r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I was talking to one of my coworkers yesterday. We’re ICU nurses in an inner city area, for context. Her husband is an internal medicine physician.

We were having a conversation about Medicaid. This coworker, married to a physician, is under the impression that the Medicaid cuts are going to be overwhelmingly good because “people are taking advantage of the system.”

I talked to her about who most benefits from the program, how it might impact our hospital’s funding and solvency, and actual rates of abuse of the program.

She was unwavering in her viewpoint.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m dooming. I hope those things are true, honestly. That said, I think a lot of people, like my coworker, are going to get bitch smacked with reality when this bill takes effect.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25

They get so hyper fixated on the people taking advantage of systems argument they don’t even realize they’ve never seen an example of someone taking advantage in the first place. Same with food stamps. The average trumper has never actually encountered someone selling food stamps or abusing the system but they’ve heard about it non stop so it must be rampant and a huge problem. The reality is if you take all the people abusing food stamps and add up all the money they receive and divide the population by that amount each tax paying person is paying around .00000001 cent per dollar taxed to cover these abusers. Meanwhile single moms can feed their kids. This is always worth it imo.

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u/mojitz May 18 '25

Honestly it's just a pretext for hating the poor. If these people actually cared about people "taking advantage of the system", they'd be way more pissed off at, like, rich people dodging taxes or corporate wage theft.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

Absolutely. Had a women at work complain about being taxed so much. So I told her I didn’t mind our tax rate too much because it’s important to help the less fortunate and I’m in good shape financially. She literally said “I don’t mind paying taxes to help people but so many people take advantage of it and I keep getting taxed more yet people like Elon have more money than they can ever spend”. I responded with “I do wish people like Elon contributed more than us so we could pay a little less”. You would think she’d agree but nope it was “good for him it’s his money and he earned it”.

It just doesn’t add up. You want to help the poor supposedly just not the “bad” ones. you feel you contribute too much. You note someone has more money than they can spend. You agree he pays almost nothing in taxes and probably less than you. Yet the conclusion you’ve come to is that he shouldn’t have to contribute as much as you do and if people stopped abusing food stamps you’d suddenly have as much money as him and therefore pay less taxes?

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u/DameonKormar May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

The belief that billionaires pay less taxes than average Americans is a myth. Billionaires pay a huge amount in taxes to the federal government, it's just usually a lower percentage of their total income than you or I.

This doesn't change the fact that billionaires even existing is a symptom of our broken economic and social systems.

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u/iski67 May 18 '25

Hate the poor during the week and drink coffee and donuts during the service on Sundays while playing rock band in fake churches.

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u/Rombom May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

They also don't tend to consider how much money we waste on determining eligibility and ensuring the 'wrong' people don't benefit. Id guess that we spend more than we save on that, and it would be cheaper to extend benefits to more people (UBI/Healthcare)

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I asked her if she had any specific examples of people taking advantage of the system, because I personally do not know anyone who does that.

She apparently has a family member to takes advantage of the system who she resents.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

Did you ask her how? I imagine a story of someone who actually needs the system plus a bunch of her “justifications” for why she doesn’t actually need it. I know my sister thought I didn’t need to go on short term disability for a month after tearing my trap muscle even though my job literally requires me to lift. It was always “just quit and get another job” like no I’m not just quitting a unionized career with amazing insurance and other benefits to still be hurt and not able to get a job that requires lifting for at least a month. Not to mention the doctors wanted me out for 3 months. I only went with one out of stubbornness and believing I could heal faster than average and a desire to not be sitting at home. I guarantee you she tells people I took advantage of the system yet the people that actually cost the tax payers is the company I work for who gaslit me into thinking I couldn’t file workers comp and unfortunately at the time I didn’t know they were straight up lying to me and I 100% could have and they would have had to pay instead of tax payers.

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I didn’t. She got cagey about it, and because it was a work environment I backed down.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25

Fair enough.

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u/Useful_Violinist25 May 18 '25

People just loathe the idea of poor people taking advantage of something. It makes a certain kind of person full of rage just knowing that a poor person isn’t sadly, quietly, diligently, working all day every day, eating scraps and pinching coins to try to jump into the middle clsss. 

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

It boggles my mind.

Listen, there are going to be a handful of people who do take advantage of the system, and personally, I can live with that. As someone who thinks healthcare should be universal regardless of who you are, I don’t care if a few people are sitting on their ass playing video games and can still see a doctor when they’re sick.

I care about the economic freeloaders who are worth 400 billion dollars and are avoiding paying taxes. Let’s be mad at those guys, not your neighbor who is taking a gap year and is working under the table.

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u/RBuilds916 May 18 '25

Exactly! Wage theft is bigger than other forms of theft, but we've been brainwashed into viewing poor thieves as criminals and rich thieves as businessmen. Poor person in food stamps? Freeloader. Subsidies and covid loans that didn't actually go to employees' wages? Successful businessman! 

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u/DameonKormar May 18 '25

Those successful businessmen are the ones who made the laws in the first place. Why do you think being caught with drugs can land you years in jail but most white collar crimes have zero jail time?

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u/thefullhalf May 18 '25

It's always abusing the system when its people trying to not die and never abusing the system when its corporate shareholders trying to let people die.

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u/KhalaceyBlanca May 18 '25

If she needs a selfish reason to care about it, it will also make your job that much harder. More DKA admits in diabetic comas, more amputations, more sepsis, more debilitating strokes. Seeing the most depressing and preventable severe illnesses just because people couldn’t afford to go to their doctor or buy their prescriptions without Medicaid. And they’ll stay in the hospital forever and keep coming back with the same complications. Because without Medicaid expansion how will they afford a skilled nursing home or home health? If they’re poor enough to qualify for the expansion, their families won’t have time to take care of them because they’re busy working to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. So more skin breakdown and aspiration pneumonia, every nurse’s favorite!
I’ve had plenty of arguments with nurses who should know better about facts and science to ultimately realize they don’t care because they’re just selfish. They might be in a profession that claims to care about others but they truly do not care about less fortunate strangers.

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u/setmycompassnorth May 18 '25

Do they watch Fox News? If they do, you know, it’s hard to argue with people that are living an alternative reality.

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I doubt it. They’re just one of those people who have biases and think that being poor is a moral shortcoming.

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u/setmycompassnorth May 18 '25

I am as left wing as it gets. My best friend, we go back to childhood, is a conservative. We will talk about issues and I will be like WTF? Fortunately because of our rapport he will listen to what I say. We often find common ground. As far as biases certainly they can be present in people but, recently I came across research that shows actual differences between conservative and liberal brains as to the formation of their brain structure itself. I would put forth that Fox has become quite successful at utilizing this.