Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, Fears the BBB (Act) May Lead to An Uprising By the Have-Nots.
This is why he's written an opinion piece describing how truly unjust and brutal the BBB is
Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and former Secretary of the United States Treasury, has an opinion piece published July 8 in the NYT (behind a paywall) about Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (now Act) titled, “This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country.”
Larry Summers is certainly no champion of the have-nots against the rich who oppress them. On the contrary Summers, for example, is a staunch supporter of the Israeli government’s decades long violent and extremely oppressive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (watch this video of Summers hiding the oppressiveness of the Israeli government) for the purpose of making Palestinians a bogeyman enemy that the billionaire rulers of Israel use to control, oppress and get rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class (as I prove here.)
So, given Summers’s pro-ruling class views, the fact that he expresses “shame at” (more likely fear of) the unjust cuts in Medicaid tells us that these cuts really are so terrible that people such as Summers worry that they might lead to dangerous levels of anger by the have-nots directed at the billionaire class that Summers represents.
Summers, in other words, fears the BBB may provoke a revolutionary uprising.
With this in mind, here are excerpts from Summers’s opinion piece:
Over the holiday weekend, while the president was celebrating tax cuts that over 10 years will deliver an average of more than $1 million to families in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, medical professionals were considering questions like these:
What should they say to seriously disabled patients, who can live at home only because Medicaid pays for rides to their medical appointments, now that those people could lose that coverage?
What should they recommend to the relatives caring for poor patients at home, who will no longer be able to work when payments for home-health aides are no longer available?
How should they advise the hospital to handle patients who can’t afford rehab or nursing facilities and can’t live at home, but who currently occupy rooms desperately needed by acutely ill patients?
Should they still feel proud of and committed to the work of giving comfort to the lonely, poor and elderly, when their country’s leaders have decided that more money for the most fortunate is a higher priority?
How can they face patients who will be evicted from the hospital with perhaps as little as a cab voucher when their stays end?
This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The approximately $1 trillion reduction, over 10 years, represents about 0.3 percent of gross domestic product. Previously, the most draconian cuts came with President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax law. But they were far smaller — $12 billion over 10 years and 0.03 percent of G.D.P. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. Other noteworthy reductions to the social safety net, such as the Clinton-era welfare reform, were even smaller.
A number of studies suggest that removing one million people from the rolls for one year could result in about 1,000 additional deaths. It follows that removing more than 11 million people for a decade would probably result in more than 100,000 deaths. Because this figure fails to take account of the degradation of service to those who remain eligible — fewer rides to the hospital, less social support — it could well be an underestimate.
A number of studies suggest that removing one million people from the rolls for one year could result in about 1,000 additional deaths. It follows that removing more than 11 million people for a decade would probably result in more than 100,000 deaths. Because this figure fails to take account of the degradation of service to those who remain eligible — fewer rides to the hospital, less social support — it could well be an underestimate.
As more people realize what is coming, there is time to alter these policies before grave damage is done. TACO — Trump always chickens out — is a doctrine that should apply well beyond financial markets.
John Spritzler is almost in a minoriry of one in identifying the true motives of the rich in expressing their opinions which invariably involve cementing their power and control over the poor.