EDITORIAL: Ryan’s $1.50 tweet exposes the lie at the bottom of tax cuts
Ryan's Twitter account retweeted the story, noting that a secretary at a
Ryan apparently thought that
Twitter exploded with derision, and the tweet was taken down after a couple of hours. Oddly, Ryan ignored the AP story's account of other families that are seeing a couple of hundred dollars more in each paycheck. Not every employer has begun employing the new withholding schedules, and depending on how much and how often an individual is paid, tax savings will vary widely.
But most people will see more money, about
On the other hand, that
Most Americans won't be fooled by a buck-fifty a week, or even a hundred bucks a week. It won't cover the increase in health insurance premiums made worse by the tax bill's elimination of the requirement to buy insurance. It won't offset the cuts in Medicaid and Medicare that Ryan has been dreaming of since he was elected to
Soon he will argue that deficits, which didn't matter when taxes were being cut, are now so severe that Medicaid must be turned into a block-grant program. That would create a kind of "Hunger Games" competition among elderly nursing home patients, the disabled and the children who account for the vast majority of Medicaid spending.
Ryan has long styled himself a policy wonk, someone who can reconcile Catholic teachings on social justice with starve-the-beast conservatism. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive. With his deleted buck-fifty tweet, this policy wonk has shown how little he understands.
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