Don't you see, it's part of the plan: Take it off the public budget and pile it on the individual:

[Nikki Stone1]

Health insurance
Charter Schools
Eventually Medicare and Social Security

Wait til most highways are privatized and you pay tolls of $5/each way during rush hour just to get to work and back, like we do on the 73 in SoCal.

The public infrastructure is being sold at bottom dollar to the highest bidders, our tax money pours into their coffers anyway, and we STILL have to pay usage fees to corporations with absolutely no limits on what they charge.

It is part of a larger plan.

It's what the IMF has been doing to the Third World since the 70s.

[Captain Hilts]

1. The individualization of personal risk has been going on for a long time. nt

[FiveGoodMen]

2. That DOES sound like the plan

[KrR]

8. No it doesn't

Medicaid is being expanded and Medicare Advantage cutback.

[MichiganVote]

3. That IS the plan. And it will result in a less civilized society.

[Nikki Stone1]

4. Yes it will

.

[leftstreet]

5. Well, there are a whole bunch of Green Jobs coming....or something...

so it'll be okay

K&R

[truedelphi]

6. very good analysis, only you are leaving out the part where Our

Glorious Leader gets to gloat about how much he has improved our lives!

That is the most fun part of all. Listening to all the gloating.

[KrR]

7. Nothing in HCR is being 'taken off the public budget'

As a matter of fact Medicare Advantage which is incremental privatized Medicare... is being cutback.
Also, Medicaid is being expanded.

[bridgit]

9. Yup: starve the beast - v. To cut taxes with the intent of using the reduced revenue...

...as an excuse to drastically reduce the size and number of services offered by a government

Example Citations:

The starve-the-beast doctrine is now firmly within the conservative mainstream. George W. Bush himself seemed to endorse the doctrine as the budget surplus evaporated: in August 2001 he called the disappearing surplus "incredibly positive news" because it would put Congress in a "fiscal straitjacket."

Like supply-siders, starve-the-beasters favor tax cuts mainly for people with high incomes. That is partly because, like supply-siders, they emphasize the incentive effects of cutting the top marginal rate; they just don't believe that those incentive effects are big enough that tax cuts pay for themselves. But they have another reason for cutting taxes mainly on the rich, which has become known as the "lucky ducky" argument.

Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these "lucky duckies." (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their "blood boiling with tax rage."
—Paul Krugman, "The Tax-Cut Con," The New York Times, September 14, 2003

http://www.wordspy.com/words/starvethebeast.asp

Disgusting All!