re: #5 Charles

Well, not everyone — it doesn’t screw the GOP’s corporate masters.

Actually, them too.

Vaccination isn’t safe for everyone. Immuno-compromised individuals may contract the disease from the vaccine, and because of that risk, they cannot safely be vaccinated.

If most people are vaccinated, the population at large will not sustain a chain reaction of infection and transmission. Persons currently undergoing chemotherapy, say, will not be at any real risk, because the disease can’t get an epidemic up and running.

This particular proposed spending cut is the pluperfect stupidest cut imaginable. You could zero out spending on electricity for stoplights and do less harm.

///well, no, you couldn’t. But dang, it’s in the same ball park.///

On the other hand, not all of the spending in the proposed budget brings benefits proportionate to the cost. We’re spending far too much. Trillion-plus deficits as far as the eye can see just won’t do, and there are limits to how much tax can actually be collected. People work for after-tax income and at sufficiently high rates, raising rates yet further only reduces the revenue realized. This must be clear: how much tax would one get from taxing packs of cigarettes $10 each? $50? $1000?

There must be cuts, and big ones, and these cuts must trim entitlement programs as well as “discretionary” spending. Neither party has bitten this bullet yet. How about making all social security benefits taxable, for example? That would have almost no impact on the after tax SS receipts of the poor or even the middling OK tier, but it would trim back the after tax size of benefits paid to the upper tiers.

How about limiting increases in SS benefits to inflation, rather than indexing those to both inflation and average wages?

How about limiting medicare and medicaid funding of extraordinarily expensive procedures that offer very limited benefits? Liver transplants, heart transplants, etc., for those who will not live much longer whether they get such a transplant or not? Yeah, “death panels”. But we all must die sooner or later. Most of us would not spend our kids’ inheritance to buy a few more months of life. Why do, collectively, what we would not do for ourselves? It’s a perfect instance of the golden rule, if you look at it right: Only ask others to do for you, what you would do for yourself if you could.