With Shutdown, Democrats Finally Take a Clear and Critical Stand

obamacare subsidies — They were lying then. They’re lying now. (© FlaglerLive)

Two figures explain the government shutdown: $4.5 trillion, and $350 billion. Illegal immigrants figure in here, but not as you’ve been misled to believe.

The $4.5 trillion figure is the cost of extending and adding to the Trump tax cuts over the next 10 years. Government revenue will be decreased by that amount. The measure known as the Big Beautiful Bill includes spending cuts and will nominally increase economic activity. But according to non-partisan analyses, the bill will add more than $4 trillion to the deficit, and therefore to the national debt.

Higher borrowing costs are part of the problem. By the end of the year we will have spent well over $1 trillion just to pay the interest on the debt. That’s more than we spend on Medicare, more than we spend on war (department of, that is), almost twice more than we spend on insuring the poor.

Donald Trump is not the only culprit. Barack Obama in 2012 cost the deficit $4 trillion when he pushed for the Bush tax cuts to be made permanent. But Obama also got us the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Since 2014, some 49.4 million Americans have been covered by Obamacare at one point or another, or 14 percent of the population, including 6.7 million Floridians, where health insurance and wages suck (the state refuses to sign on to more generous Medicaid help for the poor). This year, 45 million people are enrolled, a record, when the Medicaid expansion is included.

Trump’s bill throws 20 million people off Obamacare over the life of the bill. It let supplemental premium subsidies enacted during the Biden administration expire. It would more than double premium costs for Obamacare recipients. I’m on Obamacare. Doubling the cost of my shitty HMO to $17,000 a year doesn’t look like insurance to me.

To prevent that doubling, the cost of extending the subsidies over the next 10 years is $350 billion, or 8 percent of the Trump tax cuts. Unlike tax cuts, subsidies are recycled into the economy in the form of premium payments to private insurance companies, thus benefiting insurers’ bottom line and, by extension, economic growth. Enabling workers to keep their job when they get sick rather than go bankrupt from health costs further adds to the nation’s bottom line.

Tax cuts in comparison just blow holes in the budget, add to the debt and make it more expensive for you to finance your car loan, your mortgage or your student loans.

This is what Republicans stand for: a tax bill that extends tax cuts overwhelmingly slanted to the rich, and against measly subsidies that would allow 20 million people to keep working with some peace of mind, and not so incidentally fatten the wallets of those rich, since most of those on Obamacare are wage-earners in service to shareholder value.

This is what the Democrats have been willing to shut the government over.

So the president got one thing right: the Democrats caused the shutdown. Thank heavens they did. It’s the best thing they’ve done since failing to convince Joe Biden not to run until it was too late. They have finally recovered their voice and purpose on two essential principles: screwing millions of people’s healthcare so the president can cut taxes for the rich is unacceptable. So is ignoring 48 percent of Senators, who actually represent well over 50 percent of the population.

About these Republican lies: No, the Democrats are not looking to give free health care to undocumented immigrants. It’s not happening now. Federal law prohibits it from happening. Nothing in the Democratic proposal suggests changing that. But Mike Johnson, the president and their piously Christian crusaders have been pushing the flagrant lie day after day, because they have nothing else. Because they know that at heart the shutdown is their fault.

They also know that the Big Beautiful Bill benefits far more undocumented immigrants than do Obamacare subsidies. You think those servers at your favorite restaurants are all legal? The tax cut on tips alone will benefit them. More power to them: they deserve every penny, because the undocumented are also subsidizing your and my Social Security trust fund: $26.2 billion in 2023. They will not see a penny of their contributions. We are literally robbing “illegals” to pay ourselves.

And still the Republicans lie.

Trump’s proposal is no proposal: pass the continuing resolution as is and move on. It’s his usual style. No negotiations. It’s the sort of approach that thinks nothing of handing over $600 million to Florida to run just one concentration camp for migrants–the inhumanly named “alligator alcatraz”–while reducing Florida’s healthcare subsidies by a few billion dollars. We are tied with Nevada with the highest proportion of uninsured people in the country (10.7 percent).

The Democrats’ purpose–amazingly for Democrats, for once–is more precise: permanently extend the Obamacare subsidies and reverse deep cuts to Medicaid. (Those Biden subsidies have helped double Obamacare enrollment, to 25 million, with most of those gains in bad-insurance states like Florida, Texas and Georgia.) Trump has been looking to kill Obamacare since 2016, an animus that has its origin in Obama roasting the humorless Trump in 2011. The courts have repeatedly stopped the full demolition, allowing the program to be bled by a thousand cuts instead. It endures.

Trump is looking for a kill shot he can celebrate, as you know he would the killing of anything and anyone he doesn’t like. As I noted in a previous commentary, he doesn’t mind it when hundreds of thousands die from poor or unavailable care.

The spending bill passed the House last month. It needs 60 votes to pass the Senate. All 52 Republican votes are relatively secure (though several Republicans favor extending the subsidies as well). Eight Democrats need to join. As of this writing, three have. If Democrats fold on this one, they’re the ones who deserve incarceration at Alligator Alcatraz.