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Protect our entitlements

To the editor:

For years, Paul Ryan’s been saying he wants to undermine the social safety net, specifically Social Security and Medicare. He and other Republicans derisively refer to these programs as “entitlements,” as if recipients are wastefully leaching from the government’s veins.

However, both are programs that you and I and generations of Americans have been paying for from our paychecks since we first began working. We actually are entitled to them. We earned them. We paid for them.

And now that Paul Ryan is leaving Congress with a full pension for life, Mitch McConnell is picking up the misguided Rand-ian plan. According to McConnell, these “entitlements” (which — again — you paid for) are causing our current deficit crisis, projected now to be nearly a trillion dollars, so they must go. Somehow, it wasn’t the huge tax breaks the GOP gave their rich benefactors that drove the spike, and it wasn’t wasteful spending proposals like a billion-dollar border wall or a new and unneeded military force in space, but rather your retired grandmother and your ailing grandfather that are sucking the government teat dry and bankrupting the coffers.

Ironically, a minority of voters elected a self-styled “business genius” to run the country like a commercial enterprise in hopes of fixing some imaginary problem and improving their lives; but good businesses never try to balance the ledgers by reducing incoming revenue. “Hey, boss, I know how we can save the company. Let’s stop taking infusions of cash.” “McConnell, that’s so crazy it just might work!”

No, McConnell. No, that won’t work.

But you know what might work? Raising or even removing the income cap so that poor people aren’t the only ones having every dollar they earned taxed by Social Security, and expanding Medicare so that it’s universal and automatic so that when people begin to feel ill they can see a doctor instead of waiting until they need expensive emergency procedures — that might work. At least it works in most of Europe and Canada, as well as parts of South America and Oceania.

And the thing is, it’s not even true that Social Security and Medicare are even slightly to blame for the deficit. Those two “entitlement” programs have their own stream of revenue. Tax cuts caused the deficit, a deficit which would be even higher if those two successful, popular and easily managed programs hadn’t been robbed to pump cash into the military-industrial complex. It’s true. Some of the money they took from your pocket and promised to put in a lockbox for your retirement was squandered on Bush’s half-baked invasion of Iraq and other military boondoggles. Cheney got rich. Haliburton and Blackwater made fortunes. Now McConnell says there’s no money to pay for granny’s new hip, let alone her rent or heating bill. Sucker.

And, if Republicans maintain control of the Senate and House, there won’t be anybody to stop them.

Vote Democrat; even if it is for Joe Manchin. Seriously, the Republicans have told you their plan.

J. David Core

Toronto

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