THE GRIFTERS: Yes, It’s Satisfying To See A True Scumbag Like Price “Outed!” But, Before You Get Too Excited, Remember That His Replacement “will serve at the altar of Trump, after all. The only requirement? Destroy what you can. Let everyone else suffer.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/30/tom-price-resignation-victory?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ross Barkin writes in the Guardian:

“The sad truth is that Trump will probably replace him with a health and human services secretary who is just as bad at the job
For the Trump skeptics, the full-blown resisters, and everyone who prefers to see government remotely good, the downfall of Tom Price was a moment of true catharsis.

Donald Trump’s loathsome health and human services secretary was driven from office on Friday after a series of stunning Politico reports detailed how he racked up at least $400,000 in travel bills for charter flights. The extravagance was too much even for Trump, who in his past life as a failed developer wasted plenty of taxpayer money, and Price was told he had to go.

Before sobering reality sets in – nothing has really changed about Trumplandia – let’s remember all the ways Price represented the worst of the worst about Trump’s storming of Washington.

Tom Price resigns as health secretary over private flights and Trump criticism
A former rightwing congressman from Georgia and an orthopedic surgeon, Price spent most of his House tenure trying to destroy Obamacare and replace it with something far more draconian.
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As health and human services secretary, his dream fully realized, Price set about trying to undermine American healthcare as much as humanly possible without achieving a repeal of Obamacare. Price stopped trying to encourage people to sign up for insurance, ensuring costs would rise for everyone else. He obliterated Obamacare’s advertising budget.

Price backed a Trump budget that slashes funding for health and human services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His vision of healthcare was rather simple: get any trace of the government out of there, any protections that might be offered for the poorest and sickest. Let the free market take care of the rest.

Now Trump will cast about for a worthy successor. Price, a multimillionaire, will feel shame for a few days and then go back to cashing out in the private sector, maybe as a healthcare lobbyist trying to wrangle goodies from his old colleagues. The waterline of the swamp will rise.

Health secretary Tom Price apologizes for taking private flights for work
The real question, once the celebration dies down from liberals and various journalists heartened by the power of the press to get their scalp, is how anything will change in Trump’s Washington.

Will a new HHS secretary bring some common sense to the role and realize stabilizing the healthcare markets is their chief job? Will he or she attempt to be anything resembling an administrator? Probably not.

Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump is a gun-slinging independent beholden to no party, he is fully indoctrinated in far-right, slash-and-burn thinking. He is a president for nihilist billionaires and Milton Friedman apostles. He will lurch to the left, but his grounding will stay true. We know that from his tax plan, which promises to give relief to the rich and no one else.

In another time now lost to history, both parties paid allegiance to the idea of governing. Democrats, in the post Franklin D Roosevelt-era, were the party of large, activist government, but Republicans understood that dismantling what they inherited made no sense.

Richard Nixon preserved the gains of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society legislation. Medicare and Medicaid remained.
Under a moderate Republican president – almost no moderates actually ran for president in 2016, and it’s increasingly unclear such a creature even exists – Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act would be understood for what it is: not socialism, but a mixture of government intervention and market-driven policies dreamed up by the rightwing Heritage Foundation and later pioneered by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

It is nothing approximating single-payer healthcare. It’s a start – but it’s also plenty flawed.

Many marketplaces are succeeding, but others are failing, in part because the Trump White House is encouraging their failure. The next best thing to repealing Obamacare, for the Republican party, is to let it rot without serious reform.

Federal subsidies must be increased and a public option should be introduced to compete with private insurers. The long-term goal, championed by Bernie Sanders, should be Medicare-for-all, universal healthcare, though we’re not there yet.
Price’s successor probably won’t think about any of these things. He or she will serve at the altar of the Trump, after all. The only requirement? Destroy what you can. Let everyone else suffer.”

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Why wouldn’t Price, who ripped off taxpayers to the tune of approximately $1 million, face some consequences beyond being permitted to resign?

Also, Donald Trump is not “destroying the soul of the GOP” (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one). The modern GOP stands for the same corrupt agenda as Trump. That’s why they never really stand up to him. And, Tom Price, a Swamp Creature if  there ever was one, was a perfect representative of everything that is wrong with today’s GOP.

And with a truly miserable specimen of a human being like “Ayatollah Roy” and a slate of Bannon-inspired scummy White Nationalist candidates in the wings, the GOP has by no means “bottomed out.” The worst is yet to come.

PWS

10-01-17

 

 

THE GRIFTERS: RICH GOP POLITICOS LOOT TAXPAYERS — From Trump’s Failure To Pay Taxes To Price’s Outrageous Gov. Travel Abuses, Fat Cats Have Nothing But Contempt For Ordinary American Taxpayers!

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?e=amVubmluZ3MxMkBhb2wuY29t&s=59ce2736fe1ff635a7644af0

James Hohmann reports in the Washington Post:

“THE BIG IDEA: Bowing to pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill and public criticism from President Trump, Tom Price announced Thursday that he will partially reimburse the government for the costs of his flights on charter planes in recent months.

The Health and Human Services secretary is writing a check for $51,887 to the Treasury Department. He said he will no longer take private charters at taxpayer expense and plans to cooperate with the HHS inspector general, who last week launched an investigation into his travel practices.

The optics here are terrible. Price took a $25,000 charter flight from Dulles to Philadelphia when a round-trip train ticket would have cost $72. The government also paid for a private jet to whisk Price to a resort in Georgia where he owns land and to Nashville, where he lunched with his son.

— It came out last night that Price also used military aircraft for trips to Africa and Europe this spring, and to Asia in the summer, at a cost of more than $500,000 to taxpayers. Politico, which broke that story, notes that the reimbursements do not cover any military planes: “The overseas trips bring the total cost to taxpayers of Price’s travels to more than $1 million since May. … Price’s wife, Betty, accompanied him on the military flights, while other members of the secretary’s delegation flew commercially to Europe. … But one of Price’s recent predecessors, Kathleen Sebelius, who served for five years under President Barack Obama, said she never took a military plane on her many trips overseas; she always flew commercially.”

— A million dollars isn’t nothing, but is it more scandalous than the New York Times’s estimate that Donald Trump could cut his tax bills by more than $1.1 billion, including saving tens of millions of dollars in a single year, if Congress enacts the proposal he unveiled this week? We cannot know for sure how much Trump stands to gain personally because he’s the first president since Richard Nixon who refuses to release his tax returns.

The national debt topped $20 trillion for the first time ever this month, yet Senate Republicans tentatively agreed last week to a budget deal that would allow them to pass as much as $1.5 trillion in tax cuts without spending reductions or revenue offsets to pay for them. “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has repeatedly called the debt ‘unsustainable’ and ‘alarming,’ even going so far as to say in 2013 that it ‘makes us look a lot like Greece.’ Yet McConnell was the one who held the meeting in his office to broker the red-ink deal,” Heather Long notes.

Many of Price’s charter flights, which numbered more than two dozen in total, were so that he could be the lead cheerleader for repealing Obamacare. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill that passed the House in May, which Price aggressively advocated for, would have left 23 million more Americans uninsured by 2026 than under current law.

— Price was also flying high on the taxpayer dime at the same time he was championing cuts in spending on scientific research, medical research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for children of the working poor.

The Trump administration’s May budget called for cutting $1.2 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of HHS, including an $82 million cut at the center that works on vaccine-preventable and respiratory diseases, such as influenza and measles. Price’s budget proposed a cut of $186 million from programs at CDC’s center on HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis prevention. There was also $222 million in cuts to the agency’s chronic disease prevention programs, which are designed to help people prevent diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and obesity. The agency’s center on birth defects and developmental disabilities saw a 26 percent cut to its budget. The experts there are still trying to understand the full consequences of Zika infections in pregnant women and their babies.

Price’s first budget also sought $1 billion in cuts for the National Cancer Institute, $575 million in cuts for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and $838 million in cuts for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The administration asked Congress to slash the overall National Institutes of Health budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion. These cuts went further than even some of the most conservative GOP lawmakers were willing to go.

— All these numbers are far more consequential to the long-term health, both fiscal and physical, of the United States than Price’s private plane habit. But they are also way more abstract, and thus less sexy, than a million bucks spent on airfare.

People are inclined to focus on relatively small expenditures because they sometimes struggle to wrap their heads around bigger numbers that underscore harder truths. A search of Lexis Nexis and Google News makes clear that Price’s flights have garnered far more attention than the proposed HHS budget cuts in May or even the GOP’s $1.5 trillion debt deal last week. Non-mainstream outlets like TMZ have seized on the plane story.

— By no means is the point here that Price’s travel is unworthy of coverage. His profligacy signifies misplaced priorities, demonstrates hypocrisy (he decried Democrats for flying on military aircraft when he was in Congress) and suggests that a culture of entitlement pervades the upper echelons of the Trump administration.

Drip, drip, drip: More stories continue to emerge about members of Trump’s Cabinet flying private.

“Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke chartered a flight from Las Vegas to near his home in Montana this summer aboard a plane owned by oil-and-gas executives,” Drew Harwell and Lisa Rein scooped last night. “The flight cost taxpayers $12,375, according to an Interior Department spokeswoman. Commercial airlines run daily flights between the two airports and charge as little as $300. …

“Zinke and his official entourage also boarded private flights between the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix during a three-day trip to the Virgin Islands in March … The spring trip included an official snorkeling tour of the nearby Buck Island Reef National Monument … Zinke also attended a Virgin Islands GOP event and spoke on behalf of President Trump.”

Taxpayers have spent more than $58,000 for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to take at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February.

The Treasury Department’s inspector general is investigating Steven Mnuchin for his use of a government plane to visit Kentucky during the solar eclipse with his wife, as well as for a short trip from New York City to Washington.

— Congressional Republicans are taking this seriously. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a proud penny pincher, called on Trump last night to impose a governmentwide ban on the use of charter flights by administration officials. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has requested that more than 20 agencies provide details about the use of private, charter aircraft and government-owned aircraft by political appointees since January.“

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You get what you vote for, folks. On the other hand, the majority of Americans are stuck with the stunningly poor choices of the minority. And, it’s not like Trump’s dishonesty and lack of values were secrets!

PWS

09-29-17