Medicare

"On the tax front," says Mitt Romney, "it’s time for rich people like me to pay more."It’s always slightly annoying for regular Americans when squillionaires announce that people like them ought to be contributing more to the Treasury. (Nobody’s stopping you from writing a big cheque, Mitt!)But Romney’s intervention in today’s New York Times is noteworthy. It is the clearest sign yet that the pre-Trump Republican party, the party of Bain Capital, hyper-capitalism and asset-stripping, is adapting to a new political reality. And it’s now willing to go after the assets of the billionaires.Romney’s logic is hard to refute. Social security and entitlements are bankrupting America.

President Biden has been clear: he’s itching to attack Republicans for “wanting to cut Medicare.” But he’s running into a problem: his own administration rolled out a little-noticed rules change that’s poised to slash benefits for millions of retirees across the country. The change could jeopardize his own standing with a crucial voting bloc and could put down-ballot Democrats in electoral peril.  Biden has used everything from the pages of the New York Times to his State of the Union’s teleprompter to accuse Republicans of wanting to slash benefits to seniors who’ve paid into the retirement fund.

It’s almost spring, and you know what that means: buds popping on the trees, birds chirping as the days grow longer, and the president introducing a budget that will be quickly forgotten. And so it's happened. But there have been a few interesting twists that could make this budget season more interesting than most. President Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wednesday New York Times presenting his plan to “extend Medicare for another generation.” The piece was largely predictable: calls to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way “to increase the program’s solvency by twenty-five years.” While some fiscal conservatives welcomed the president’s willingness to raise the issue of Medicare solvency, his ideas are largely dead on arrival for Republicans.

Fresh — or not so fresh — from his awkward and stilted State of the Union address, President Biden took his show on the road to Florida to stump against what he claims are Republican plans to cut (“sunset” in Beltway-speak) Social Security and Medicare. Apparently unaware that Florida is now an irretrievably red state, on Thursday the president spoke at the University of Tampa in what was widely received as a kickstart to his expected 2024 reelection campaign. Despite platitudes about bipartisanship, Biden targeted Florida Senator Rick Scott, a Republican who has floated a plan to review federal programs once every five years for reauthorization (though the plan does not specifically mention either Social Security or Medicare).

Newly elected GOP congressman Andy Ogles said that President Joe Biden shouldn't have been surprised to receive jeers when he "levied false accusations" about Republicans during his Tuesday night State of the Union address. "I think him standing in the dais and lying to the American people is inappropriate," Ogles told The Spectator. "If you're going to have the audacity to do that, don't be surprised that you get pushback from those who are being levied with accusations. So I would say what was inappropriate is his tone." Biden claimed during his State of the Union address that some Republicans wanted to sunset Social Security and Medicare every five years. "That means if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them, those programs will go away," Biden said.

Recent mass shootings have reminded us of just how much gun violence has surged since Covid. The record of 45,222 Americans dying from gun-related injuries in the first year of the pandemic could well be topped in 2022, with more than 12,000 fatally shot since the end of April. Many rightly condemn progressive district attorneys in cities for failing to condemn the increased bloodshed. Yet the uptick in violence has been uniform across the nation, plaguing rural counties as much as urban ones, which is why most psychological experts put the blame squarely on the emotional residue of lengthy Covid lockdowns.

Much has been written about the expansiveness of the Biden administration’s signature priority: the Build Back Better Act (BBB). The legislation is projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to spend more than $1.6 trillion in its attempts to address countless Democratic priorities ranging from climate change to the expansion of Medicaid. One aspect of the bill, however, has attracted far less fanfare than it should have: its impact on the cost of prescription drugs. Provisions in the bill would, among other things, impose rebates on drug manufacturers if prices rise faster than inflation. It’s an idea that sounds great in the current moment of creeping inflation, but is ultimately little more than a market distortion likely to produce an array of adverse consequences.