Third Quiz – New Child Welfare + Medicaid Work Requirement

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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

Third Quiz – New Child Welfare + Medicaid Work Requirement

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Third Short Quiz - The New Refundable Child Tax Credit and The New Medicaid Work Requirement


A. The New Refundable Child Tax Credit

1. What is the difference between a “tax credit” and a “tax deduction”?

2. Do members of the Mainstream Media often confuse the two?

3. What is the difference between a “plain-vanilla garden-variety” tax credit and a REFUNDABLE tax credit?

4. Do our pols think that REFUNDABLE tax credits are wonderful because the pols don’t have to call them “subsidies” in the case of those that benefit business or affluent individuals, or “welfare” in the case of those that benefit the poor?

5. Prior to last month’s $1.5 TRillion “Tax Reform” bill, were there any REFUNDABLE tax credits that benefitted the nation’s poor?

6. Does the new Tax Reform Act provide a child tax credit of $2,000/year, of which $1,400/year is REFUNDABLE?

7. Did Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) loudly proclaim that he was opposed to the Tax Reform legislation because only $1,100/year of the new child tax credit would be REFUNDABLE -- forcing the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to increase the REFUNDABLE portion to $1,400/year in order to secure Senator Rubio’s vote?

8. Will the new $1,400/year REFUNDABLE child tax credit lift quite a few Americans households out of $2.00 per person per day “extreme poverty”?


B. The New Medicaid Work Requirement

1. Since its original enactment in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Program, has Medicaid ever had a work requirement?

2. Did the Trump Administration announce on this past Thursday (1/11/2018) that it will permit states to impose a work requirement?

3. Did the Trump Administration explain that there were 10 states that wanted to run demonstration projects for testing requirements for work or other types of community engagement like training, education, job search, volunteer activities and care giving?

4. Did the Trump Administration also explain that the new Medicaid work requirement would be similar to the work requirement of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF)?

5. Is TANF the short-term (60 months lifetime cap) DISCRETIONARY program (like Medicaid, TANF is administered by the states, and states have always been authorized under TANF to pay NO BENEFITS whatsoever) with which President Bill Clinton replaced in 1996 the Aid to Families With Dependent Children Program (AFDC) which had been THE CORNERSTONE OF FDR’S “NEW DEAL” FOR 61 YEARS?

6. Was Medicaid enacted in 1965 to provide completely-free medical care to Americans living below the poverty line?

7. Did Obamacare extend Medicaid (in participating states) to the next-lowest economic tier?

8. Did quite a few states decline to participate in the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid because the U.S. government would only bear a portion of the cost of the expansion, and because Obamacare only offered a “promise” (each Congress has only a two-year life and cannot bind future Congresses to anything -- and, indeed, each two-year Congress cannot even bind itself against changing its own mind) to pay a portion of the cost of the expansion for only a limited time?

9. Since Republicans talked incessantly last summer about “Repealing and Replacing” Obamacare with “block grants” to the states, is the Trump Administration’s approval of state work requirements for Medicaid probably meant to pave the way for those states that “stuck their necks out” and elected to implement the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, to “pull their necks back in”?

10. Until such time as Obamacare is “repealed and replaced” by block grants to the states, is the new work requirement likely to enable states to salvage some of their Medicaid benefits for the Obamacare tier above the poverty line at the expense of Medicaid benefits for the traditionally-served tier of Americans below the poverty line?

11. Is this ploy by our pols to “Rob Peter to Pay Paul” reminiscent of Obamacare’s plundering in 2009 the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” of $500 Billion (that’s a HALF TRillion) to help “pay for” Obamacare? Did AARP, incredibly, approve stealing this $500 Billion from the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund”? Was that theft different from the normal investment by the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” in U.S. Government Securities because the theft would never be repaid and the U.S. Government Securities presumably will be?

12. BTW, when President Obama had his “High Noon” showdown with Republicans over “shutting down the government” for 16 days in 2013, did Obama have the audacity to prevent Social Security from being paid during the “shut down” even though the so-called “Social Security Trust Fund” was solvent and its Trustees violated their fiduciary duties by obeying Obama’s illegal order for them to violate their fiduciary duties?

13. Since President Reagan’s 1986 legislation (requiring Hospital Emergency Rooms to provide medical treatment for everyone REGARDLESS OF ABILITY TO PAY) will provide a significant amount of medical care for America’s poor who will now be excluded from Medicaid by the new work requirement, isn’t the new work requirement ALSO a thinly-disguised ploy to shift significant Medicaid costs onto the hospitals and onto insurance companies (which can be expected to raise premiums for the Americans served by those hospitals)?

14. BTW, do public-opinion surveys show that many of the nation’s poor actually prefer medical treatment dispensed by Hospital Emergency Rooms to Medicaid?

15. And also BTW, did we launch one of our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail Campaigns following our 7/12/2017 meeting to provide “Medicare For All” as a means of SAVING THE U.S. GOVERNMENT $300 BILLION/YEAR?

16. And shouldn’t TRUE CONSERVATIVES favor saving the U.S. Government $300 BILLION/year (not just $300 BILLION over a 10-year period which is the time span our pols love to talk about), even if we (quoting Rhett Butler from “Gone With The Wind”) “frankly…don’t give a damn” about our poor???

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