From Beverly Pestel
Richland Center
To the Editor:
A term I hear a lot regarding the Trump Administration is “Cruelty is the point.” When it comes to immigrants, minorities, and LGBTQ+ that is obviously true. We see it happening day after day in the aggressive and abusive force ICE agents use and in the conditions the Administration is attempting to force on public and private institutions.
However, it is also true that to the Trump Administration and most Republican Legislators “Cruelty is irrelevant”, it simply doesn’t matter. This is obvious in the policies contained in the Big Not-So-Beautiful Bill.
Already, many families with health insurance through the Affordable Care Act are receiving notices of huge increases in their insurance premiums. This is happening because Republicans have taken away the tax credits that make the insurance affordable. This change is part of the Big Not-So-Beautiful Bill passed by Republicans. To those who voted for the Big Not-So-Bill, the cruelty of this is irrelevant, they simply don’t care. This change is projected to increase health insurance premiums for everyone as a result of a decrees in the number of people in the insurance pool.
Soon, women, infants and children will begin losing supplemental food assistance (WIC and SNAP) and as a result, some of the most vulnerable among us will go hungry.
But not everything is irrelevant to those Republican politicians who voted for the Big Not-So-Beautiful Bill. They desperately want to be re-elected. Because of that many of the policies in that bill that will hurt working families won’t be enacted until after the November 2026 election. So, between now and then they will be assuring you that no one will be kicked of Medicaid — they will. They will pretend that they did not vote to gut Medicare — they did. They will say that the imminent closing of rural hospitals is fake news — it is not.
They are counting on the fact that you’ll forget what they have voted to do to you. They are counting on the fact that by delaying much of the cruelty focused on working families in this bill until after the election, they’ll get re-elected, at which point it will all be too late for us.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have shut the government down because they spent our tax dollars by giving billionaires tax cuts and refuse Democrat’s demands to use our tax dollars to meet the needs of the American people.
