot of them veterans) getting suckered into shitty for-profit colleges like Full Sail “University” and getting useless degrees that will in no way help them to build successful careers. What we also got was skyrocketing tuition rates all across the country because universities had this reliable pile of taxpayer cash to count on. And then there’s the ACA. I called it a steaming pile of shit while it was being voted on because I understood that this new revenue stream that insurance companies were delighted to get their hands on was never going to do a fucking thing to actually lower the cost of insurance, especially since said steaming pile of shit legislation came with a four year extension on pharmaceutical patents. How in the actual fuck are rates supposed to go down when insurance companies were now going to be paying for brand name drugs for 50% longer than they were before? Suddenly, these health insurance CEO’s who had a dying (literally) business model were able to see themselves as titans of industry for creating this massive, brand new, totally reliable revenue stream that guarantees them a 20% profit margin. I’m sorry, I meant to say, “administrative cost”. Medicare runs on with 4% administrative cost, Medicaid runs slightly under that, and the VA runs closer to 2%. According to the KFF, healthcare expenditures in the US went from $3,002.11B in 2014 to $4,866.49B in 2023. If you look at the previous nine years, you’ll see that expenditures went from $1,894.68B in 2004 to $2,855.93B. Those numbers haven’t been adjusted for inflation so the ACA did jack shit to bring down costs. Instead, insurance became so fucking unaffordable that Biden had to increase the income level at which a family (or single person) could qualify for subsidies. The original bill provided subsidies for households whose incomes were between 100% – 400% of the poverty line. For an individual, 400% was an income of about $43,000 a year and for a family of four, it was an income of $88,000 a year. As part of the American Rescue Plan Act, Biden increased the subsidies so that a family of three making $103,000 a year would qualify. That expansion is what the shutdown was about. That “15 million Americans” number that you keep hearing are the people were never able to afford insurance, even through the exchanges until the subsidies were expanded. It did not include the original cohort of people who received subsidies. They were never at risk of losing their subsidies.
This piece shit of a plan is only eleven years old and we’ve already had to expand the number of people who need taxpayer funded subsidies in order to be able to afford insurance. Where do you think we’re going to be in three years when this latest extension expires? Do you think that premiums are going to go down, or will they go up? Will wages go up, or will they stay flat or go down as AI becomes more prevalent?
Taxpayer subsidies do fuck all to fix any problem and since we’ve already established that there’s very little waste in government run programs, where do you think that all of those subsidies are coming from? It’s not from taxing the rich or the corporations at the levels they should be taxed at. It’s primarily coming from the Social Security trust fund, Japan and China (in that order).
So why the fuck are tax cuts or taxpayer subsidies the only solutions that democrats and republicans ever have? That’s easy. It’s because they’re like ammosexuals, trying to come up with a solution to school shootings. You see, they start from a place where limiting or regulating guns in any way is a nonstarter so their solutions are very limited and therefore usually don’t start until after the shooting does. Similarly, both parties have taken the idea of costing a single corporation (or billionaire…. and now trillionaire) a single nickel off the table.
So now here we are. And here is where we will be stuck as long as we keep falling for the same bullshit and voting for the same bullshit politicians who keep telling us that this bullshit is the best we can do.
It’s not, and it’s about time that we all realized that in big enough numbers to change things. It’s primary season. THIS is your chance to put the breaks on this cycle of lunacy.
