Team Trump To Veterans: Thanks For Your Service, Kiss Your VA Healthcare Goodbye
Serves the suckers and losers right.
The Right has found a new group to declare enemies of America — or at least to paint as useless takers who need to tighten their belts and suck it up so billionaires can have another tax cut. Oh, sure, Republicans still want to stick it to poor people, minorities, college students, blue states, women, and old people who keep abusing Social Security and Medicare by not hurrying up and dying.
But as military news blog Task And Purpose reports, there’s apparently a lot of enthusiasm in some corners for adding military veterans to the list of the Unworthy, because holy crap the budget will have to be slashed a lot to pay for making the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts for the rich permanent, and to pile more tax cuts for the rich on top of that. As the story notes:
The most recent call for cuts is a widely criticized opinion article in The Economist on Nov. 28 that described veterans’ disability benefits as “absurdly generous.” […]
The Economist piece echoes an argument made by the Washington Post’s editorial board last year that limiting disability payments to veterans would help get America’s financial house in order.
Those selfish, selfish veterans! Don’t they recognize that today’s Republicans are no longer fans of the endless wars veterans were sent to fight by previous RINO Republicans who are no longer in fashion? Republicans now prefer vets who didn’t get lung disease from toxic burn pits. Take some responsibility for what you did to the budget, snowflakes. Why, you don’t even pay taxes on your disability benefits! Besides, Donald Trump doesn’t like seeing disabled veterans. They’re very unsettling to him.
We read that Economist piece, and wow, it really does portray disabled vets as a bunch of lazy schemers fleecing the taxpayers and not even feeling appropriately shameful about whooping it up on permanent disability. Yes, really:
Once on the payroll, veterans usually remain beneficiaries for life. The stigma around collecting payments has faded in recent decades. [emphasis added — Dok]
In the good old days, real American patriots loved their country and stubbornly refused any help from the government, because they had some goddamn pride in themselves. Or maybe that was only what happened in some old movie.
The Economist cites Stanford economist Mark Duggan, who says VA disability benefits do help “a lot of people who deserve it,” but tut-tuts that “getting on the programme becomes an escalator to higher disability ratings and compensation. […] Once you qualify you have an incentive not to get better.”
Lazy lazy disabled veterans need to just get better and stop fleecing us! The piece closes with a flag-stomping yellow-ribbon-burning sentiment that would have gotten a magazine shunned during the War on Terror:
Reducing payments to former soldiers will never be popular, but it would be wise. America’s veteran obsession has gone too far. [Emphasis fucking added again.]
But you see, Republicans are over those wars now, and indeed many are done with “national defense” altogether, since it might make President Putin unhappy.
Task and Purpose also notes that Project 2025 calls for a number of reforms to the Department of Veterans Affairs that would
increase privatization, narrow the eligibility criteria for health benefits and replace civil service-style employees with political appointees in its ranks.
Like the Economist piece, Project 2025 contends that too many health problems that qualify toward veterans’ disability benefits are “tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.” As any fool knows, the smart move is to fake a case of bone spurs to avoid service, not to lollygag around with PTSD and lung disease after you’ve actually been to war and returned.
Then of course there’s the bullshit rationale advanced by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that veterans’ healthcare is just one of a whole bunch of spending (including NASA, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Institutes of Health, among others) that must be eliminated altogether because it supposedly doesn’t have a current annual appropriation from Congress. (The only flaw in that logic is that that’s not how the budget actually works, but they promised Trump to cut $2 trillion out of the budget, and that’s one excuse.)
Look: America needs to support its real heroes — billionaire GOP donors — instead of endlessly throwing money at veterans, who have after all finished their service to the country and, like any other war surplus materiel, can now be auctioned off in bulk for scrap. Especially useless are vets with service-related disabilities, who even if they’re fairly young can’t be recalled to service and ordered to shoot fellow Americans who protest Trump or police brutality. (I am tempted to post this to Twitter to see if Elon Musk calls it “interesting!” But I won’t because he might.)
It’s a tough world and we have to make tough choices that will not hurt the obscenely rich, as Elon Musk already explained. You people will need to suffer some temporary hardship in the form of an economic crash, but it’s a price oligarchs are willing for you to pay.
[Letters From An American / Task & Purpose / Economist / WaPo]
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MODERATOR NOTE:
Hey, you filthy fuckaducks, I just deleted an entire subthread in which two readers started calling each other enemies of all things good and decent, and even though both participants in the shitshow tried to include something like logic and evidence, they were in that Internet argument mode where I wouldn't want either of them to be in the same room holding broken beer bottles by the neck.
I also had to remind a completely different person the illogic of their call for all veterans to be "fucked good and hard," every last one of them, because military vets voted nearly 2 to 1 for Trump.
It's an accurate statistic, but I think maybe that's a poor solution, since it amounts to calling for the 34% of veterans who voted for Harris to be fucked good and hard too. That's a population that includes Tim Walz, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, and a hell of a lot of Wonkette readers who I can name, and so can you.
So no, let's not be calling for collective punishment of sinful groups. And yes, we still prohibit calls for violence in general. This is not because some people aren't assholes who make America objectively worse, but because this is a fucking civilized place, fuckers. It's a blog, and venting your violent fantasies really will not do anything to bring the change we need.
I know that a lot of us are pissed off about the election, and on top of that a lot of us are further having very legitimate emotions related to the murder of that insurance CEO, either seeing it as a proxy for rage at how fucked this nation's health "system" is, or being horrified that people are talking about shooting a lot more CEOs who all have it coming.
Just a reminder that the GODDAMNNED COMMENTING RULES REMAIN IN EFFECT, PLEASE AND THANK YOU AND HAVE A STRESS FREE GODDAMNED WEEKEND.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rules-for-commenting-radicals
Look, obviously murder is bad. That goes (almost) without saying.
But it is interesting to note that the last time the climate for getting away with murder of a billionaire was this favourable "fetchez les tumbrels" was the most popular search on Google.