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**MARCH 21, 2024**
On the Prospect website
The Disinformation Gap Between Talk and Action
The U.S. is in no position to export AI solutions until it gets its own
house in order. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
The PBM-Insurer Mafia Comes for Community Pharmacies
UnitedHealth, CVS, and Cigna's PBMs are using their market share and
pull in Washington to drive one of the key levers to manage health care
costs-independent pharmacies-out of business. BY MATTHEW
CUNNINGHAM-COOK
What Really Happened on October 7?
And why, wonders a new Al Jazeera documentary, did the media go to such
lengths to concoct gruesome X-rated versions of an attack that was
harrowing enough to begin with? BY MAUREEN TKACIK
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Republicans Say It Aloud: They Want to
Raise the Retirement Age
The vast majority of House GOPniks tell Americans that if they want
Social Security, they need to work longer.
Can Republicans keep building their support among working-class voters?
Not if the Republicans have anything to say about it.
Earlier today, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released its
recommendations
for the fiscal 2025 budget. Among its particulars was a real
working-class winner: raising the retirement age for Social Security
eligibility.
Lest you think this is the recommendation of a small number of far-right
crackpots, think again. It's the recommendation of a whole mess of
far-right crackpots. Fully 173 of the 220 Republican members of the
House belong to the RSC. It includes the MAGAnauts, but also all the
stray acolytes of Calvin Coolidge, whose idea of utopia requires letting
the market run amok.
Aware, perhaps, that flatly declaring they want to extend the work life
of an assembly-line or construction worker, of a sales clerk or a
trucker, could yield unpleasant consequences, the RSC chose to state its
policy as gently as it could. What Republicans support, they wrote, is
making "modest adjustments to the retirement age for future
retirees"-after commendably citing one editorial that called for
raising the age above its current 67.
At times, the inspiration for their suggestions isn't so much Coolidge
as it's Ebenezer Scrooge. The case for cutting back on SSI payments to
the aged, blind, and disabled, including blind and disabled children, is
that "Tragically, children who received SSI payments often become
dependent on the program as adults." Clearly, any blind or disabled kids
will just have to grow out of it.
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Indeed, lest Americans grow dangerously healthy, the RSC also calls for
taxing health benefits that exceed a certain level, thereby helping
those beleaguered employers to cut benefits that might otherwise go for
mammograms and other frivolities. Not to play favorites, the RSC also
calls for major cuts to health programs for mothers and young children,
and to school lunch programs. If Americans want to be healthy, in other
words, they damn well should be able to pay for it themselves. (There is
no reference in the RSC's 180-page report, by the way, to raising the
federal minimum wage over its current $7.25.)
For that matter, the RSC also demands a revocation of the EPA's
standards on heavy-duty vehicle emissions. If Americans want to stay
healthy, they should also know enough not to drive behind trucks.
But it's the party's support for raising the retirement age that
most immediately undercuts the Republicans' claim to be the true
champions of the working class. The Biden campaign jumped right on it,
and it will surely be the subject of several gazillion Democratic ads
between now and November. Many RSC members must have known that, but
they just can't help themselves. It's in their DNA.
And now, when they talk to Americans who work on their feet rather than
sitting down, the Democrats have a beautifully clear and simple case to
make.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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