Republicans Want to Make Billionaires Ineligible for Food Stamps – Their Idea of Shared Sacrifice

GOP Policy Proposal Rebuts Charges of Favoring the Wealthy

The current argument over whether or not to extend the payroll tax reduction that expires at the end of this year is partly over ways to pay for the lost revenues.  Republicans in particular want to pay for the tax cut by cutting government spending on middle and low income people.  In this way any benefit of the payroll tax cut would be lost by the loss of government benefits to the very people receiving the benefit of the tax cut and who need it the most.

Now if that logic seems tortured (remember Conservatives believe in torture, so it’s ok) there is this additional concession by the party of the wealthy.

In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.

This is obviously class warfare, and imagine the horror and disappointment by the wealthy of this totally unfounded attack on them by their allies the Republicans.  Expect the wealthy Conservatives to denounce these plans as job killers that seek to punish billionaires for their success and to rob them of their hard earned gains.

It certainly brings into question the viability of plans to allow Food Stamps to be used to pay the annual fee on an American Express Gold Card, something Conservatives have supported in the past.  Maybe the argument that billionaires have to eat the same as everybody else is just not as powerful as it once was.