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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18901 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.

(I had seen those headlines and hadn't dug deeper. Here's what I found with a quick web search.)

I think you're talking about New York Times articles like "Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare". For concrete proposals, it links indirectly to https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/budget_fy22_final.pdf which includes details such as

  • Increasing the Medicare/Social Security age and enshrining future increases in law by tying them to life expectancy.

  • Privatizing Medicare/Social Security.

These (and a lot of other details I didn't read carefully nor am at all qualified to analyze) are framed as responsible ways to keep those programs running. And, of course, the minority party always proposes things when out of power that they never seriously try to enact when they think they might actually pass. But the House Republicans (well, the RSC which is apparently 156 out of 212 current House Republicans) really did publish a wishlist of what they want in a budget and it included those things.

The linked article "Entitlement, Spending Cap Plans Linked by GOP to Debt-Limit Deal" quotes Republican politicans talking about that plan in interviews for that article published October 11, 2022, and that the plan itself was published in June.

I actually did find that NYT article, but it's paywalled and thus memory-holed. The plan probably deserves it's own discussion thread, but at a glance, it looks like a ACA style "reform", which makes all the rhetoric fucking hilarious.

Increasing the retirement age/pension age is something they are also considering here in Ireland (it was supposed to happen last year, but public reaction was so bad they sat on it) so it's one of the tools governments are trying when struggling with the "pensions timebomb". I think privatising Medicare/Social Security would be a bad idea, as these are huge government programmes and there are enough layers of bureaucracy without having to deal with "which private entity took over my pension and have they gone bust or sold it on to someone?" with privatisation.

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