America Is Already Tired of the Republicans’ Urgency to Cut Expenses

The Republican Party is working hard to fall from grace in record time. Their proposition to privatize Medicare is scaring a lot of voters.

The chances that Barack Obama will be succeeding himself next year as president have increased again over the last few days in Washington. Six months after they regained the majority in the House of Representatives during the midterm elections, the Republican Party is working hard to lose the voters’ favor in no time.

A lot of this has to do with Medicare, the popular public health insurance for retired people. Still drunk on their victory in November, the Republicans decided to launch their proposition to privatize Medicare. Basically, elderly people would receive checks with which they could buy health insurance on the private market. These checks would not cover all costs though, and since the value of the checks does not increase with the duration of their lives, retired people will gradually have to pay larger amounts out of pocket even if it means giving up their last dime, because if you are old and sick enough (which we will all be one day), you do not have a choice anymore. It will be pay or die.

Asocial

Is this then the foundation of all asocial regulations? Indeed. That voters would not be applauding this was predictable. The first sign of doom: in the Conservative 26th voting district of the state of New York, where Republican Chris Lee won three quarters of the votes (he had to step down because of a sex scandal), the vacant seat was surprisingly won by Democrat Kathy Hochul. Her recipe for success was simple: she kept confronting her opponent Jane Corwin with the plan to privatize Medicare.

Based on this, Washington watchers conclude that the voters are once again fed up with the Republicans. The point has some substance, and if you look past today’s political discussion on Medicare, it still has everything to do with the intense fury at the continuing economic crisis. Americans have had such hard times over the past several years that their patience has basically run out. They want it different and better, and they want it right now. In 2008, Obama benefited from this. When the change he promised did not arrive instantly, the Republicans got their turn in 2010. Now that they are overplaying their cards with their radical privatizing and budget plans, it is more than plausible that Obama and the Democrats end up on the right side of another landslide.

The Americans are right to be angry. Company profits are once again off the charts, and CEO’s are collecting bonuses as if there never had been a “Great Recession,” but the common people keep suffering. Unemployment is stagnant at nine percent. Add the number of people who are forced to work part-time because they fail to find a full-time job, and you end up with a number that constantly balances just underneath a terrifying twenty percent. Tens of thousands of people are still losing their houses every month, and millions of others see the value of their properties drop.

According to a study by the American Association of Retired Persons (an influential lobby of retired people), almost half of the American population older than fifty has suffered economic damage because of the crisis. Half of this group was forced to save money by cutting back on medication purchases or by postponing and canceling medical treatment. 25 percent indicated they were out of savings, and 12 percent could not afford health care.

The Pew Charitable Trust, an independent NGO in Philadelphia, did a poll which indicated that the white members of the working class feel extremely pessimistic about the future. Only 24 percent said they are doing better now than 10 years ago. Only a third believes their children will be living in better times than them.

The point is that social insecurity in the United States is exceptionally high. This is hard to take, since Americans grew up hearing they lived in the richest country in the world and that every generation would be living better lives than the previous one. This no longer seems to be true. The number of people who drop out keeps increasing. The middle class, with whom the “American Dream” lives strongest, finds itself more and more in the danger zone. Nobody is safe anymore.

And let Medicare be the last remaining piece of social security. Whatever happened, Americans always knew that they would at least have an affordable health insurance for their old days. Touch on that and you know you will get yourself in trouble, especially when the majority of your votes come from the elderly population and white workers. In other words: with their plans to privatize, the Republicans decided to kick their own voters in the shins.

Millstone

The Democrats know what to do: repeat Kathy Hochul’s New York trick as often as possible. The Democratic party identified 97 voter districts all over the country that are represented in the House by Republicans but in which the Democrats are doing better than in New York’s 26th. In each of these districts, they will try to put Medicare as a millstone around the Republicans’ necks.

In the mean time, Republicans stubbornly stick to their plan to privatize. They put such high stakes on it that they cannot pull back from it without losing face. Additionally, every Republican knows that a no-vote would anger the Tea Party immediately. The Tea Oarty is obsessed with extreme budget plans and has proven more than once in the last few years that it has the power to see Republican representatives fail by adding an even stricter candidate to the fight during primaries.

The Republicans have got themselves pretty stuck this way. With the Tea Party breathing down their necks, they read the midterm elections in November as an agreement with the Tea Party’s agenda, which focuses on rock-hard budget cuts, privatizing of social welfare and continued tax reductions for the rich. Now, this turns out to be a big mistake. The voter was mainly angry. The voter has been angry for a long time now and that will only change when somebody can offer him the prospect of the “American Dream”: a house with a garden, two cars in front of the door and the solid confidence that it will be a bit more for his children. Whether anyone will be able to deliver this is an entirely different question.