Here We Go Again!

Democrat demagogues spew lies about Medicaid and Food Stamps.

In the early part of the 20th Century, Mark Twain purportedly declared, “there is no such thing as a new idea...”¹ Ever since, Democrats have been proving him right.

Outraged by the hint of restraint in a $4.5 trillion budget resolution passed by House Republicans, Democrats are going back to the future.² Rehashing their shopworn tactics last seen in the 115th Congress when we passed a similar reconciliation package, they’re screaming from the mountain tops about so-called ‘cuts’ to Medicaid and Food Stamps.

Here we go again.

The crux of the GOP plan is finding $1.5 trillion in ‘cuts’ over a decade, without which federal spending will start to eat into the Tax Cut & Jobs Act (something we also passed in the 115th), resulting in massive anti-growth tax increases kicking in January 1, 2026.

Failure of the Senate to sign off on this ‘one, big beautiful bill’ that reauthorizes the TC&JA results in over $4 trillion in snapback taxes. The standard deduction and child credit will be sliced in half; personal and small pass-thru business tax rates jump; the death tax will be doubled and high-tax ‘blue’ states will get a massive SALT subsidy from other federal taxpayers.³

Naturally, Democrats favor this tax hike, despite the fact that federal receipts have gone up—not down—since the Trump tax reform was signed into law in 2017.⁴ Gee, you don’t suppose spending might be the problem, do you?

Well, yes, I’ll bet you do.

So the House plan starts by asking the Energy and Commerce Committee (beware, appropriators have the last say, hence the endless CRs) for half the savings. Since the panel oversees Medicaid, originally designed as free health care for the indigent, Democrats are howling.

Notwithstanding a few LINOs (‘libertarians in name only’) who relish in letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, Republicans now need a majority to ‘stay the course.’⁵

Which shouldn’t be hard if they simply start with repealing the Biden administration’s reckless spending spree (see Inflation Reduction Act), which added more than $6 trillion to the national debt in just three years.⁶

When I was in Congress (and the national debt hovered around a measly $20 trillion), our attempts to rein in these runaway entitlement programs were met with the same fake ‘resistance’ that’s greeting DOGE budget cutters today, only now we’re $36 trillion in hock.⁷

Then and now, it’s little more than an orchestrated astroturfing campaign by left-wing groups such as ‘Indivisible,’ designed to gaslight the public into believing there’s no support for, say, ‘work requirements’ for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents or ABAWD.