Two weeks ago, 214 House members voted to approve a federal budget that slashes Medicaid by $10 billion. Medicaid provides health services to America’s most vulnerable — poor kids, the elderly, and pregnant women. Yes, their lives will be tougher, the anti-Medicaid contigent said, but the deficits! Entitlement spending must be scaled back! We have to restore fiscal discipline!
Now, the Senate and House are wrangling over a new highway bill. All but five of those representatives voted for the bill, which includes:
– $25 million for a “Bridge to Nowhere,” connecting two South Carolina towns with a combined population of 2,000.
– $3 million for the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, where the Packard automobile was first produced; $1.5 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; and $400,000 for the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, N.Y.
– $95 million to widen a highway in Sheboygan and Fond du Lac counties in Wisconsin – “a widening that the state Department of Transportation says is unnecessary for 15 to 20 years and that legislators approved after bypassing the DOT and a commission charged with developing major road projects.”
– $200 million for a one-mile span linking Ketchikan, Alaska, with Gravina Island. (Currently, fifty people live on Gravina Island — “they reach Ketchikan by taking a seven-minute ferry ride.”)
That’s sick.
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