Daines to Montanans: Drop dead
By the time you read this, Steve Daines may have already pushed through Congress the big budget bill. It cuts almost a trillion dollars from Medicaid and other health care, including the Affordable Care Act.
Please call his office now. Because if the bill passes, the likely result will be many of us losing our health insurance, and within a few years, the closing of St. Luke's and St. Joseph's, our cherished local hospitals. Some of our fellow citizens, especially our most vulnerable, would needlessly suffer or even die.
Why are they doing this? The primary objective is to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest and large corporations.
However, the bill's mix of harsh cuts to healthcare and tax cuts for the rich will not balance out, so the national debt will explode by over three trillion dollars. Daines and others are doing this intentionally, giving themselves an excuse to tell us, in a few years, darn it, we must now also cut Medicare and Social Security.
The budget bill aims to gut many other programs supported by most Montanans. They comprise tiny portions of the overall budget, further proof that Republican talk about deficits is a phony rationale for their hostility to popular programs.
Among the targets: National Parks, tree-planting work in our National Forests, public radio and television, Hamilton’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, rooftop solar and clean energy jobs, Energy Star programs, protection of clean water and air, and even accurate scientific information about weather and climate.
Taking from the poor and giving to the rich has long been an objective of many Republican politicians, but now they are poised at a historic moment, with their larger objective in sight: destroying democratic government as a functioning system and handing over even more power and wealth to the top 1%.
Will they get away with it? That depends on us – on whether we Montanans raise enough popular awareness of this disastrous, heartless bill, and hold to account those responsible: Daines, Ryan Zinke and Tim Sheehy.
– Thompson Smith, Charlo