So-called fiscal hawk Republican Jodey Arrington (TX-19) won't run in 2026, says Trump is committed to reversing the curse of public debt but doesn't know where the president is lol

 

Let me tell you where you are, Jodey. 

Four months after you passed the Big Ugly Bill under reconciliation rules, rules which Mike Crapo in the Senate turned on their head, you are a whisker away from another $2 trillion in debt added to the public debt since July 4th.

Jodey's just puttin' lipstick on the pig and saying, See ya! 

 

... Arrington said he had faith Republicans in Washington would pick up his mantle of fiscal hawkishness, or as he's often called it, "reversing the curse" of public debt.

"The president's committed to it, he talks about it all the time. He's actually doing something about it with very difficult decisions, not politically popular decisions. This is all about political will," Arrington said. "Trump's doing it. Mike Johnson is committed to it… And we have a growing number of fiscal hawks who are absolutely dogged on this issue."

But he said he would continue to push for further fiscal reforms for his remaining year on Capitol Hill, including another budget reconciliation bill to follow up on the big, beautiful bill.

"I don't know where the Senate Republicans are. I don't know where the president is and can't speak for the White House. But the House is at the ready," Arrington said. "It's been our most consequential tool to support the president and the strength of the country, and I don't see any reason we wouldn't utilize it to its fullest extent."

More. 

The Detroit News: Harvest of hand-picked crops in Michigan in immediate peril due to Trump deportation program, prices set to rocket higher

 Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis

The immigration crisis at the southern border has been replaced by one in America's orchards and farm fields.

With harvest season about to begin in earnest, farmers are desperate for laborers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Already in the Pacific Northwest, much of the cherry crop was left to rot because of the shortage of agricultural workers.

The crisis will soon roll into Michigan, where apples, cherries, blueberries, asparagus and other crops are rapidly ripening. Hand-picked specialty crops are a $6.3 billion industry in Michigan, supporting 41,000 jobs.

The shortage of farm workers has been building for years, due to an aging agricultural workforce, competition from more lucrative and less grueling jobs and restrictions on immigrant labor.

This year, it is exacerbated by the Trump administration's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and the deportation of those who have entered the country illegally.

Estimates are that 42% of farm workers are undocumented migrants. Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms employing migrants have frightened away many of those workers from the fields where they had been working.

But the work they do hasn't gone away. Fruit and vegetables still need to be harvested. If they're not, it will lead to food waste, shortages and higher prices on the grocery shelves.

When asked about the worker shortage, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the solution lies in greater mechanization of farms and matching the 34 million able bodied Americans who must find jobs or lose their Medicaid benefits with farmers who need workers.

While Rollins is correct that those who can work should be expected to, it's doubtful even the risk of losing health care benefits will coax the jobless into hot, backbreaking farm work.

Her solutions will take time and large capital investments. They won't save this year's harvest.

The Trump administration must take emergency action to assure there are enough workers to bring in the crops this summer and fall.

Rather than deporting migrants willing to fill essential jobs such as harvesting, the administration should grant them seasonal visas and a no-deportation guarantee as long as they are working on farms.

Beyond that, reform is needed for the H-2A visa program that allows farmers to legally employ temporary workers from another country. The application process is too complex and time-consuming. It must be simplified; farmers need help now.

Also at issue is the federal mandatory minimum wage for H-2A visa holders, now set at $18.50 an hour. That's nearly $8 an hour higher than the state minimum wage in Michigan. When added to housing and other costs for these workers, many farmers have to limit their use of the visas.

Longer term, resources should be devoted to recruiting domestic workers for the agriculture industry. Farmers are also being encouraged to raise wages for native-born workers, add benefits and improve working conditions.

All of that is expensive and will inevitably show up in grocery prices. But so will the shortages caused by allowing crops to rot in fields.

The most sensible option for this season is to back off deportation of farm workers while solutions are pursued for either replacing them or giving them legal status.

Unaffordable Care Act to become more unaffordable for millions in 2026 due to Trump's reconciliation bill, just in time for the election

 

 Why 22 million people may see ‘sharp’ increase in health insurance premiums in 2026

... More than 22 million people — about 92% of ACA enrollees — received a federal subsidy this year that reduced their insurance premiums, according to KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

Those recipients would see “sharp premium increase” on Jan. 1, Cynthia Cox, the group’s ACA program director, said during a webinar on Wednesday.

The average marketplace enrollee saved $705 in 2024 — a 44% reduction in premium costs — because of the enhanced tax credits, according to a November analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Without the credits, average out-of-pocket premiums in 2026 would rise by more than 75%, Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy, said during the webinar.

Additionally, 4.2 million Americans would become uninsured over the next decade if the enhanced subsidies lapse, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That growth in the ranks of the uninsured is on top of the nearly 12 million people expected to lose health coverage from over $1 trillion in spending cuts Republicans made to health programs like Medicaid and the ACA to help offset the legislation’s cost. ... 

ACA enrollment has more than doubled, to roughly 24 million people in 2025 from about 11 million in 2020, according to data tracked by The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. ...  

According to Google's AI, there are 22.8 million fewer uninsured 2010-2024, presumably because of Obamacare, but 26.7 million more on . . . Medicaid!

Because of that Rube Goldberg Machine known as Obamacare!

Push here, and it comes out there. And the kicker is Medicaid involves estate recovery for nursing home and other care costs at death, which varies by state.

You can run, but you cannot hide. 

 

 

Deane Waldman argues Medicaid cuts of 20 million new Biden enrollees who don't belong there would save lives by shortening wait times for care which have swelled to 132 days

 Medicaid cuts could save thousands of lives  

... Reduced enrollment and cuts to nonclinical spending could shorten wait times, make care more accessible, and reduce death-by-queue. No one in the media has reported this potential benefit from cuts to Medicaid. ... 

Senate reconciliation bill gives chipmakers like TSMC more tax credits while cutting Medicaid

 

Chipmakers get larger tax credits in Trump’s latest ‘big beautiful bill’ 

 

... Under the bill, passed by the Senate Tuesday, tax credits for those semiconductor firms would rise to 35% from 25%. That’s more than the 30% increase that had made it into a draft version of the bill. ... 

The new provisions expand on tax incentives under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided grants of $39 billion and loans of $75 billion for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing projects. ...

 

Medicaid cuts in Trump’s megabill will leave millions uninsured, threaten rural hospitals

... Recent changes to the bill would cut roughly $1.1 trillion in health-care spending over the next decade, according to new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 

More than $1 trillion of those cuts would come from Medicaid, a joint federal and state health insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans, according to the CBO. The funding cuts go beyond insurance coverage: The loss of that funding could gut many rural hospitals that disproportionately rely on federal spending.

The CBO estimates that the current version of the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing health insurance by 2034, with the majority of those people losing Medicaid coverage. ...

Approximately 72 million Americans are currently enrolled in Medicaid, about one-fifth of the total U.S. population, according to government data. Medicaid is the primary payer for the majority of nursing home residents, and pays for around 40% of all births. ...

Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin folds like a house of cards, switches his Nay vote to Yea to advance reconciliation bill to the Senate floor for debate

 Trump megabill narrowly advances in Senate despite two GOP defections

Senate Republicans on Saturday narrowly voted to advance a sprawling 1,000-page bill to enact President Trump’s agenda, despite the opposition of two GOP lawmakers.

The vote was 51-49.

Two Republicans voted against advancing the package: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes a provision to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who says the legislation would cost his state $38.9 trillion in federal Medicaid funding.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) changed his “no” vote to “aye,” and holdout Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) also voted yes to advance the bill. 

The bill had suffered several significant setbacks in the days and hours before coming to the floor, at times appearing to be on shaky ground.

The vote itself was also full of drama. ...

Flashback to May 25 when Johnson said he had enough votes in the Senate to stop the bill:

GOP senator says resistance to Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' could stop it in the Senate

President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the "One Big, Beautiful Bill" passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator said there's enough resistance to halt the bill unless there are significant changes.

"The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, urging deeper spending cuts than those in the bill to reset to a "reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending."

"I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit," Johnson said. ...                                                

Didn't even have him!

 

Blowhard Tommy Tuberville isn't running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, so he'll say anything now

 

GOP senator calls for Senate parliamentarian to be fired after ruling against Medicaid cuts

The Republican claim that the Big Beautiful Bill's cuts to Medicaid coverage will be offset by enrollments in employer-provided health insurance is a bad joke

The enrollment rate in employer provided health insurance is down four points 2008-2021, from 54% to 48%.

Why?

Costs.

The average premium for a health insurance plan from an employer was 36% higher in 2021 than the inflation adjusted premium from 2008 should have been. The 2008 premium of $4,386 should have been $5,446 in 2021. Instead it was $7,380.

People can't afford this insurance.

Meanwhile their out of pocket cost for it increased 86% over the period, while their deductibles shot up 131%.

Government mandated health insurance, Obamacare, has been a disaster for workers who have voted with their feet against it because they can't afford it and benefit little from it, swelling Medicaid enrollments in desperation.

Republicans promised to fix this in 2017 and failed.

Now they're saying, Let Them Eat Cake.

 

 

 

 

So-called fiscal hawks of the House GOP totally cave and narrowly pass Trump's omnibus tax and spending bill 215-214: Massie of Kentucky and Davidson of Ohio were the sole Nay votes

 The House Freedom Caucus is a joke, along with the rest of them: At least $20 trillion in new debt over ten years, increases the SALT cap for itemized deductions important in high tax Blue states, Green New Deal spending still in there, ratifies federal support for Medicaid's backdoor vehicle as insurance under Obamacare, etc.

The Chair of the House Freedom Caucus:

 

 

 

 

 

Ha ha ha, the budget framework House Republicans were so proud of passing in late February will have to be completely reworked in the Republican Senate, reconciliation bill won't move until the end of July

... “Thune and others have said they don’t think it’s realistic we’ll move the finished product until the end of July,” a Republican senator said of Thune’s projected timeline for moving Trump’s agenda.

“Thune said he thought that the House’s timeline on this was totally unrealistic and that the House doesn’t have their ducks in a row, and their budget resolution has to be completely reworked, and this idea that we do it by April or May is just ridiculous,” the source said. ...

Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last month that the House-passed budget needed “a major overhaul” before it could pass the Senate. ...

 

More. 

The major areas of disagreement include switching to the so-called current policy baseline to get the cost of the package to zero, a complete fantasy; choosing which tax cuts, most of which are ad hoc and targeted and not broad-based, to include in the package; cutting future deficits by $880 billion as the House says it wants without cutting Medicaid funding; and goosing defense spending by $175 billion.

 

Just minor details like that.

 

 

You'd think a 71-year old guy like RFK Jr would know something about Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D, but you would be wrong

He is not qualified, on top of being a lunatic.

 RFK Jr. stumbles over basics of Medicare, Medicaid during Senate confirmation hearings

When asked what Medicare Part A is for, Kennedy said it is “mainly for primary care or physicians.” Hassan clarified that it is coverage for seniors who receive inpatient care at hospitals. 

Kennedy, when asked what Medicare Part B is, said it is “for physicians and doctors.” Part B is coverage for a range of medical services such as doctor visits, outpatient care, home health, certain medical supplies and preventive services.

When asked what Medicare Part C is for, Kennedy called it “the full menu of all the services – A, B, C and D.” Hassan noted that Part C is also known as Medicare Advantage, which are privately run plans contracted by Medicare. Those plans serve as an alternative to traditional Medicare plans. 

Kennedy insisted that he “just explained the basics” of the program, but Hassan said she had to correct him on several things.

 

The orchestrated lawfare against Donald Trump is designed to make you forget Biden's five tyrannical anti-democratic COVID-19 vaccination orders

Not to mention to make you forget all Biden's other failures, starting with the fall of Kabul in August 2021.

This is the same political strategy used by Hillary and the Democrats after Trump's election, with their phony baloney plastic banana Trump-Russia hoax to hamstring Trump's tenure in office.

 

The five mandates were discussed here in April 2022:

Federal contractor mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Federal employee mandate September 9, 2021 on all employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

OSHA mandate November 4, 2021 on all employers of 100 or more COUNTRYWIDE to be vaccinated or tested weekly

Medicare/Medicaid provider mandate November 4, 2021 on all provider employees with no opt-out for testing or masking

Head Start mandate November 30, 2021 requiring vaccination of 300,000 employees at child care facilities AND masking of the children.

And let's not forget the vaccination mandates shoved down the throats of the US military and National Guard in August and November 2021. More than 8,000 service members who refused the jabs were forced out.

This is the real Joe Biden.

As much as I sympathize with this guy's tale of Obamacare woe, his timeline is pure fantasy

 The story is here:

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ...  the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

The guy had a great plan before Obama!

But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.

Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.

The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.

The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.

The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.

It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.

It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.

That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.

If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.

The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.

Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.

Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.

Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

 

 

Compromise spending bill passes US House 286-134 bringing fiscal year 2024 federal discretionary spending to $1.659 trillion through September

 WASHINGTON — The House voted 286-134 on Friday to pass a sweeping $1.2 trillion government funding bill, sending it to the Senate just hours before the deadline to prevent a shutdown. ...

The bill, released early Thursday, funds the departments of Homeland Security, State, Labor, Defense, Health and Human Services and various other agencies. Together with the $459 billion bill passed earlier this month, it fully funds the federal government to the tune of $1.659 trillion through September, after months of stopgap bills and negotiations.

More here.

The Roll Call Vote is here, if you want to check how your representative voted. 

The argument is perennially NOT about deficit spending, but deficit spending on WHAT. 

The projected tax shortfall for all programs for fiscal 2024 is $1.582 trillion, more than half of which will be net interest expense of $0.870 trillion on the exploding national debt. Interest payments on what we have already borrowed now exceed defense outlays of $0.822 trillion.

CBO in early February estimated fiscal 2024 discretionary spending at $1.739 trillion, so today's bill "saves" a mere $80 billion off that.

Mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. is estimated at $3.908 trillion for fiscal 2024.

It's obvious that spending should be cut and taxes raised, but no one has the courage for either.

They should just agree to do both and let the chips fall where they may. Everyone out here will be pissed, vote accordingly, and it would be a wash politically.

Current national debt is $34.5612 trillion and rising.

83 million still on Medicaid

 Down from 94 million but up from 65 million before the pandemic.

Story.

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Meanwhile The Grauniad can't decide whether record STDs constitute a crisis which is serious or waning

While neglected, the STI crisis presents a serious public health problem. ...

But Harvey warns that a coordinated effort by national health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is needed to combat the waning STI crisis.

Here.

You can always count on THE GRAUNIAD to be clear as mud.

Spending in 2020 on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to hit $2.19 trillion

[S]pending on the “big three”—Social Security ($1.1 trillion), Medicare ($679 billion) and Medicaid ($418 billon)—will be approximately $2.19 trillion in 2020, nearly three times more than defense spending ($738 billion).

Story.

Atlantic article totally soft-peddles how Obamacare's architects made millions vulnerable to estate recovery under Medicaid

The only reason Obamacare can be called successful reasonably is that it threw millions onto Medicaid, except that what is spent on you in life for your healthcare under Medicaid ends up coming out of what's left of what you owned after you die, if anything, including from the sale of your house, and even from the sale of granny's hand-me-down quilts.

America's first black president, Bill Clinton, signed estate recovery into law, and the second one then sold that bill of goods to millions of America's uninsured poor. He just bought himself a $15 million mansion to celebrate. 

Medicaid’s Dark Secret:

For many participants, the program that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans isn’t free. It’s a loan. And the government expects to be repaid. ...

One lawyer in Tennessee recalled a case in which a woman went to her late mother’s Medicaid auction to buy back quilts that had been passed down for generations. ...

One of the few times estate recovery has made headlines was earlier this decade, during the rollout of the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion. As more Americans considered Medicaid as a health-insurance option, more came across the fine print. At least three states passed legislation to scale back their recovery policies after public outcry.

Obama stole neo-liberal healthcare mandate from Hillary, who stole it from "conservative" Heritage Foundation

There is no difference between forcing you to buy health insurance and taking your money to pay for Medicaid and Medicare.

Everyone is for tyranny.