A list of productive spending cuts Congress could pass in a 2025 budget reconciliation bill

@ViciDraco Oh I disagree. The annual savings from these cuts will accumulate and turn into long-term downward pressure on the structural deficit. It‘s ironic that you‘d talk about the risk of malnutrition when one suggestion is explicitly about restricting food stamps to healthier dietary options.
Healthcare costs will always be the same, unless reforms aim at reducing them, but these cuts would merely redistribute some of the costs to patients and thus relieve the federal government Of the ballooning Medicaid costs.

@CedricH malnutrition because you underestimate how many people that will lose benefits or see a benefit reduction will simply stop eating or turn to simple rice and beans and cheap carbs.

Patients on medicaid can already barely get important services in certain states. Florida, for example, has so few specialists that already accept it that waiting lines for said services take many many months. Also, when it comes to basic essential preventative which is easier to get with Medicaid, the people getting these benefits are getting them because they can't otherwise afford care. Pushing costs to the patients in this instance is completely negating the reason they have the benefits to begin with.

What that does is not save money. It leads to people waiting until they need emergency rooms and then not paying their bill, leading to even more medical debt which is already causing massive issues throughout the health system.

These are things that will add more stress to the system while putting more blame on the powerless. If you think we should just be letting people suffer and die of they aren't economically valuable, then these policies make sense. But when it starts happening it's going to get painful. And it is going to cause both social and economic unrest.

@ViciDraco You‘re grossly exaggerating and distorting the probable effects of these cuts to make your point.
Overall, people will have to deal with adjustments and become more independent in the way they manage their personal finances. More frugality doesn’t have to end in medical disasters or malnutrition. The cuts will more than compensate for the cost of any medical debt as a result of emergency treatments. These structural adjustments will also encourage higher labor participation which is key to ensure a steady household income. Over the long, term, they‘d be the one who‘d suffer most from a fiscal crisis and higher interest rates.
Let‘s see if there‘ll be material unrest over this or if this is just another scenario to scare people into accepting an ever expanding welfare apparatus.

@CedricH You are grossly underestimating how lacking the current system is for those that need it and overexaggerating the ability of people who rely on these services to do well with less in order to make your point. Don't act like you are a fair arbiter and those who disagree are fabricating because that simply isn't the case. Your biases distort your views just as much as you abuse my biases of distorting mine.

I believe Yang had a better solution to the SNAP issue with a UBI system where you provide a base level benefit to everyone. Those who don't actually need it end up paying it back in taxes. But the costs of administration are deeply simplified because every citizen gets it. Non-citizen immigrants would also pay into it but not get the benefit unless they became citizens.

Medicaid issues are better solved through a single payer universal Healthcare system. The reason medical costs are so high is due to private monopsony/monopoly formations in the Healthcare system. Americans pay among the highest rates for mediocre care and coverage. The problem there isn't Medicare or Medicaid. It's private markets having dominant control of complex services necessary to survival.

@ViciDraco Healthcare prices are high because there‘s too much demand for insignificant procedures, doctors and nurses are being overpaid, administrative costs in the US health sector are unreasonably steep, competition between health care provides keeps being undermined by government regulations and drug prices are comparatively high because of IP protections for brand medications which, in turn, are key to medical breakthroughs and innovation.

Well, I‘m not the one describing hysterical doomsday scenarios filled with rioting, strikes, crime waves or malnutrition you are. So I‘d argue that your distortions and exaggerations are a bit more pronounced and tendentious.



Thus replacing SNAP with a Fruits and Vegetable program would both considerably contain costs and improve nutritional outcomes.