‘Traitor’ Kevin McCarthy Is Demanding Work Requirements For ‘All’ Social Safety Net Programs (Social Security and Medicare Too)

‘Traitor” Kevin McCarthy, who led 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the 2020 election results even after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, and whose MAGA Republican economic terrorists are now holding the country hostage over a manufactured debt ceiling crisis to demand extortion from Democrats on the budget, is now making the ridiculous extortion demand for work requirements on ‘all the programs’ including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP:

Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is under fire after announcing Tuesday he is demanding work requirements for “all” social safety net programs as part of his debt ceiling “negotiations” with President Joe Biden.

For decades, study after study show that work requirements are not effective for many reasons, including many people on programs such as Medicaid are not physically able to work, while Americans using other programs, like SNAP, often called food stamps, are not able to work for lack of child or elder care. And many Americans accessing social safety net programs are working already.

Speaker McCarthy, without evidence, baselessly disagrees. [He is a fucking idiot.]

Studies have not found that work requirements significantly boost employment. Instead, there is evidence that work requirements cause many people to lose their benefits. https://t.co/aGRHnbfL87

— The Recount (@therecount) May 16, 2023

“What work requirements actually do is help people get a job,” he told reporters. Work requirements do nothing to “help” people get jobs, they simply threaten them with increased hunger, emotional trauma, and disease if they do not.

“Every data point shows that, and it helps people move forward,” McCarthy said, which is also false.

McCarthy claims – again, falsely – “the public wants it, both parties want it.”

“The idea that they want to put us into a default because they will not work with on that [sic] is ludicrous to me.”

Republicans are the ones pushing for a default, not Democrats.

Asked by a reporter if he is “talking about SNAP, which program are you talking about specifically?” the Speaker freely admitted, “Look, we’re talking about all the programs.”

He then began to repeat his false claims.

“Because it helps people get into a job.”

McCarthy also claimed that forcing people who may not be physically or emotionally able to work, or who may have responsibilities that preclude them from leaving the house to go to a job “helps the supply chain.”

What the Speaker is ignoring are the millions of undocumented immigrants currently within our borders desperate to work at jobs that won’t threaten their ability to stay in the country – not to mention the thousands of others coming to the U.S. seeking asylum or a way out of poverty, gangs, drugs, disease, and corruption.

“The Trump Administration took the worst aspects of the Clinton policy and made them exponentially vindictive, and even less effective at helping the poor,” Anne Kim in 2021 wrote at Washington Monthly. “Arkansas’ Medicaid work rules, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report, forced the disenrollment of about 18,000 people but prompted ‘no increase in employment or other community engagement activities.’ The tightening of SNAP or food stamp work requirements was especially nonsensical, given the program’s traditionally countercyclical role as a safety net for Americans who’ve lost their jobs during a recession. ‘Taking away food benefits doesn’t make it easier for anyone to find a stable job; it just makes people hungrier,’ as Ed Bolen of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently wrote.”

Despite McCarthy’s apparent implication that Americans accessing social safety net benefits are not currently working, in fact many who are, do.

Earlier this year the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a state-by-state report that also finds nationally, more than 41% of SNAP recipients are in working families.

And last month the Kaiser Family Foundation published a report showing the majority of adults using Medicaid who were also able to work, are working.

“Speaker McCarthy’s big red line is that we MUST impose work requirements that don’t actual lead to more work but do make the process so cumbersome that millions of people fall out of the program due to red tape – or else he’ll force us to default,” observed Bobby Kogan, the senior director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress.

For those on Social Security and Medicare, you earned those benefits by working and paying FICA taxes into the system. “It’s your money!” You don’t have to keep working to get your benefits.

And why are we not imposing work requirements on corporate welfare, e.g., subsidies and tax credits? And why not work requirements on the investor class aka the predator class, for capital gains?

Kevin McCarthy has said he wants to "lock in" and extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2025.

Extending those cuts would add a cumulative *$3.5 trillion* to the deficit through 2033, per new @USCBO estimates.

So much for fiscal responsibility. pic.twitter.com/Dl8CfA4sjF

— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) May 16, 2023

There is no good faith on the part of Republicans in these hostage negotiations. Ex-president Trump and many of his economic terrorist supporters in Congress have called for a default on the debt and the economic disaster it would cause, because they believe chaos would inure to their benefit, that somehow the public will reward them for their economic terrorism and the damage it would inflict on the U.S. and global economy.

The feckless media no doubt will parrot Republican talking points about how it is President Biden’s fault for simply not agreeing to their extremist extortion demands and pay the ransom. Well fuck those losers in the media who are aiding and abetting this economic terrorism from MAGA Republicans. They are complicit in this crime and are equally culpable.