this is the thing i think is fascinating. there s a sense in that they say programs for poor people or poor programs, so medicaid for years, you can cut medicaid because it s those people. not medicare, yeah. what s happened over the years is that the economic devastation of the financial crisis and downward mobility of huge swaths of might america particularly means there s lots of folks who voted for trump who on medicaid or seniors who are home bound on meals on wheels or hall rogers from kentucky who talks about the budget being draconian, careless and counterproductive. i think there s a mismatch between kwlo they think the voters are and who they really are. i almost feel like there s a bit of optimism in that trump being undone by his own banality. some of us feared that trump was going to be able to particularly when rubs decide deficits don t matter when republicans are in power that he would be able to shore up a new constituency by turning them
a reason tom price is their focus. that s because, as you pointed out, mike, why you re a legend avenue columnist, because medicare is easiest to run on nationally. a precedent for doing this. the precedent is house republicans doing this in 2010. they ran by in large against obamacare but specifically on the fact that obamacare took money out of medicare to finance subsidies for other insurance. it took money out of medicare to prolong the program. they ran effectively on it. got back the house. democrats said we can do that again. there s a precedent going back to bush administration. not medicare but social security. 2005 bush comes in after winning re-election. decides he wants to try to do a privatize account voucher system for social security. democrats, their first big battle, is to defeat that. it predicates their comeback to winning the house in 2016. they look at this and say, okay, if trump is going to go there
administration are putting out today are true and accurate, give them the benefit of the doubt, the rosiest possible scenario, and there are many reasons not to do that given the recent track record of numbers coming out, you have to ask yourself to what end. what good have we done? we still haven t had the back end of the website fully built. we had millions kicked off their own plans involuntarily, many others who were not able to see the doctors they preferred. millions thrown out of medicare, who may or may not have been eligible before, but we don t know if they re newly eligible or not. medicaid, i m sorry, not medicare, being a system that may or may not provide actual medical benefits to people. there are studies that disagree with that. you have seniors scrambling to pay more for medicare advantage. you have businesses reworking their entire work week in order to comply and to avoid fines. i think all of that, given what we have seen at the end of this enrollment period or nea
company that leases jets, and that is just part of a multibillion dollar buying binge here for the chinese. coming up, lou dobbs on this buying binge, what the chinese are going after here in the united states and why. megyn: well, back in washington the speaker of the house today said he is waiting for a new proposal from the white house in the negotiation over how to best deal with america s debt crisis. both sides might want to check out the results of a new poll from politico. it, they polled 1,000 registered voter, and that poll shows that 76% favor government spending being cut across the board. that s more than three times the number who oppose the idea. lawmakers need to come up with a plan by december 31st, but you know what usually happens when you poll the people, they say, yes, i do. how about any program that you support? oh, no, not social security, not medicare, not medicaid, not veterans benefits, nothing that
in blowbacks, they seem like self-inflicted wounds that may have led to some people thinking, well, maybe they re not as great as i thought they were. we covered earlier in the show the unions protesting outside of a cancer benefit, and, you know, we talked about earlier this year how they went on the lawn of a bank of america executive, and his son was cowering inside by himself, and they re chanting outside. you know, those kinds of things may not help their appeal to the grander public. sure, megyn. i think those types of strong-arm tactics are inappropriate whichever side of the argument you re on. but i think the greatest thing that unions can do to win back more support from the public and, frankly, from companies and government is to negotiate in good faith and recognize that the percentage of monies that workers are going to need to contribute for health care and retirement is going to have to increase. the numbers are there. we re going to do the same thing with social secur