But according to Mr. Trump, the point of health care for the masses is to keep the sidewalks clear of dead bodies. Similarly, per Mr. Gingrich, the point of food for the masses is to keep the world safe for billionaires.
What We Learned from the Donald Trump-Marco Rubio Screamfest
Trump went even further, raising the possibility, to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, that he was being audited because he was a “strong Christian.”)
.. Cruz, with leading questions and prosecutorial zeal, forced Trump to acknowledge that he does not, indeed, want people to die “on the sidewalks and the streets.” Cruz made it clear that he considered this a damning admission.
.. Although he likes to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur who created a vastly profitable business, many people in the business world have long regarded him as a self-promoting huckster who emblazons his name on properties that don’t belong to him and habitually overstates his net worth.
.. During the debate, he claimed that tax returns don’t give any indication of a person’s wealth, which is nonsense. If Trump’s various businesses are worth as much as he claims they are, they must generate a great deal of revenue and income, at least some of which would be reflected on his tax returns.
.. Back in the nineteen-seventies, Johnston points out, New York City Mayor Abe Beame gave Trump a four-hundred-million-dollar tax abatement to facilitate his first big real-estate deal, the conversion of a hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. During the nineteen-eighties, when the city refused to give Trump seven hundred million dollars in tax breaks for his controversial Riverside South development, he had a bitter dispute with Mayor Ed Koch.
The Secret Side of Donald Trump
“Well, I like the mandate,” said Trump. “O.K., so here’s where I’m a little bit different. I don’t want people dying on the streets and I say this all the time.”
.. This is how far we have fallen. The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination keeps bragging that he does not want people dying in the streets.
“Now some people would say, ‘That’s not a very Republican thing to say,’” he told Cooper.
.. We will skip over the part where Trump is this far down the road and still working on a basic plan. The more important point is that he’s coming down to a health care policy that is the same as Marco Rubio’s and Ted Cruz’s.
.. The bottom line is that once you really pin him down, Donald Trump is a mail-order conservative Republican, except more trash-talking about Muslims and Mexicans. Surrender hope and be careful not to die in the streets.
Donald Trump, Holy Fool?
If the government doesn’t subsidize the health care of very poor people, those people are more likely to suffer from preventable health problems. When poor people’s preventable health problems become severe, they go to hospitals, where they rack up bills they can’t afford to pay. That leads hospitals to increase charges to those who can pay, like the government. Thus, in many cases, it costs more over the long term to withhold health-care subsidies than to provide them. The only way for the government to completely wash its hands of sick poor people would be to deny the indigent access to hospitals and allow them to die in the streets.