The opportunities that this great country grants them
This week, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) helped push a tax bill through the Senate that will cost about $1 trillion. At the same time, he lamented the difficulties of finding the money to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which pays forhealthcare for nine million children and costs about $14 billion a year — a program Hatch helped create.
A Sunday-morning tweet from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough quoting Hatch kicked off a dustup on Twitter over the Utah Republican’s take on CHIP. Funding for the program — which was created as a joint effort between Hatch and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy in 1997 — expired at the end of September; Congress has yet to reauthorize it. That puts health care for millions of American children at risk.
But those children will probably never amount to anything. Their parents can’t afford to buy commercial health insurance for them, so what are the chances that they will ever be CEOs or senators or lobbyists? The tax cuts, on the other hand, go to incredibly valuable people like mortgage brokers and fraudulent bankers.
“We’re going to do CHIP, there’s no question about it in my mind. And it’s got to be done the right way,” Hatch said. “But the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore, and to just add more and more spending and more and more spending, and you can look at the rest of the bill for the more and more spending.”
This came as he advocated for a tax bill that, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s latest estimate, will add approximately $1 trillion to the deficit even when adjusted for economic growth, and which disproportionately benefits corporations and the wealthy.
But it’s all about deserving. Rich people deserve more than poor people do. Once you understand that it all makes sense.
Hatch also said he thinks CHIP has done a “terrific job for people who really need the help” and noted that he had advocated for helping those who can’t help themselves throughout his Senate career. But, he continued, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.” He blamed a “liberal philosophy” for creating millions of people “who believe everything they are or ever hope to be depend upon the federal government rather than the opportunities that this great country grants them.”
Opportunities to work in chicken processing plants or harvesting kale, to take on huge debt to get a worthless degree, to take three buses to get to work because rents close to work are pegged to tech wages.
But that’s what they deserve, isn’t it.
And who’s fault is that? There is plenty of money in this country, but it is in very few hands, and the government is pushing even more of it back into those hands. Hatch is as much to blame for that as anyone. He just doesn’t want it to affect Utah.
And a significant portion of that money is no longer in the country, if we are to believe the persistant rumors about tax havens (like the Cyprus banks under the control of
Russian oligarchsWhite House officialstotally anonymous innocentplayerspeasants). Or innocent locations like US VI or other Caribbean hell-holes.Rank fucking hypocricy! Hasn’t the federal government just gift-wrapped billions of dollars to help the down-trodden rich scrape through without having to lift a well-manicured finger. I wonder which liberal philosopher convinced them to sit back and take federal government benefits?
So why do you give them such a big tax break?
And if this is about children, would he expect children to lift a finger and help themselves? Because it’s their own fault to be born to poor parents?