What Is Paul Ryan Planning To Do To Americans Next?

The Republicans seem to have gotten away with passing Paul Ryan's egregiously class warfare tax scam-- even if the newest polls show most American voters hate it. A Gallup poll released this week shows that a majority of independent voters (56%) oppose the tax bill, as do 87% of Democrats. Only 16% of Republicans disapprove of it. Overall just 29% of American voters approve, the same number the new Quinnipiac poll found. And here's a page from the CBS poll released yesterday:

Republican lawmakers, though, are excited about their victory and don't seem to be thinking about voters getting even with them in 2018. In fact, they have even worse in store before them-- Ryan's dream-- an attack on Medicare and Social Security. After Ryan threatened on Ross Kaminsky's talk radio show that "We're going the have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit" (have just blown both up with massive tax cuts for the rich), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) responded "It's pure greed not necessity why Speaker Ryan wants to dismantle Social Security and Medicare." Ryan's point was that Medicare and Medicaid, which he calls "entitlements" are "the big drivers of debt." He sees then as "really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking." Ryan calls Medicare and Social Security "a welfare system that's trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work. We've got to work on that."

Over in the Senate, Ryan's bizarrely white teethed buddy, Marco Rubio, said that "instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future” is the best way forward. Sam Stein:

Trump has repeatedly vowed that he has no plans or designs to touch Medicare or Social Security. He has been openly critical of past Republican efforts-- including those undertaken by Ryan-- to do so.

And for good reason. Republicans suffered massive midterm losses following George W. Bush’s failed attempt at Social Security privatization in 2005. Barack Obama reduced Medicare expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars as part of Obamacare, which Republicans effectively branded as a Medicare “cut” in the 2010 midterms.

One plugged-in GOP lobbyist told The Daily Beast that the expectation on K Street was that Trump would instead pursue a major infrastructure bill in 2018 in part because it would better position the party for the 2018 elections.

“I personally think they will pivot to infrastructure in desperate attempt to win support before midterms,” the lobbyists said.

Infrastructure reform carries its own set of complications, not least of which is that GOP leadership outside of Trump doesn’t seem particularly enamored with the idea. And while it may prove more popular a pursuit, other Republicans ascribe to the notion that when your party has a majority in both chambers of Congress, you use it.

"It seems consistent with long-held Republican concerns-- which ought to be bipartisan, but too rarely are-- that these life-saving programs that the American people rely on are not sustainable in their current form,” Michael Steel, a former top House GOP aide, said of Medicare and Social Security. “It's politically easy to ignore reality, which is why Washington Democrats and their fellow travelers tend to demagogue this issue shamelessly."

Ryan has not spoke of entitlement reform in political terms. Instead, he’s talked about the need to pursue it as a means of exhibiting fiscal conservatism. "We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit," Ryan said during a radio appearance. The Speaker has also stated that he has begun to convince the president of the necessity of going down this route.

Democrats have been blown away by what they see as political chutzpah. And they’ve warned repeatedly that the forthcoming tax cut bill, which will add an estimated $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over ten years time, is merely a predicate for gutting the social safety net in the upcoming year.

“I have not the slightest doubt as I have said before, that after the Republicans pass this huge tax giveaway to the wealthy and large corporations, they will be back on the floor of the Senate,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on the Senate floor last week. “And when they come back, they'll say, 'oh, my goodness, the deficit is too high. We have got to cut social security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and nutritional programs.'”

David Gill, the progressive Democrat vying with some Republican-lite establishment hack to take on Republican Rodney Davis in central Illinois told us that "Bernie Sanders is exactly right-- it has long been clear that the Republicans are intent on cutting Medicare and Social Security. Beyond the fact that this approach is incredibly heartless and mean-spirited, it also is based on a lie. These social programs are not 'entitlements'; rather, they are programs into which the recipients have made contributions over a long period of time. The attempt to dismantle these programs is yet another result of the fact that our politics and our government are now fully-owned subsidiaries of Corporate America. My Republican opponent, Rodney Davis, marches in lockstep with his party’s leadership, in spite of the fact that the bills that he supports will bring tremendous pain to the vast majority of the people in our district. When we should be working toward improving peoples’ lives with a single-payer healthcare system, a $15 per hour minimum wage, and tuition-free access to public universities, Mr. Davis is trying to move us in precisely the wrong direction. I lost by 0.3% of the vote when I last ran in 2012; Mr. Davis was saved in that election by the presence of a liberal independent. Next year we will have just two candidates in the general election, and I have no doubt that my passionate progressive politics can win here in IL-13."

Austin Frerick has a similar perspective down in Iowa's 3rd district. "It's immoral that Speaker Ryan and David Young are now thinking about cutting Social Security to pay for the trillion dollar tax cut they gave to corporations. At a time when over half of all older workers have no retirement savings, we need to instead be talking about strengthening and expanding Social Security. Workers earned this safety net. These corporations just bought a giveaway.  This says everything about which side they're on and I'll give you a hint, it ain't ours."