Bloomberg: Obamacare 2.0 Gives Tax Relief to Clinton Voters, with Rust Belt Voters Paying More for Health Care

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

An analysis conducted by Bloomberg News found that counties who voted for President Donald Trump—particularly crucial Rust Belt states—would see “less than a third” of the tax relief that counties who voted for Hillary Clinton would under Obamacare 2.0, which would give a financial boost to the winners of globalization.

“Taxpayers in counties that backed Trump would see an annual windfall of about $6.6 billion, a Bloomberg analysis of Internal Revenue Service data shows. In counties that backed Clinton, it’d be about $21.9 billion,” Bloomberg explains, since the tax cuts in Obamacare 2.0, championed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, apply to couples earning over $250,000 and individuals earning over $200,000. Blue counties like Manhattan, filled with high-earners, would be able to avoid an additional Medicare tax under Ryan’s plan.

That’s not a surprise. Clinton’s support came from counties where large amounts of money flowed in and out, where the “winners of globalization” clustered, as Christopher Caldwell explained in the Claremont Review of Books:

Any place that has political power becomes a choke-point through which global money streams must pass. Such places are sheltered from globalization’s storms. They tend to grow. Austin, Texas, adds tens of thousands of residents a year, and is now the country’s 11th-largest city. The four richest counties in the United States are all in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Resources are sucked from almost everywhere into political capitals and a few high-tech centers and university towns allied with them, where ambitious people settle and constitute a class. The Democratic Party is the party of that class, the class of the winners of globalization.

There are now just three regions of the country in which Democrats dominate—New England, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Otherwise, the party’s support comes from the archipelago of powerful New Economy cities it controls. Washington, D.C., with its 93-to-4 partisan breakdown, is not that unusual. Hillary Clinton won Cambridge, Massachusetts, by 89 to 6 and San Francisco by 86 to 9. Here, where the future of the country is mapped out, the “rest” of the country has become invisible, indecipherable, foreign.

Trump’s sprawling base of support spans across the country: The losers of globalization. As Michael Patrick Leahy reported at Breitbart News shortly after the election: “Donald Trump won an overwhelming 7.5 million popular vote victory in 3,084 of the country’s 3,141 counties or county equivalents in America’s heartland… Hillary Clinton, in contrast, had an 8.2 million vote margin in a narrow band of 52 coastal counties and five ‘county equivalent’ cities stretching from San Diego to Seattle on the West Coast and Northern Virginia to Boston on the East Coast.”

And, Obamacare 2.0 wouldn’t let many Trump voters to keep more of their money. Earlier, the Washington Post reported that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will see their tax credits decrease under Obamacare 2.0: “If you’re a 40-year-old making $75,000 a year, you’re going to get a 75 percent or higher increase to your tax credits—a beneficial situation for you. If, however, you’re a 60-year-old making $30,000 a year, you’re going to see a reduction in those tax credits (unless you live in Upstate New York or Massachusetts or parts of central Texas).”

The Congressional Budget Office also estimates that Obamacare 2.0 could cause up to 24 million to lose their health insurance plans by 2026.

Obamacare 2.0 also includes an arbitrary “continuous coverage” provision that inflicts a year-long, 30 percent increase as a penalty on those who go without insurance for more than 63 days. That will take money from middle class voters and put it in the hands of insurance companies. Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz sparked an uproar after he called this wealth transfer “an investment” that voters should make over buying a new iPhone.

Massive wealth disparities and concentrated wealth at the top of society have led to growing political unrest, said Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this week.

“But the overview here is that all the wealth, basically, in the last 10 years, has stuck to the top end. That’s one of the reasons we’ve had all the political turmoil, as you know,” Carlson said. “And so, kind of a hard sell to say ‘Yeah, we’re gonna repeal Obamacare, but we’re gonna send more money to the people who’ve already gotten the richest over the last 10 years.’ I mean, that’s what this does, no? I’m not a leftist, it’s just—that’s true.”

“I’m not that concerned about it,” Ryan said. Ryan may not be interested in political upheaval, but it’s interested in him. Passing Obamacare—and the stimulus package—led to the Tea Party revolt in 2010. Enormous Obamacare premium increases revealed in October hurt Clinton’s campaign. Trump is more popular than Ryan in Ryan’s congressional district, while Obamacare 2.0 is unpopular: Only 37 percent support it, while 46 percent oppose it. The rumblings against the bill could cost Ryan his Speakership, or even his Congressional seat while handing power to Democrats.

Still, some voters feel ambivalent towards the tax cuts in Obamacare 2.0 and still support Trump.

“It pisses me off, but my wife pisses me off, too, and we’re still married,” one Trump supporter told Bloomberg.

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