A not-entirely-stray thought, pulled out of the swamps of pre-coffee semi-consciousness by Mistermix’s post on Medicaid and Medicare below.
The evisceration of Medicaid contemplated by the Ryan-Romney ticket and party is not simply a grotesque act of cruelty to people in their most urgent hours of need. It’s not just going to kill people. It’s not just crap economics, an enemy of prosperity on its face. (Short form argument here, for the sticklers among us: un- or under-treated illness sucks productive hours and capacity out of the economy. Think of it as a labor-supply sea-anchor, dragging us backward in any wind.)
No, or rather, more: gutting Medicaid, as Mistermix points out, radically constrains access to nursing home care for way too many Americans. And with that, you get the final step in the sequence of moves that the GOP hopes to make that will, taken together, finally transform the traditional American middle class (back) into an atomized and largely defenseless proletariat
Why so apocalyptic?
Connect the dots:
In his keynote at the convention on Tuesday Mayor Julián Castro pointed out that class mobility is a relay, not a sprint. The ability of lower income families to propel children into more secure futures than their parents lived was and is a key driver in creating what is both “middle” and a “class” out of the great mass of Americans.
That is — to reach the point where your family is not always one paycheck from real trouble (my loose definition of what it means to be in the middle) you need to be able to accumulate two kinds of assets that you can transfer to your children. One is intangible: the human capital that comes with education and the increasingly wide range of entry points to the economy that such education affords. And then there are the tangible assets, which for almost everyone short of Mitt Romney territory (or at least Paul Ryan turf), means a house. The single moment when most folks acquire significant chunks of capital in excess of daily needs comes when parents die and the next generation inherits. And most of what most people inherit is the value of their parents’ house.
I’ll try to keep this short (how….novel! — ed.)