July 4 Reflection on the GOP Megabill: Is Attacking Fellow Americans’ Lives and Well-Being Patriotic?
PICRYL
On this July 4 weekend, a moment of the year that inspires reflection on our nation’s history and founding and that is designed to stoke our patriotic sensibilities, it is worth reflecting on the meaning of patriotism, on what constitutes patriotism.
Most simply, of course, patriotism refers to a love or devotion to one’s country. But what does it mean to love one’s country, to be devoted to it?
In thinking about this question, it seems pertinent to invoke–or impossible not to invoke–the current political context in the United States. The GOP is celebrating as a landmark political feat its passage of a megabill–what Trump calls his “big, beautiful bill”--which has its perhaps most controversial centerpiece, among many controversial elements, deep cuts to Medicaid and nutrition programs for low-income Americans, which are projected to leave roughly 17 million Americans without health coverage.
Sure, these cuts reduce federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, but these funds are being funneled to afford enormous tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, whose well-being, access to healthcare, and overall comfort seem quite assured. The top 1% will reap $1 trillion in tax breaks while corporate America will enjoy an additional $900 billion in give-aways as a result of the megabill’s extension and expansion of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that already featured a grotesque and robust reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent–a 40 percent cut!
The bill isn’t about exercising fiscal responsibility or addressing the mounting national debt, as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculates that tax revenues over the next ten years will be reduced by $4.5 trillion while $3.4 trillion will be added to the national debt.
And in addition to the harm this bill does to Americans’ well-being by cutting off their access to health care, the cuts will have a ripple effect in terms of inflicting damage on the U.S. economy and worsening Americans’ lives and health severely.
Community health centers and rural hospitals, largely reliant on Medicaid funding, are projected to close, eliminating vital access to health care for rural and vulnerable low-income Americans. Additionally, the closing of these facilities because of Medicaid cuts will also result in the unemployment of myriad workers in the healthcare industry. Additionally, thinking even more broadly, we know that the health of the U.S. economy relies on the health of American workers, so any reduction in Americans’ access to health care will impact the economy. Plus, when people don’t have health coverage, we know they visit the emergency room, typically after not seeking routine preventative care for ailments, making the cost of such visits more expensive, resulting in skyrocketing healthcare costs for all.
Let’s return to the question of patriotism.
Does loving the country mean loving the people in it? Can you act in hostile and abusive ways towards Americans and still love America?
Is it patriotic to deprive Americans of the means of life, of life itself? It would seem not.
It would seem impossible to say one loves America while actively engaging in, endorsing, or in any supporting legislative efforts to deteriorate the conditions that make Americans’ lives possible.
This bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, suggesting it bore some relation to the nation’s historical quest for a sovereignty characterized by freedom, rooted in the principle that all people are created equal, and insistent on a democratic alternative to the tyranny of an authoritarian political order, actually positions itself in direct opposition, complete contradiction, to the values informing the founding of the nation.
In the Declaration of Independence, our founders were insistent that we all enjoyed certain inalienable rights that included “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This bill is aggressively hostile to American life.
The Constitution states that “we the people” were establishing that very Constitution to “form a more perfect union” and “promote the general welfare,” among other objectives.
This bill hardly seems to promote the welfare of the majority of Americans, and it certainly doesn’t seem to unite us; rather it heightens divisions, grossly serving the wealthiest Americans at the expense of America’s working-class majority. This is not unity.
Senator Bernie Sander’s (D-Vermont) puts this fact in stark relief, highlighting that:
As a result of this legislation, over 16 million Americans will lose their healthcare, 50,000 Americans will unnecessarily die, one out of four nursing homes in America may be forced to shutdown, 30% of Americans who receive primary care at community health centers may be denied the care they need, over a million hungry kids will be unable to receive nutrition assistance and working-class Americans will be unable to afford to go to college.
Make no mistake about it: This bill is a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans.
And for what? The Republicans are inflicting all of this pain on the working class in order to hand out a $1 trillion tax break to the top 1% and a $900 billion tax break for large corporations.
If you think this bill expresses patriotism, a love and devotion to America and Americans, then you aren’t understanding the aspirational values of our national project.
And for those, like Kellyanne Conway, who says that those losing coverage should simply get a job–well, y’all need a reality check because many Americans who qualify for food stamps and Medicaid do, in fact, work to make the richest corporations even richer. McDonald’s and Walmart, for example, are among the top employers in the nation of Medicaid and food stamps. Amazon workers routinely experience housing and food insecurity and also avail themselves of these programs.
So, these giant corporations are already effectively receiving government subsidies to support their workforce–and they’re getting a tax cut paid for by American workers losing their health insurance! Stories abound of the working poor not being able to survive on full-time wages (see here and here, as just two examples).
So much for perfecting the union and promoting the general welfare.
This is really a case of a few Americans hoarding food and medicine while masses of working-class Americans stand by in need.
It’s hard to see how that kind of willful withholding, willful deprivation, can be called patriotic, much less humane.
To put the starkness of this inhumanity and lack of love for fellow Americans in perspective–and to raise the question of how much is enough?--let’s consider Jeff Bezos’ recent wedding.
As Newsweek reported:
The cost of the nuptials on Friday was estimated between $47 million and $56 million, according to Reuters, citing Luca Zaia, president of the Veneto region where the Italian city of canals is based. And while this sum may appear lavish to any ordinary American, it amounted to just 0.0193-0.0230 percent of the Amazon founder's estimated $244 billion net worth, as recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The average and median net worth of an American family is $1,063,700 and $192,900 respectively, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Federal Reserve. This means Bezos' wedding was financially similar to an average American spending less than $250 on their wedding—about the cost of a family dinner or a new pair of sneakers.
It must strike us as cruelly ironic that corporate lobbyists and Congressional Republicans, in addition to the President, are crafting and slamming through legislation to give folks like Jeff Bezos more.
Clearly, the President and his Republican Party want to promote the specific welfare of the wealthiest, who don’t even need more and probably don’t even know what to do with it, rather than the general welfare of America’s working-class majority.
Put mildly, there’s nothing patriotic about the Republican megabill. It is far more an expression of hostility and hatred, rather than love, for America and Americans.