The federal government shutdown is hurting Massachusetts. Some 45,000 federal jobs are on the road; the state is shedding $18.6 million in tourism weekly; infrastructure tasks are being delayed; veterans are ready for important providers; and households that depend on SNAP and EBT advantages are questioning the place their subsequent meal will come from.
The state’s fifth District — a hub for analysis, medication and academia — is bracing for cuts to analysis contracts, and labs are having to cut back hiring, with ripple results for all the financial system.
For Rep. Katherine Clark, the second-highest-ranking Home Democrat, this carnage is a political pawn. “Shutdowns are horrible, and, after all, there can be households which are going to undergo,” she mentioned on Fox Information. “But it surely is among the few leverage occasions we have now.”
Her phrases are callous, however in a way, we must always be pleased about her honesty, as a result of it means Democrats are saying the quiet half out loud: The occasion is holding the federal government hostage to stay it to political enemies, not caring whether or not the victims who get caught within the crossfire are veterans or single mothers or most cancers researchers or another constituents they’re charged with representing.
And what are Democrats holding the federal government hostage over? Obamacare subsidies from the COVID period that Democrats claimed had been non permanent 4 years in the past.
The American Rescue Plan, signed into regulation by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, expanded the eligibility standards for enhanced premium tax credit. These had been by no means supposed to be everlasting, and if allowed to proceed past their present length, they’d grow to be fiscally unsustainable. The Congressional Funds Workplace and Joint Committee on Taxation discovered that these credit would improve federal deficits by $34.2 billion over a decade.
Worse but, these subsidies have had a distorting impact: suppliers have been in a position to cost increased and better charges as a result of they know the federal government can pay them greater and larger subsidies, no matter how a lot they cost. Which means the general price will increase, and tax {dollars} go into the pockets of medical insurance executives.
Whereas it’s close to inconceivable to justify maintaining the federal government shut down for this lengthy for any motive, it’s downright absurd to close the federal government down over subsidies that Democrats wrote to run out for a deceptively named piece of laws that has not given People extra inexpensive well being care.
That is what folks in my Massachusetts district are getting used as “leverage” for: a system that isn’t even serving them, and that has made healthcare much less accessible and fewer inexpensive for them.
It’s unconscionable {that a} congresswoman, particularly given her place because the Democratic Whip, is sitting round taking part in political video games in Washington whereas throwing Massachusetts — and the nation — beneath the bus.
Jennifer Nassour is a former chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Social gathering and is host of the PoliticalContessa podcast./InsideSources
