It Is Not About The Cost
Money doesn’t grow on trees; it talks, and the dollar is almighty. Our language is filled with idioms about money, and politicians love to talk about it. Whenever they seek to cut a program or hinder progress, they cite the deficit or debt as their justification.
It’s all fake. Not the deficit and the debt, but politicians pretending to care about it. It is merely an excuse leveraged when it suits them and ignored when it doesn’t.
Since a fight over healthcare costs caused the government shutdown, we will start there.
Universal healthcare is used across the globe because all citizens should have access to healthcare and because it is the most efficient, cost-effective approach. One glaring exception to using universal healthcare is the United States. Every year this topic comes up, and every year some politicians claim we can’t afford it.
Numerous studies, including those from conservative groups, have found that universal healthcare would save the US between $200-$500 billion per year and ensure all American citizens are covered. Instead, we’re paying more, and ~27 million Americans are uninsured.
While politicians continue to mislead the public about universal healthcare, the Affordable Care Act helps manage the situation. But the lies flow there too.
The central claim is that the ACA caused everyone to pay more for their healthcare. This is proven false by comparing the rate of increase in healthcare premiums from 2003 to 2013 with the rate of change from 2014, the year the ACA went into effect, to 2024. The rate of increase slowed significantly since the ACA took effect.
The ACA primarily makes healthcare more affordable through subsidies. Those subsidies have reduced the number of uninsured Americans by over 25 million. During the pandemic recovery, as Americans were struggling to make ends meet, these subsidies were expanded to help more people.Those additional subsidies expire on January 1st and will more than double the monthly premium for over 20 million Americans.
Each year that the subsidies are extended, the cost is $35 billion. Before we show how affordable that is, let’s look at other programs Republicans deemed unaffordable.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, provides federal aid to help individuals and families afford food. This program has long been a target for Republicans who continue to chip away at it whenever they can. The OBBB enacted more cuts to the program, which will reduce its budget by $9 billion next year.
On the topic of ensuring children have the nutritious food they need to develop and focus in school, reinstating the free school lunch for all program enacted during Covid would cost around $23 billion per year.
Housing all of the homeless people in America? The average estimate is around $14 billion annually.
Trump is cutting staff at Veterans Affairs as part of his goal to reduce their budget by $8 billion.
All of those items together total $89 billion. Republicans gave the top 1%, who already hold as much wealth as the bottom 90% of Americans, a $117 billion tax cut for 2026 alone. They also increased the annual defense budget by $113 billion, pushing the total defense budget, which has never successfully passed an audit, to over $1 trillion every year.
To claim we don’t have $89 billion to improve American lives is absurd.
Republicans also made a big deal about the $35 billion budget for USAID, which provided food to starving children, medicine to people in need, and improved US relations the world over. They said we couldn’t afford to help other countries because of our debt. But now, the Trump administration is giving a $40 billion bailout to Argentina because the Argentinian president is a supporter of Trump, and wealthy US investors bought up Argentina’s debt.
It has never actually been about the money. That is only an excuse used to convince the public that cuts to programs that help them, or others, are needed when what is really happening is that more money is being funneled to the wealthy as everyone else’s struggles worsen.
We can ensure that no American goes hungry, homeless, or without medical care.
We can provide quality public education and affordable childcare services.
We can fund and even expand Social Security for decades to come.
We can reduce our nation’s debt to improve our economic security for the future.
But only if we get our priorities straight and stop falling for political rhetoric designed to make us think suffering is a regular part of life, at a time when billionaires are buying islands, mega yachts, and launching themselves into space.
https://usafacts.org/articles/who-owns-american-wealth/
Basic Income Is A Powerful Solution
We're born into a world where everything is owned, jobs don’t pay enough to cover the bills, and we’re told that guaranteeing a minimum standard of living is a handout. This is the design of the privileged to ensure they hold money and power while generational poverty abounds.