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One of the most baffling themes of Donald Trump’s second term is how he is specifically ruining the cities and lives of his most loyal voters—taking their factories, their jobs, their health care, their hospitals, and their future.
The first knife Trump drove into the backs of red economies was to repeal almost all of the Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden’s economic and climate program, particularly the IRA, ended up directing the lion’s share of its investment to red states and regions. No longer! Most IRA-based future planned investment has been canceled, and some existing investment has been abandoned.
The second knife was enormous health care cuts, with Trump signing the biggest slashes to Medicaid in history, along with refusing to extend Biden-era Obamacare subsidies. It turns out that 57 percent of all enrollees on the Obamacare marketplaces live in districts represented by a Republican, and enrollment is disproportionately large in the South.
The third knife was specifically for the backs of farmers, whose international export markets have been devastated, probably permanently, by Trump’s lunatic trade war.
And now, Trump is yanking tens of billions of dollars of yet more red state high-tech investment that had already been approved as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Lots of liberal regions will be hurt by these cuts, but on the whole, conservative regions are taking the bulk of the bloodletting.
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