On Monday, the Washington Post’s Editorial Board published an opinion piece titled “Veterans deserve support. But one benefit program deserves scrutiny.” The piece begins with two lines about how “Americans must keep faith” in our veterans, and also how we “owe the greatest debt” to those very same veterans. Of course, after pressing the return key on their keyboard, the rest of the editorial essay is all about how we should really tighten those purse strings about this “greatest debt” we “owe” them.
It is a profoundly embarrassing position to take, but then again, it was only two months ago that the same editorial board published “Yes, Social Security and Medicare still need to be reformed — and soon,” where they only discuss conservative ideas that include everything from raising the age to qualify for Social Security to “creating some kind of sovereign wealth fund,” while not once touching on the abject failure of the Trump/GOP tax cuts for the rich, and the estimated $2.3 trillion hole they cause over the next few years.
The piece on the veterans argues that there are veterans receiving benefits who are still able to work and make money, and so they should feel the squeeze of revisions in “disability ratings.”
The WaPo opinion piece recognizes that, for decades, our veterans had to do with “poorly funded and managed” VA clinics and hospitals. It recognizes that over the last twenty years, with multiple morally indefensible wars and better and more robust understandings of medicine and care, there are even more veterans in need of services. But, the board says, while “we owe our veterans every support, we also owe them a measure of fiscal responsibility.” In fact, the editorial board grabbed its most offensive thesaurus to drop “we offer suggestions about how to carefully prune the department’s kudzu-like spending growth.” Kudzu, if you don’t know, is an invasive plant that can quickly overtake an ecosystem. Get it?
So what’s the pruning suggestion? Which plants need a little pruning? You know, prune now and those flowers will grow! “The Congressional Budget Office estimates limiting payments for veterans who earn more than $170,000 a year would save $253 billion over the next decade. Congress could alternatively tax the benefits, or some portion of them, particularly for new recipients with high incomes.”
As with their opinions on Social Security and Medicare (programs that studies show will benefit more than 90 percent of Americans during their lifetimes), the WaPo opinion is that it is those people, the 99% of the population whose wealth makes up a pittance when compared to the wealth hoarded and recirculated among the top 1%, should tighten their belts. We can’t tax the rich, they say, but we can tax these greedy veterans of war who earn too much to call poor. It is up to veterans to earn a decent living to offset the trillions (plural and with a “t”) that the very top one percent of the population (which doesn’t pay into Social Security, mind you) continue to vacuum up to purchase larger yachts, trips to space, and fortified compounds in New Zealand.
Overhauling our health care system is completely off the table for the minds over at WaPo, because they would argue it is politically unwieldy at this time. Of course, they are very quick to criticize and attack any economic plans that begin to show the political will of most Americans to tax the rich and make them pay a more equitable share of our country’s costs. Just ask the editorial board’s op-ed from three weeks ago or so, titled “The United States has a debt problem. Biden’s budget won’t solve it.”
What almost no lawmaker wants to admit is that Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for the bulk of the debt. Instead, they point fingers. Mr. Biden blasts former president Donald Trump for running up the debt with big tax cuts that weren’t paid for. That leaves out the inconvenient fact that he, too, added substantially to the debt with extra pandemic aid approved only by Democrats.
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The scale of sobriety that is now necessary means we will need to do a lot more than lawmakers are acknowledging. Republicans falsely claim that the nation’s budget situation would be fine if it just cut back on welfare, waste and foreign aid. Democrats are equally misleading when they suggest it will take raising taxes on big businesses and the rich and perhaps shaving a bit off defense to get where we need to be.
What an embarrassing thing to write. What an embarrassing and pointless way to argue. The editorial board, just like their “pruning” of veterans’ benefits, hides its disgust with the masses by pretending to offer up politically agnostic positions. But they aren’t. This isn’t a matter of Democratic lawmakers being unwilling to “compromise” and “prune” things. In fact, it's the tenor of traditional media outlets' chants to protect the richest in our country and maintain the status quo in a system that continues to circle the drain that leads to taxes being cut on the wealthy and lowered spending on social safety nets.
The “liberal media,” a meme created by right-wing think tanks and successfully employed by our national consciousness over the past decades, is a myth. At best, the traditional media outlets that are not entirely handed over to being conservative propaganda machines are centrist. They represent mostly wealthy Americans who believe in a boom-and-bust economy that can only be mitigated by squeezing any and all Americans—except those with millions to spare.
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Our planned Ukraine episode will have to wait, as Donald Trump is being arraigned in New York City for his role in falsifying records to hide hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. This is the first of a potential slew of indictments coming Trump’s way, and we are here for a celebration of karmic justice—and to talk about what happens to the Republican Party after this.