by Ronald Altman
Congress went home for another two-week vacation after the House passed a budget on a 228-199 party-line vote. If enacted, the House budget would gut the past 80 years of social legislation. The Senate passed the same budget with a 52-46 mostly party-line vote (Senators Cruz and Paul didn’t think it went far enough).
This reactionary budget did not receive a “yes” vote from a single Democrat in either house of Congress. Both Illinois Senator Mark Kirk and 10th District Congressman Bob Dold voted “yes.”
Since the 2010 midterm election results returned the Republicans to power and made John Boehner Speaker, deficit hawks led by Representative Paul Ryan have longed to take a hatchet to Democratic priorities. Until this year, Senator Harry Reid and a Democratic majority in the Senate had stood in the way of their plans. In fact, Congress has been so dysfunctional during the Obama administration that no budget bill has passed both houses since 2008.
But now the Republicans have their majority in both houses of Congress. Although the final Authorization and Appropriation Acts that will outline the severity of the damage remain to be passed, we can be sure that if this budget were enacted ours would become a radically different country.
Here are just some of the Republican budget priorities:
• Conversion of Medicare from an Entitlement to a Refundable Tax Credit. Since passage in 1964, the Medicare Act has provided health insurance to Americans 65 years of age and older. This would change under the Budget Act of 2015. Those under age 56 in 2015 would not ever receive traditional Medicare benefits. Instead, they would receive a fixed refundable tax credit that they could use toward paying for health insurance purchased on the open market.
Dold and Kirk’s votes for this budget were votes to destroy Medicare.
• Conversion of Medicaid to a Block Grant. Medicaid is a federal-state cooperative program with federal oversight and controls that pays for healthcare for needy aged, blind, and disabled people, as well as pregnant women and children. The 2015 budget bill would convert Medicaid to a federal block grant. A block grant is basically a fixed sum of money that the federal treasury doles out, with little or no oversight. The grantee state then uses the funds to pay for a portion of the costs of a series of programs, at the state’s discretion. Any remaining costs are the responsibility of the state, if it wishes to fund them.
Dold and Kirk’s votes for this budget were votes to deny healthcare to the poor, especially pregnant women and children.
• Repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The budget bill fulfills the Republican dream of repealing Obamacare. It does not include any alternative for the more than 16 million Americans who have obtained health insurance through the Marketplace since 2014; it only instructs committees to find an alternative.
Without the Affordable Care Act, the more than 16 million enrollees would be thrown into the private health insurance marketplace without any of the current protections of Obamacare, or the subsidies that have made healthcare affordable to families earning less than four times poverty.
This would mark a return to the bad old days when Americans with any preexisting healthcare problem could not afford insurance, policies were subject to annual and lifetime payment limits, and policies often didn’t cover the full range of healthcare services.
Dold and Kirk’s votes for this budget were votes to deny more than 16 million Americans access to affordable healthcare.
• Increased Defense Spending and Cuts to Social Spending. Over the past two years, the budget sequester that ended the 2013 government shutdown has reduced domestic and military spending equally and reduced the budget deficit from $1.33 trillion to $486 billion. The Republicans’ 2015 Budget Act raises defense spending to levels not seen since 2009. It then provides that spending for wars will be considered “emergency” off-budget spending, uncontrolled by the limitations of the sequester. At the same time, it cuts $2 trillion over the next 10 years from programs such as CHIP (children’s health insurance), food stamps, welfare, public transportation, and agricultural support
Dold and Kirk’s votes for this budget were votes to give priority to funding foreign wars over taking care of domestic needs.
• Reduction of Tax Revenue. The 2015 Budget Act eliminates taxation of capital gains and dividends and lowers the maximum individual income tax rate to 35 percent. It also lowers the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and applies that lower rate to both normal C-corporations and so-called pass-through S-corporations. This means that self-employed individuals could lower their tax rate by 10 percent simply by forming a personal service or limited liability corporation.
Dold and Kirk’s votes for this budget were votes to reduce the taxes of the wealthiest Americans while offering no relief to wage earners.
A party’s budget proposals reflect the party’s priorities, and the Republicans’ 2015 Budget Act is no exception. None of these priorities should be surprising; they all have been features of the Ryan budget for more than five years now. What’s changed is that Ryan’s party now controls Congress.
Equally, the votes cast by congressmen and senators reflect the officeholders’ priorities. By their support for this regressive, reactionary budget, Bob Dold and Mark Kirk have demonstrated that their priorities are not the priorities of voters in the 10th Congressional District, nor, we hope, of a majority of Illinois voters.
Both stand for reelection in 2016. They must be defeated.