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    Close-up of social security cards.

    Social Security Is a Sacred Contract—Not Something To Be Trifled With

    Let this be a warning to the Republican Party and any lawmaker who dare attack this life-saving program.

    Tom Conway
    Jan 30, 2023

    Cliff Carlton was the 10th of 11 children and one of three still living at home when his father, a coal miner, died unexpectedly at 67.

    Only his dad’s Social Security benefits, along with vegetables from the family’s small farm in southwestern Virginia, kept the household afloat during the lean years that followed.

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    Inequality.org
    Social Security
    A person holding a big U.S. coin

    GOP's Farcical Debt Ceiling Ploy Deserves Farcical Response: Mint a Really, Really Big Coin

    Refusing to raise the debt ceiling amounts to prohibiting the government from paying debt that Congress already incurred.

    Karen Dolan
    Jan 27, 2023

    Key House Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security so badly that they’re willing to risk a global financial crisis over it.

    Their weapon? The debt ceiling, an arbitrary, purely political limit on federal borrowing that bears no meaningful relationship to the health of the economy. It’s a farcical problem — and demands an equally farcical solution.

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    MarketWatch
    debt ceiling
    lorida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis points

    Dear Opponents of Ron DeSantis Everywhere: Get Your Shit Together

    People in Florida of all political persuasions often talk of Ron DeSantis as if he is a formidable juggernaut that Democrats can't hope to restrain. This is false.

    Hamilton Nolan
    Jan 26, 2023

    The entire state of Florida, home to 22 million people, is currently being run as a giant Fox News campaign ad for the Ron DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign. As a method of crafting responsible public policy, this approach has a number of drawbacks. Yet when you set aside the politically archaic concept of “good governing,” it becomes clear that the DeSantis culture war strategy is highly effective air cover for the more substantive Republican project of class war. As he waves his hands and dazzles us with soundbites, he is trying to break the back of the Florida teachers union, which would rank as one of the most profoundly damaging blows to the labor movement in recent years. If the state’s incompetent Democratic Party can’t rally itself to cut through the torrent of performative bullshit and bigotry, we will soon wake up and find that this whiny, bullet-headed ex-jock has done to Florida’s workers what former Republican Gov. Scott Walker did to Wisconsin’s.

    This week, DeSantis announced that he is proposing legislation designed to decimate the power of Florida’s teachers unions. It would prohibit dues checkoff, making it excruciating for the unions to collect dues, and outlaw teachers doing union work or handing out union materials on the job. He is also trying to undermine collective bargaining by creating a pot of money dedicated to giving raises to teachers — but setting an expiration date on it, and then claiming that unions fighting for better contracts are placing their members at risk of losing access to that money altogether. It’s not hard to see the logic. In a state where less than 5% of workers are union members, the teachers union is one of the only real bastions of Democratic-leaning labor power. As is always the case when Republicans howl about teachers unions, the pious pose of caring about parents is cover for a deliberate plan to destroy one of the few types of unions that are able to carry influence, even in red states. All of that studied concern for parents never seems to extend to the issue of providing a well-funded public education system for their kids.

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    Opinion
    Ron DeSantis
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