How have your Repug state legislators ruined your life today?

We were warned.  The late, great, lamented Molly Ivins warned us. When it comes to daily life, it's our state legislators who have the most control over what we can do and whether we can do it safely.

Take Kentucky's General Assembly.  Please.

Since repugs took over the state house in 2016 for full control of the legislative and executive branches, they have been systematically dismantling the structures of civilization Kentucky progressives have managed to erect.

• slashing already minimal benefits for the poor, sick and disabled.

• denying the humanity of vagina-havers and condemning them to a slow, painful death of sepsis after an illegal abortion or a lifetime of forced birth. 

• canceling all state incentives for renewable energy and slapping a giant annual tax on the owners of electric cars.

• eliminating all background checks, training and permit fees for concealed carry.  Now you can get shot and killed for failing to genuflect to the Pumpkin Traitor anytime, anywhere in the Commonwealth. 

• exempting the governor and legislators from being subject to the courts, in case any dogooding libs try to sue their motherfucking asses for all of that unconstitutional bullshit.

and, of course, the coup de grace:

• hiding from the public all records of how and why legislators are fucking us over.

Kentucky repugs did this.  But Kentucky Democrats are letting them do it.  All of this and much, much worse.

Medicaid Torture

Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You right here in Kentucky started this shit.  How dare impoverished people - no matter how sick, disabled or already working - dare take a penny of tax money that should be going to make Bevin and his billionaire buddies even more filthy rich?

 

Digby:

Making sick people work in order to get health care is right up there with the most dissonant policies they've ever came up with. It makes even less sense than usual.

Look for them to start saying people need to work to get social security and Medicare as well. After all, just because they're old doesn't mean people shouldn't "take responsibility" for their retirement and health care, amirite?

I wish I could understand what it is about sick people getting health care that makes these people so angry that they lose their humanity.

It's the same reason we can't have all the nice things European socialists have:  because American motherfucking racists hate everything that puts a penny into the pocket of a ni**er or a spic.

McConnell vs. Kentucky

Noah at Down with Tyranny:

What Fiendish Medicaid Fuckery is Bevin Planning Now?

First he reversed the denial of vision and dental coverage, and now he's cancelled the higher co-pays.

He didn't do it because a judge ordered him to, he didn't do it because he suddenly saw error of his libertarian ways, and he sure as fuck didn't do it out of the kindness of the sewage pump that pretends to be him heart.

He did it to throw everybody off while he perfects some massive plot to eliminate all the Kentucky poors, once and for all.

Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You Will Strip Health Care from 500,000 Kentuckians

How DARE those disabled poors not show proper gratitude to King Matt for forcing them to work in the salt mines for no pay?  BURN THEM!

TPM:

Attorneys for Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) will tell a federal court this Friday that that the governor plans to take his ball and go home if he can’t get his way on Medicaid work requirements, premiums, and other restrictions. Bevin, who campaigned on ending the Medicaid expansion but backed down from that threat once elected, is now arguing that he will scrap the state’s Medicaid expansion if the controversial new rules are struck down by federal courts.

Kentucky was the first state in the nation to win permission from the Trump administration to impose the new Medicaid rules, which are expected to throw nearly 100,000 Kentuckians off the program. With at least a dozen other states looking to adopt their own Medicaid work requirements, the outcome of the case could determine the future of the program not only in Kentucky but across the country.

Kentucky and the Trump administration are jointly fighting a lawsuit from a dozen-plus Kentucky residents who fear the work requirements and other hurdles will strip them of their Medicaid coverage. The plaintiffs are arguing, among other points, that the new rules do not further Congress’ original intent for Medicaid — to provide affordable health care to low-income people.

Kentucky’s waiver will allow the state, to deny coverage to any non-disabled adult who cannot prove they are working at least 20 hours per week. The state also will be able to charge low-income Medicaid recipients health care premiums, eliminate full coverage of dental care, vision services, and over-the-counter medications for many adults, end retroactive Medicaid coverage, and implement a six-month lockout period for people who fail to re-enroll in time or report a change in income.

SNIP

Cuello told TPM that their attorneys also plan to implore the judge not to endorse Bevin’s hostage-taking tactic, arguing that doing so would be “rewarding bad threats.”

“If you were to allow Kentucky to get away with this argument, you’d be saying that anytime someone can come up with a threat worse than the harm the plaintiff is identifying, they can strip away someone’s standing,” he explained. “That sends the message that any government official could avoid lawsuits by saying, ‘If you grant this challenge, we’ll do this other thing that’s even worse.'”

Isn't there a word for that kind of tactic? 

Who's A Lazy Taker?

Repugs are just lumpy bags of projection.

Shakezula at LGM:

Republican apparatchicks are obsessed with the idea of poor people, especially poor minorities, sitting around doing nothing because that’s what they do. If they were smart they’d be worried the poor are sitting around planning where to put the guillotines.

Why Bevin is Dead Wrong About Medicaid

Mostly because he's an obscenely rich libertarian motherfucker who thinks that people who were not born rich don't deserve to live.

More specifically:

Dok Zoom at Wonkette:

Now, before you get all “ARE THEY GONNA MAKE NURSING HOME RESIDENTS WORK IN COAL MINES,” the letter is quite clear that states can only throw people off healthcare for not working if they’re “non-elderly, non-pregnant adult Medicaid beneficiaries who are eligible for Medicaid on a basis other than disability.” So relax! Sending Meemaw to the coal mines is Phase III, and won’t even be considered until CHIP reauthorization is made conditional on the repeal of child labor laws.

SNIP

And if most people currently getting Medicaid are already working, or seem to have a good reason not to be working (which may win them an exemption from the work requirement), then why the hell is a work requirement needed in the first goddamn place? That’s simple: You gotta tighten the screws on poor people, because no matter what the reality is, Republicans just know life in poverty is an endless funtimes parade of free stuff. The goal here is to add more barriers to people living the high life on Medicaid, and the result will be fewer people getting the medical care that really can improve their job prospects.

And Scott Lemieus at LGM:

Emma Sandoe is, as always on this subject, excellent:

Eight in 10 Medicaid beneficiaries of working age already live in working families. Recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that the most Medicaid beneficiaries who are not working are sick or disabled (but do not meet the rigid definitions of disability outlined by the Social Security Administration), or they are taking care of their family who may be elderly, sick or children that need care. Many more are in school or are retired.

These people have valid reasons for not working and taking away their health insurance will likely make their health worse or worsen the health of the people that they are caring for. The administration has created a solution to a problem that does not exist.

This policy will make it more difficult for people who are eligible for Medicaid and are working in low-wage jobs to be enrolled in the program. Navigating the complexities of health insurance bureaucracy is difficult for anyone. This policy adds another layer of complexity to the system. Now, beneficiaries will have to take additional steps when applying for coverage, as well as monitor and ensure their state government is accurately recording their information to receive the benefits they are already eligible for. Think how the country would respond if Medicare beneficiaries had to regularly prove that they were aging to keep their Medicare cards.

In reality, IT systems don’t always work, mail gets lost and people working two to three jobs to get by and still making little money may not have the time to correct the paperwork. Healthy people who want to get preventative health care will drop out of Medicaid because the additional burden is too high. These people may miss cancer screenings and diagnosis of chronic conditions.

The purpose of any insurance is to protect against financial devastation. Rigorous and recent research shows that Medicaid coverage not only improves a beneficiary’s health, it protects low-income people against bankruptcy and financial loss. These important protections have reduced extreme poverty and allowed many people opportunities to get out of poverty.

The administration has tried to make this policy more palatable by making exceptions for people who volunteer or have a severe disability. But this policy is so heavily pushed by the administration and Republican states because they think it will reduce the number of people on Medicaid. When we’ve tied work to other government run programs, it does little to increase work. In fact, we’ve seen the opposite: that access to health care can make it easier for people to find jobs. We’ve seen that when people don’t have access to needed medications it is harder for them to find jobs.

The point about how adding further conditions creates bureaucratic impediments that inevitably cause even eligible people to lose their insurance is particularly important.

And this avoidable suffering and misery has become a pillar of Republican policy. A collaboration between one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States and Republican state legislators had denied Medicaid to millions of people. A Republican Congress came frighteningly close to enacting massive Medicaid cuts in order to fund a massive upper-class tax cut. And now, having failed to gut Medicaid, Trump and various state legislatures are lashing out against some of the most vulnerable people in society. This is what Republican health care policy is, and it’s simply vile.

"Simply vile" pretty much covers it.

Typical Repug Tax Bill on Steroids

If it didn't fuck the middle class and poor to pour more billions in billionaire's pockets, repugs wouldn't vote for it.

Kevin Drum:

I’ve sort of given up on the latest batch of estimates about the effect of the tax bill. They all say the same thing: It gives big cuts to the rich; big cuts to corporations; big cuts to hedge fund zillionaires; and a few crumbs for the middle class that disappear over time. And none of this has the slightest effect. Republicans just don’t care. It doesn’t matter that the economy is strong and doesn’t need a tax cut. It doesn’t matter that CBO hasn’t had time to produce an official estimate of the bill. It doesn’t matter that American corporations are already among the lowest-taxed in the world. It doesn’t matter that the bill will have virtually no effect on growth. It doesn’t matter that the rich have done so well over the past few decades that they hardly need another windfall.

Republicans are just going to do it, and that’s all there is to it. So why not turn off your brain and go read about Prince Harry instead? He’s also rich, but at least he doesn’t spend his time whining about how meager his allowance is.

Homeless People Cleaning Up Lexington Work Harder Than Governor I Got Mine Fuck You

Another entry for the "Poor People Do All the Real Work" file.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

When I climbed in the Panhandler Jobs Van for one of its twice-weekly runs, two men and a woman were already in the back seat, eager to earn $45 and an $8 fast-food lunch for five hours of picking up trash along the roadside.

As we rolled down Main Street toward the day’s job site along South Broadway and Harrodsburg Road, driver Jarrod Jones stopped twice when he saw panhandlers. Four more men and two women squeezed into the van.

At the corner of South Broadway and West Maxwell Street, several men folded their signs when they saw the van coming. Jones slowed, but didn’t stop. 

 “We don’t have any room left,” he yelled. “Sorry.”

When Mayor Jim Gray announced the Jobs Van program in April, I was skeptical. I doubted many of the dozens of men and women who started begging on street corners after the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down Lexington’s panhandling ordinance in February would stop “flying signs” if offered work. 

I wasn’t the only one.

“I didn’t think this would work,” said Steve Polston, a retired corporate turnaround specialist with a Harvard MBA who organized the Jobs Van program in his volunteer role as board chair of the non-profit New Life Day Center.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect hardly anybody to work,” said Jones, a former Lexington Police officer Polston hired last spring to drive the van and manage the work crews with help from former boxer Charles Jones.

“It’s proved me wrong,” he added. “I've had maybe four or five people turn me down. From the beginning, we’ve had so many people that want to do it, but we don’t have the room and have to turn them away.”

SNIP

 So far, Gray is impressed with the results in Lexington.

“There’s a perception that people who are panhandling want to do it,” said Gray, who also spent a morning with a work crew. “All you have to do is talk to people on the van. They don’t want to (panhandle). But they have challenges.”

SNIP

The men and women I met on the Jobs Van said it has been a godsend.

Errol Gill, 52, came to Lexington from Detroit four years ago. He said he has worked as a handyman and dishwasher. He sleeps where he can. The night before we talked, he said he slept in Cheapside Park.

“What we’re doing now is a blessing; it really is,” Gill said. “I don’t want to be out here no more on the streets. I’m too old for this.”

Steven “Hillbilly” Dykes, 54, feels the same way. He has lived on and off Lexington’s streets since the 1980s. “People want to work,” he said. “I think they ought to run this van more than two days a week.”

Dykes has battled alcoholism and served time for manslaughter in the 2008 death of another homeless man. 

“I was one of the officers that arrested Hillbilly,” Jarrod Jones said. “And now he’s by far my hardest worker.”

I'll pay the $45 and lunch for Gov. Bevin to do that job for just one day.  I bet he doesn't last an hour.

ead more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpy

SNIP
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpy“We don’t have any room left,” he yelled. “Sorry.”When Mayor Jim Gray announced the Jobs Van program in April, I was skeptical. I doubted many of the dozens of men and women who started begging on street corners after the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down Lexington’s panhandling ordinance in February would stop “flying signs” if offered work.

I wasn’t the only one.
“I didn’t think this would work,” said Steve Polston, a retired corporate turnaround specialist with a Harvard MBA who organized the Jobs Van program in his volunteer role as board chair of the non-profit New Life Day Center.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect hardly anybody to work,” said Jones, a former Lexington Police officer Polston hired last spring to drive the van and manage the work crews with help from former boxer Charles Jones.
“It’s proved me wrong,” he added. “I've had maybe four or five people turn me down. From the beginning, we’ve had so many people that want to do it, but we don’t have the room and have to turn them away.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpyWhen Mayor Jim Gray announced the Jobs Van program in April, I was skeptical. I doubted many of the dozens of men and women who started begging on street corners after the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down Lexington’s panhandling ordinance in February would stop “flying signs” if offered work.

I wasn’t the only one.
“I didn’t think this would work,” said Steve Polston, a retired corporate turnaround specialist with a Harvard MBA who organized the Jobs Van program in his volunteer role as board chair of the non-profit New Life Day Center.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect hardly anybody to work,” said Jones, a former Lexington Police officer Polston hired last spring to drive the van and manage the work crews with help from former boxer Charles Jones.
“It’s proved me wrong,” he added. “I've had maybe four or five people turn me down. From the beginning, we’ve had so many people that want to do it, but we don’t have the room and have to turn them away.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpyWhen Mayor Jim Gray announced the Jobs Van program in April, I was skeptical. I doubted many of the dozens of men and women who started begging on street corners after the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down Lexington’s panhandling ordinance in February would stop “flying signs” if offered work.

I wasn’t the only one.
“I didn’t think this would work,” said Steve Polston, a retired corporate turnaround specialist with a Harvard MBA who organized the Jobs Van program in his volunteer role as board chair of the non-profit New Life Day Center.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect hardly anybody to work,” said Jones, a former Lexington Police officer Polston hired last spring to drive the van and manage the work crews with help from former boxer Charles Jones.
“It’s proved me wrong,” he added. “I've had maybe four or five people turn me down. From the beginning, we’ve had so many people that want to do it, but we don’t have the room and have to turn them away.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article173302211.html#storylink=cpy

Who's Really Lazy? Or, Projection Is An Amazing Drug

It's always amazing and sickening to me to hear rich fucks condemn poor people - especially poor black people - for being "lazy."  Amazing and sickening because the rich fucks saying that have never worked a day in their lives.

No, sitting in front of a camera denouncing the people whose poverty supports your lazy rich ass is not work.  Sitting in front of a computer watching your money make more money is not work. Sitting at a desk ordering underlings to evict renters so you can sell their apartments as condos to other rich fucks is not work.

Work is cleaning the toilets in the buildings where the rich fucks pretend to work.  Work is serving food you can't afford to rich fucks who don't tip because that would be encouraging your "laziness."  Work is juggling three minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table.

As Melissa Harris-Perry once exclaimed in a memorable television moment, being poor is hard work.  It always has been.  Keeping it that way is yet another legacy of the confederacy that needs to be swept away.

In a fascinating article on radical Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, the Smithsonian captured this quote:

Enslaved men, Lay noted, would “Plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses.” He saw enslaved women busy with “all the Drudgery in Dairy and Kitchen, within doors and without.” These grinding labors he contrasted with the idleness of the slave owners—the growling, empty bellies of the enslaved and the “lazy Ungodly bellies” of their masters. Worse, he explained with rising anger, slave keepers would perpetuate this inequality by leaving these workers as property to “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children for them to Domineer.”

Gov. "I got mine, Fuck you" is throwing your MeeMaw into the street

Medicaid, not Medicare, pays for nursing home care in this country.  Obamacare, not private insurance, keeps thousands of elderly Kentuckians on Medicaid and receiving neededBevin just tossed 9,000 Kentucky grannies and Papaws out of nursing homes.

Deborah Yetter at the Courier:

In a move the state says would save money but cut another 9,000 people from Medicaid, Gov. Matt Bevin's administration is seeking permission from the federal government for more changes to the state-federal health plan that serves 1.4 million Kentuckians.

The changes, filed this week, revise a sweeping plan to the state's Medicaid program Bevin proposed last year seeking federal permission, or a "waiver," to reshape the program in order to impose more costs and personal responsibility on consumers.

The Bevin administration said the changes, aimed largely at "able-bodied" adults, are part of an effort to "provide dignity to individuals" and help them toward "independence from public assistance."

The changes are not designed to cut anyone from Medicaid, according to Doug Hogan, a spokesman for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Rather, the administration expects Medicaid enrollment to drop as people transition to employer health plans or choose not to participate in requirements such as work or volunteering.

But health care advocates in Kentucky said the changes do nothing to improve the proposal Bevin introduced last year and worsen it in several ways, most significantly increasing from about 86,000 to 95,000 the number of people expected to lose health coverage over the five-year life of the plan.

Stop Letting the GOP Deny All Our Voters

When everybody votes, Democratic candidates win.  If everyone votes, the GOP will never win another election. Anywhere.  And they know it.

The only way repugs can win elections is by election fraud: claiming that non-existent "voter fraud" is a crisis and demands strict ID laws that disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Kentucky has an all-repug state government and semi-strict voter ID laws (non-photo Social Security cards are acceptable).  Don't think bills to shrink the Democratic electorate won't come up in the legislature in January.




Shakezula at LGM:

Like a well-oiled machine that is actually well-oiled.

A new memo from Priorities USA and Civis Analytics provides evidence that voter ID laws successfully disenfranchised voters in 2016.

First, Civis and Priorities performed a simple analysis of how turnout changed in states that adopted voter ID laws between the 2012 and 2016 elections. As the table shows, states that adopted strict turnout laws (MS, VA and WI) saw their turnout drop, while states that did not saw an increase in turnout (this aligns with a similar GAO analysis of voter ID laws).

Civis and Priorities also find that these laws disproportionately harmed black voters, by examining how black turnout changed at the county level between 2012 and 2016. As the table shows, turnout out in counties with a high black population share dropped by 2.2 points in states where ID laws did not change, compared to a 5 point drop in states where a strict ID law was implemented.

I know the current vogue is to set out on quests to capture the votes of the Elucidated & Elusive Guild of Fence Sitters, Middle-Roadsters, Bern Noticers & Goldilockians. But unless the Democratic Party and affiliates are willing to defend the base with all out war against the GOP’s voter suppression efforts we’re going to have 8 years of President tRump abetted by Republican majorities in both Houses, followed by President Worse than tRump abetted by a larger majority of Republicans.

Bevin Just Chopping Poor People Into Hamburger Now

Congratulations, motherfucker.  You have exceeded any AynRandian wet dream Paul Ryan could come up with.  You've got a plan that will turn Kentucky into a fourth-world hellhole that will make Haiti look like Denmark. You've out-Brownbacked Kansas' own Destroyer.

Bevin's plan to "reform Medicaid" is so off the Outrage Meter that only Wonkette can deal with it properly:

How will they do this, you ask? WELL. First they’re going to tell everyone that employment leads to good health, which is as true as saying that marriage gets you out of poverty! Then they’re going to give everyone jobs (they’re not going to give anyone jobs) and when everyone is working they can all buy employer-based health insurance! That is actually their plan to fix the public health crisis in their state! It’s kind of like listening to Jeb! talk about 4.5% GDP growth year over year, or Donald Trump explain who’s paying for the #FuckingWall.

Anyway, that’s not the bit that’s outrageous, that’s just the wet dreams of Sam Brownback. Here’s the really innovative and start-uppy and consumer-driven part! See, if you want something swanky like glasses or God forbid dental care, then you can do various Character-Building activities like community service or rehab! And accrue points in an account! Which will be taken away if you misbehave!


God bless the free markets, I tell you what. This state is faced with what even they admit is close to epidemic level rates of HIV and hepatitis, and how many times do you have to have to fall asleep to an audio version of Atlas Shrugged before the following actual sentence isn’t dystopian as all fuck: “The cornerstone of the Kentucky HEALTH program is the introduction of a community engagement and employment initiative aimed at increasing workforce participation rates in Kentucky, which is critical to improving the health status of Kentuckians.”

THEIR BEST TACTIC FOR STOPPING A HEALTH EPIDEMIC IS JOBS AND GROWTH. Anyway, poor people of Kentucky: We hope you enjoy your new Medicaid plan, in which you can have all the fun of a prison work-release program and if you do earn enough points in side quests, you’ll get to have a root canal achievement!

The state has not yet commented on how it plans to pay for the ridiculous amount of administration and at least one new agency it will take to get caseworkers to follow up on all this new bullshit, nor on how much extra staff they plan to take on to keep up with demand. When reached for comment, the spokesmonkey just yelled at us about how well Kansas is doing then called us fake news.

Here's my plan for fixing Kentucky's real problem, which is that we are ruled by a bunch of rich motherfuckers who have never worked a day in their privileged fucking lives.

Take them out of their fancy houses and take away their fancy cars and cancel their health insurance and freeze all their accounts and give them a job mopping up puke in the filthy restrooms of some fast-food joint for minimum wage.  Part time.  Then make them find a place to live on $200 a week that is not a slum or a shack.

Then when they are coughing their lungs out with pneumonia or screaming from the agony of back pain tell them that they haven't earned enough good behavior points to get health care.

Newsflash: Poor People Can't Afford Drugs. Test the Motherfucking Rich Instead. Start With Bevin.

Not that any waste of money bothers repug legislators as long as they get to humiliate poor people.

Josh Israel and Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

Low-income Americans who need to enroll in the country’s only cash assistance program—the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—face an onerous process. It typically requires extensive paperwork, visits to welfare offices, and sometimes even upfront job searches. Despite these hurdles, the chances of success are slim: out of every 100 families living in poverty, less than a quarter are enrolled in the TANF welfare program.

But some states have made the process of getting help even more difficult.

At least 15 state legislatures have enacted laws that require drug testing TANF applicants or beneficiaries. Last year, 13 of those testing programs were up and running. That means poor people who try to get assistance in these 13 states have to be screened for potential drug use and, if they are deemed suspicious, must come back to pee in a cup in order to receive benefits. While some states offer treatment programs to those who test positive, in essence, if you can’t prove you’re drug-free, you lose all benefits.

Some states test applicants, some just test beneficiaries. All states use some sort of screening to determine who has a reasonable suspicion of abusing drugs. Some states pay a lot for this screening, some pay next to nothing. Those different methodologies and rules lead to wide disparity in how many people were tested and how much they cost.

For the third straight year, ThinkProgress reached out to each of these states to ask how many applied for their TANF programs and how many were approved; how many of those were given drug tests; how many tested positive and negative; how many were rejected because they refused or did not show up for a required drug test; and the total cost of the program for 2016.

The states’ own data shows the costs were high, yet the positive tests were few.

All told, these 13 states tested 2,826 people out of about 250,000 applicants and recipients in 2016. Of those tested, just 369 came back positive. In four states, drug testing uncovered exactly zero positive tests for the whole year. The positive drug test rate out of all applicants, in states where people tested positive, ranged from 0.07 percent in Arkansas to 2.14 percent in Utah; none of them came anywhere close to the national drug use rate of 9.4 percent for the general population.

Incentives

As someone once said, repugs claim that giving more money to the rich makes them work harder, but giving money to the poor makes them work less.  Right.

Tell Feds to Reject Bevin's Murder Medicaid Plan

You've got only 30 days.  Go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky. Don't know what to say?  Write this:

 

"Expanded Medicaid as implemented by the Beshear administration has made huge strides in improving health among Kentucky's working poor.  It has also started to do what no other effort in Kentucky's 224 years as a state has done: finally eliminate generational poverty in the Commonwealth. 

Please do not approve Governor Lying Coward's plan to kill 400,000 Kentuckians and bust a $2 billion hole in our state's budget."

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

The federal government told the Bevin administration Thursday that its Medicaid waiver proposal has “sufficient information to evaluate” and it now wants to hear from Kentuckians what they think about the proposal.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Press Secretary Marjorie Connolly said the agency has certified the completeness of Kentucky’s application for a Medicaid waiver, one of the first hurdles the proposal must clear.

She said the next step is a 30-day federal comment period.

“After the comment period and review and consideration of public input, the waiver process usually involves significant additional dialogue between HHS and states,” Connolly said. 

“We are prepared to continue working for as long as it takes to find a solution that builds on the historic progress Kentucky has made under Medicaid expansion and avoids moving backwards.”

To comment, go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky.

Bevin submitted his proposal to the federal government last month for the program that provides health insurance for 1.32 million Kentuckians.

The most controversial measures include premiums and co-pays and a requirement that able-bodied adults be engaged in their communities for at least 20 hours every week, through a job, classes, volunteering or other specified activities.

Go to Medicaid.org and click on “View Section 1115 Demonstration List” to find Kentucky.  Stop reading this and do it now.  NOW.

Great Idea of the Week

Extend it to CEOs and Board Directors of corporations and I'd say this would definitely put an end to the redistribution of income from the working poor to the filthy rich.

Now all we need is an excuse to deny the franchise to repugs, conservatards, freakazoids and other non-Democratic voters.

 

Allegra Kirkland at TPM: 

If states can drug test low-income residents seeking welfare assistance, why can’t they do the same for members of the one percent asking for hefty federal tax deductions?

So goes the thinking of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who spoke to the Guardian on Wednesday about her new Top 1% Accountability Act. The bill would force taxpayers reporting itemized deductions of over $150,000 to either submit a clear drug test to the IRS or accept the much lower standard deduction when filing their tax returns.

“We’re not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off SNAP,” Moore told the Guardian, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. “But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let’s start on the other end of the income spectrum.”

The Milwaukee congresswoman's bill comes as a rebuke to Republican lawmakers and her state’s governor, Scott Walker. A state law that went into effect in December forces applicants for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to answer questions about their drug use, and Walker is suing the federal government for the right to drug test Wisconsin residents applying for SNAP benefits.

Other officials like Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) and West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) have pushed for similar measures in their states.

Moore told the Guardian she was “sick and tired, and sick and tired of being sick and tired, of the criminalization of poverty.”

How Austerity Budgets Make Politicians Stupid, Broke and Criminal

And Kentucky Governor Lying Coward is following this script with his costly and ridiculous cuts to Medicaid, kynect, higher education and everything that makes the Bluegrass state worthwhile.

First Kansas, which has no money to open the public school system this fall because of massive tax cuts for the rich and big business.  Then Louisiana, which has no money for anything at all.  Now Colorado.

Think Progress:

Colorado Springs will pay back destitute people it illegally jailed because they couldn’t pay court fines, the city announced Thursday.

The city will also discontinue its debtor’s prison policy, which violated both the U.S. Constitution and a 2014 state law in Colorado. The system usually targeted non-jailable offenses like jaywalking, violating park curfews, or drinking in public.

More than 60 victims of the city’s debtor’s prison policy are getting repaid with interest under the $103,000 settlement with the state’s American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter. Under the city’s previous “pay or serve” sentencing policy, people who couldn’t afford fines for non-criminal violations like panhandling near highways were forced to spend one day behind bars for every $50 the court said they owed. The settlement sets compensation for 66 pay-or-serve victims at the rate of $125 per day they were jailed.

SNIP

Three quarters of the time, the people jailed for being broke had been brought to court for an offense that carries no jail time under the relevant statute. Yet jailed they were, as the city treated poverty as a criminal offense.

Debtor’s prisons are banned by the Constitution, as the Supreme Court established in the early 1980s. Yet the practice has made a resurgence in communities around in the country in recent years, as cash-starved states and towns enacted a huge number of new fines, process fees, and related courtroom charges associated with non-criminal offenses. All but two states have added fees or increased existing ones since 2010, according to a 2015 review by the Alliance for a Just Society. The threat of jail time for non-payers gives teeth to those stiffer fee structures — and politicians too focused on fee revenues often fail to notice they’re spending more to illegally jail the poor than the fees are even bringing in, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The increasing reliance on criminal fees for revenue, and the corresponding debtor's prison revival, coincide with the severe budget crunch most communities experienced during and after the financial crisis and Great Recession. Some of that budget pressure was inevitable given how deep a crater the Wall Street crisis created. But in many corners of America, those conditions were exacerbated by decades of starve-the-beast fiscal policy designed by conservatives hell-bent on shrinking government down small enough to "drown it in the bathtub."

The tax-cutting obsession promoted by generations of conservative lawmakers has harsh consequences for all manner of public programs.

That's it, right there. Cutting taxes forces slashes in public services, which hurts the economy, which sends revenues plummeting, which forces more cuts in public services and so on until we have the lords-n-serfs economy Matt Bevin and his billionaire buddies want.

Punishing the Poor Just Keeps Them Poor

The policy of deliberate impoverishment is not new; it's been around at least as long as the idea of some people having more than others.

But it's conservative America in which the policy has reached its highest achievement.  Not coincidentally because in America the policy has been from the beginning justified by racism.

Erik Loomis:

One of the two fundamental problems with American welfare policy is that at its core, it assumes that the poor are morally deficient and need to be fixed instead of just poor. So rather than just increase the money in these programs, politicians blather on about the morality of the poor, which is an excuse not to fully fund them.

We know growing up poor is bad for kids. But instead of focusing on the money, U.S. anti-poverty policy often focuses on the perceived moral shortcomings of the poor themselves. We don’t try to address poverty directly, or alleviate it; we simply try to change the way poor people behave, especially poor parents. Specifically, we offer two choices to poor parents if they want to escape poverty: get a job, or get married. Not only does this approach not work, but it’s also a cruel punishment for children who cannot be held responsible for their parents’ decisions.

Policy that addresses poverty by punishing the poor for their perceived misdeeds plays on some popular misunderstandings, especially about marriage and parenting. Many non-poor people mistakenly believe that our lax attitude toward marriage is behind the child poverty problem. That’s why a Heritage Foundation claim that marriage reduces the chance of living in poverty by 82 percent has been a staple on the Republican campaign trail this season, and welfare money has been diverted from alleviating poverty to promoting marriage among the poor.

…

First, single parenthood doesn’t just cause these social ailments, it also reflects them. Some of these problems are merely the consequence of whatever caused their parents to be single in the first place: poverty, illness, incarceration, weak relationship skills, and so on. In other words, successful people are more likely to raise successful children and to have successful marriages. Research on marriage among poor Americans clearly shows that the majority want to be married, but they aren’t for a variety of reasons related to their poverty. Faced with poor prospects in a marriage partner, some women reason, “I can do bad by myself,” as reported in the book “Promises I Can Keep,” by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Some couples place marriage on a pedestal, and plan to postpone it until they are financially stable. As one young man with a pregnant girlfriend put it, “I’d rather get engaged for two years, save money, get a house, make sure … the baby’s got a bedroom.” For too many, however, that moment never arrives.

Poverty clearly lowers the chance of a successful marriage, even as being single may make it harder to escape poverty. This pattern is the subject of a long-running debate among social scientists. Although we can’t agree on the exact breakdown of cause and effect, any reasonable researcher will concede it runs both ways.

But the second answer is perhaps more important for today’s poverty debates. It is that the number of single-parent families doesn’t drive the poverty rate – rather, it mostly helps determine which families and children will be poor, not how many will be. How many people live in poverty is largely the outcome of our policy choices, about jobs and wages, and support for poor families. A key study compared poverty rates and family structure in 18 countries, finding that the United States had the highest rate of poverty among single-mother families – more than 40 percent, compared with 5 or 10 percent in the Nordic countries. No country had as large a difference in poverty rates between single mothers and the rest of the population as the United States – that’s our unique penalty for single parenthood.

This has always been a problem with the nation’s response to the poor. From the early charity programs of the antebellum period to Social Darwinism to the Salvation Army to the present, the poor’s poverty is consistently seen as their own fault and something that can be fixed if we intervene in the right way. So the problem becomes unwed mothers instead of a lack of economic opportunity. Why blame capitalists when you can blame 23 year old women who lack a GED?

Meanwhile what the poor actually need are good-paying jobs for people without college educations, which are fewer and farther between in our outsourced, automated, subcontracted, franchised, temp worker economy.

The other fundamental problem with our welfare policy is racism. While not all the poor are people of color or immigrants, many are. And if West Virginia and eastern Kentucky they are mostly white, we find ways to denigrate them anyway. The problem of the poor is also “the problem of black people.” Or Mexicans. Or the Irish in 1850. Or Italians in 1910. Or whatever. But always black people. Focusing on actual poverty alleviation would mean having to deal with the inequalities at the heart of our society, which means dealing with white supremacy and structural racism. And we can’t be having that, now can we.