The meeting highlighted the tough spot Mrs. May finds herself in: She needs Mr. Trump’s support as the U.K. leaves the European Union and seeks to build economic relations with the U.S., but she also has publicly admonished him and sought to avoid the political fallout of appearing too close to a leader who is unpopular among many in her home country. She appeared to tread a careful path, stressing free trade and a global rules-based system that has “delivered the greatest advances in prosperity we have ever known.”
.. Mr. Trump also met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that Palestinians must return to peace talks with Israel in order to keep receiving U.S. aid. Although he said he was hopeful a for a peace deal between the two nations at-odds, the president said the Palestinians had “disrespected” the U.S. by refusing to meet with Vice President Mike Pence on his trip to the Middle East earlier this week. “That money is on the table,” Mr. Trump added, “and that money’s not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
Dollars, Cents and Republican Sadism
G.O.P. opposition to programs helping the less fortunate, from food stamps to Medicaid, is usually framed in monetary terms. For example, Senator Orrin Hatch, challenged about Congress’s failure to take action on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a part of Medicaid that covers nearly nine million children — and whose federal funding expired back in September — declared that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.”
.. the suffering imposed by Republican opposition to safety-net programs isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Inflicting pain is the point.
.. The federal government would initially pay the full cost, and even in the long run it would pay 90 percent, meanwhile bringing money and jobs into state economies.
Yet 18 states — all of them with Republican-controlled legislatures, governors or both — still haven’t expanded Medicaid. Why?
.. G.O.P. politicians simply don’t want lower-income families to have access to health care and are actually willing to hurt their own states’ economies to deny them that access.
.. the Trump administration declared that it would allow them to do so. But what was driving this demand?
.. The reality is that a vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients are in families where at least one adult is working. And a vast majority of those who aren’t working have very good reasons for not being in the labor force: They’re disabled, they’re caregivers to other family members or they’re students. The population of Medicaid recipients who “ought” to be working but aren’t is very small, and the money that states could save by denying them coverage is trivial.
.. most of the money they could save by kicking people off would be federal, not state, dollars. So what’s this about?
.. The answer, surely, is that it isn’t about saving money, it’s about stigmatizing those who receive government aid, forcing them to jump through hoops to prove their neediness. Again, the pain is the point.
.. In fact, a 10-year extension of CHIP funding would save the government $6 billion.
.. Making lower-income Americans worse off has become a goal in itself for the modern G.O.P., a goal the party is actually willing to spend money and increase deficits to achieve.