Friday, July 8, 2011

It's only "fraud" if you are poor?

In response to an online petition I signed yesterday, I just received an email from Florida Senator Bill Nelson.  The petition asked senators not to "balance the budget" on the backs of seniors and the poor.  The email included this [my emphasis]:

     While I support reasonable cuts to discretionary spending, it is clear that we cannot balance our budget through discretionary spending cuts alone. That’s why I am pressing my colleagues to support a comprehensive approach to deficit reduction that not only eliminates duplicative programs, but also reduces extraneous procurements and phases-out unnecessary and outdated tax breaks that only benefit a few large corporations. Furthermore, we must continue efforts to curb the fraud that plagues programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which costs taxpayers billions.

So, wait. The term "fraud" is applied to the elderly and the poor, who are the major recipients of Medicare (I am among them) and Medicaid.  Meanwhile, "large corporations" are only guilty of taking advantage of "tax breaks," which are presumably at least legal?
This is why I am not a registered Demoncrat.  Very few of them are significantly more moral than the Rethuglicans.

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After a year: genocide by any other name

And the name, I learned this week, is: The Dahiya Doctrine.  Mehdi Hassan explains here .