The "aggressively normal"
Scott Walker sat down with CNBC reporter John Hardwood to talk about how he's the next coming of Ronald Reagan with a lot of word salad and reinventing of history (like how George H.W. Bush inherited an "economic boom" from Reagan—tell that to Bush I's reelection campaign—and how Bill Clinton's economic success was because of Reagan). But when it got down to Reagan and Medicare and Medicaid, well, that was a different time and Obamacare and everything and no, Walker isn't like him at all.
When Harwood asked him about Reagan's staunch opposition to Medicare, hemming and hawing from Walker:
Well, we're not going to take Medicare away. He gave that speech, as I remember, three years before I was born. So I can't judge what he meant at the time. I'm just going to tell you, for people at or near retirement, we're not touching Social Security. We're going make sure that they have an intact Medicare system. For my generation and younger, yeah—needs to be some sort of reforms. We live in a 401(k) society. We are going to change Medicaid.
Social Security privatization, perhaps? Look out folks, Walker is coming for your future economic security. Or if you happen to be poor now, he's going to make it worse. Just like Reagan didn't? On Medicaid, when Harwood reminds him that Reagan expanded it:
That's precisely what's wrong with the federal government—everybody thinks it's OK to take money, but somebody else is going to pay for it. We're all paying for it. We're all taxpayers. I did not take the Medicaid expansion, because I thought it would further reinforce Obamacare, make it that much more difficult to repeal it. It has. I'm still going to work with Congress to repeal it. I've got a plan to do that that starts in day one.
Speaking of Obamacare repeal, Harwood brings up the fact that Walker's plan
helps the wealthy, hurts the poor and wonders "why is this the right time for that kind of redistribution?" To which Walker responds with "Freedom!"
Our system's purely about freedom. It's about giving people the freedom. The tax credit goes up by age, not by income. It goes up by age because the credit should be connected to what it actually costs people to get health insurance. It's not about a redistribution of wealth issue. We allow people to buy into whatever—give 'em the freedom. We give patients as consumers the freedom to choose where they want to go or—frankly, part of our plan says if you want to pool together your resources as consumers, and pick your own plan, you can do that on your own. You have the freedom to take this tax credit, to take your money and pick where you want to go—or if you want to have health care at all. We don't have a mandate. We wiped the mandate out. We say you can control your own money, with money for a health savings account. Whether you have your own health care plan through your employer or you buy one individually, it's all about freedom.
Freedom clearly is only available to the people who can afford it in Walker's world. That does make him somewhat Reagan-like. It definitely makes him a Republican, and very bad news for the majority of us. Just
ask Wisconsin.