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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (10581)	2/1/2006 9:23:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541761

What would you call it when the tax cuts are partially financed with cuts in Medicaid Medicaid is not something the poor own. Cutting it is not taking something from them, it is giving them less than you used to give them. It might be a bad thing, it might hurt people, but it isn't taking something from anyone. As I said a couple of years back to someone making the same argument as you - If I give you $10 every day, and you rely on that $10 a day, and then I stop giving it to you, I have not taken anything from you, or redistributed anything away from you. The long paragraph you have about how programs haven't been cut doesn't address the argument. Those are aggregate numbers. If, for instance, you make the point that support for higher education has increased, that's not necessarily support that helps families pay for it. If the aggregate numbers increase every year than social spending in general, and education spending have not been cut. Spending on higher education has increased, both direct spending on/by the institutions of higher learning and spending on subsidies and support for students so that they can afford the tuition. Even if the cost has increased more than the assistance has increased, and so the education is less affordable you can't reasonably call it a cut in assistance if both real total spending and real per capita spending have gone up. You can say the programs are being mismanaged, or that the money is wasted, or that the increases are insufficient, but none of those things is a "cut". Tim