President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Sorry, no.

 

define the top 5entitlement programs and their fiscal relationship to the budget. Not social security it’s got its own tax. .

 

How's it different? People pay payroll taxes, government buys securities with them to generate (modest) extra income, government pays benefits out of the revenues. It's worked for over 80 years for Social Security and over 50 for Medicare. The critics have no practical objection, just ideology.

 

I don't object to the rejiggering of these programs at all.

In fact, they should be vigorously rejiggered. As should Pentagon procurement. That $135 billion of cost overruns and waste we were talking about earlier would pay for CHIP for a decade.

I object to the phrase "entitlement program," when it's used interchangeably (and wrongly) with "welfare."

 

Who did that?

 

Noted Trumpist Ben Shapiro:

 

More from the Daily 202 - WaPo.

"-- Steve Bannon spoke to former Trump campaign aide Carter Page about Russia when he was under FBI surveillance in January 2017 – raising the “strong possibility” that agents may have intercepted the conversation. Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports: “Page told Congress in November about the call. But it has been cast into a new light by last week’s release of a Republican memo revealing that the FBI was monitoring Page’s communications at the time. ‘If Page was using one of his standard phones, it was probably picked up,' said Elizabeth Goitein, a former Justice Department trial attorney … The significance of a possible FBI recording depends on the exact content of the conversation between Bannon and Page, about which Page has been vague. But it means the FBI's surveillance of Page … may have touched one of the highest-ranking figures in Trump's incoming administration just days before inauguration."

I don't know if y'all had heard about this - it broke yesterday.

"-- GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee are planning to construct a physical wall to separate Republican and Democratic staffers in the committee’s secure spaces. CBS News’s Olivia Victoria Gazis reports: “For now, some Republican committee members deny knowing anything about it, while strongly suggesting the division is the brainchild of the committee's chairman, Devin Nunes [R-Calif.]. ‘I'm not part of that decision,’ said Rep. Mike Conaway [R-Tex.] ‘You've got to talk to Devin. I don't know what they're trying to do one way or the other.’ ‘I swear to God I didn't know that,’ said Rep. Tom Rooney [R-Fla.], when asked about the plan. While acknowledging a wall might not be constructive for the committee's work, he said, ‘The level of trust and the level of everything down there is – it's poison. It's absolute poison down there.’"

 

I can't know what's in anyone's heart or head when they use the phrase.

Well, I know what this guy means when he uses it:

"We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit”

Ryan says Republicans to target welfare, Medicare, Medicaid spending in 2018

 

I thought of welfare in the sense that I don’t want my children, especially my special-needs son, to feel the brunt of the government’s irresponsibility when the rent finally comes due.

 

My saying that Social Security and Medicare are, and always have been, pay-as-you-go systems has nothing to do with objections, ideology, anything. I am simply stating a fact. Indeed, labeling them "insurance" programs was an act of political/ideological slight-of-hand.

If Social Security and Medicare weren't pay-as-you-go systems and were true insurance, then people would have legal property claims on benefits. They don't. Ryan et al. could literally stop the checks tomorrow if they wanted to face the political backlash.