Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Wednesday that Ukrainian government workers could face delays in the payment of their salaries or pensions if the US and the EU do not approve new aid packages soon.
“The support of partners is extremely critical,” Svyrydenko said, according to Financial Times. “We need it urgently.”
The US has been funding the Ukrainian government with tens of billions of dollars through a form of assistance known as direct budgetary aid, which pays for government services and salaries and even subsidizes small businesses. But that aid has all dried up as Congress has yet to approve the over $60 billion President Biden is seeking to fund the proxy war in Ukraine and prop up the Zelensky government.
The EU has been trying to push through a 50 billion euro aid package for Ukraine that would be disbursed over four years, but it has been vetoed by Hungary. EU officials are set to meet on February 1 to try to push through the funds again, but it’s unclear if Budapest will approve.
Republicans in Congress are holding out on approving the new spending on the Ukraine war until Democrats agree to significant changes to border policies and immigration laws. Senate negotiators failed to reach a deal before the holiday recess and won’t be returning to Washington until after the New Year.
Svyrydenko said if the new aid is not approved soon, Ukraine’s economy will be pushed into “survival” mode. Kyiv may have to delay paying wages for 500,000 civil servants and 1.4 million teachers and benefits for 10 million pensioners.
It’s verifiably insane to pay for Ukrainian pensioners while talking about cuts to medicare or social security for US citizens. Stop the war and let them drive their own economy.
Which politicians have sponsored bills to cut Medicare or Social Security?
The last time the Republicans even CLAIMED they were cutting Medicare was in the early 1990s, when by “cut” they meant “only a 4.1% annual increase instead of the 5.5% Bill Clinton requested.”
The Social Security COLA for 2023 was 8.7%.
Both sides of the uniparty have been trying to put cuts on the table.
Feel free to point to the bill if you can.
Dread is right. If you haven’t understood the “everthing is on the table” at every budget impasse over the last 23 yrs, you weren’t paying attention.
At one point Biden himself strongly supported it.
Well, if it was “on the table,” presumably you can point to the part of the table where the bill was.
OK, it’s a central tenet of neo-liberalism, to privatize all pensions (invest SS on Wall St.) and health care, both corporate and gov’t.
AGREED 1000 percent. They snuck it into our consciousness via numerous ads, “News Reports about insolvency”, “Boeing” paid for documentaries, and even in TV programs like “House of Cards.” I stopped watching CNN after a segment paid for by Boeing was trying to convince me that it’s more financially responsible if they cut Social Security and Medicare. Here’s a prediction: If Biden “wins” the elections, there’s going to be a major push not only to put it on the table but also squeeze it into the holes in our skulls they’re using for our brainwashing right now.
That’s not a real response to Knapp’s challenge. It amounts to merely claiming that it’s the sort of thing “they” do.
It’s not yet a bill but a slow chipping away. Biden has said multiple times in the senate that there needs to be cuts. The GOP writ large has said the same. It is always under the guise of “ saving it”.
Particularly from the Democratic side of the table.
Agreed. See my response below to Robert.
Whether that’s true or not depends on what you mean by “on the table.” If you mean just talking about vague ideas, certainly there are always pols who say things, aimed at selected audiences, that they know are going absolutely nowhere in the real world. In the real world of the US, no one who wants to be elected or reelected to Congress is going to actually try to cut Medicare or Social Security.
For that matter, no politician who doesn’t want to risk being shot at a campaign rally is going to do that. Motherhood and apple pie may not be as popular in America, or as important to as many Americans, as those programs.
I would think it would be a phasing out kind of thing. Watering down future benefits of people who haven’t been born yet. It was a tactic our union used to use. Keep benefits for those presently working since you don’t have to look into the eyes of the people you will be screwing in the future.
Just in time for the decline in life expectancy.
Yeah, there are conservative ideologues who have repeatedly proposed schemes like that. They are mostly promoting the interests of the Masters of the Wall Street Universe™, who would love to get their hands on the piles of money that now funds Social Security. They are often able to convince younger people that the program will be broke before they become eligible for benefits, so they can muster some voter support.
But Social Security is a defined-benefits program while private-sector investing is gambling. So far, very large super-majorities have always supported the existing system. Typically 70-80% of Americans consistently say that they want to keep and improve Medicare and Social Security, including removing the cap that exempts income over $400K annually from contributions. People dependent on voters don’t seriously mess with numbers like that.
“Typically 70-80% of Americans consistently say that they want to keep and improve Medicare and Social Security, including removing the cap that exempts income over $400K annually from contributions.”
The latter is unsurprising. When one is getting screwed on the return on one’s own “contributions” to a scam, picking other people’s pockets more deeply for bigger involuntary “contributions” always seems attractive.
Biden has wanted cut through all of his years in the senate and even as VP. He wouldn’t do it before an election.
It’s always before an election.
No. He’ll pretend he’s protecting people.
At no time in history (let alone during Joe Biden’s career) has it not been “before an election.”
He is not going to run on cutting entitlements, sorry but that is plain stupid, no other word for it.
Agreed.
And he’s not going to actually cut entitlements, either.
It’s always before an election, except when one is not running again, at which point no one cares what one thinks.
If reelected, he will cut whatever is necessary to get an agreement for the war machine. Or his handlers will, I should say.
Biden cut SNAP benefits in a budget compromise. He let people get kicked off medicaid who were actually eligible. This is in concert with red states. It all comes in small doses until it’s carved out. It always happens after fearmongering about government shutdowns.
Interesting, but since we were talking about Medicare, not Medicad, and Social Security, not SNAP, not really applicable.
Did the cuts to SNAP get it back down to 2020 levels? It went from $79.1 billion in 2020 to $113.74 billion in 2021 for a reason, just like Medicaid enrollment increased by 11.5% during that time period. Do you happen to remember if anything happened in 2020 that might have been considered a good reason for the massive increases? If so, is that thing still a thing?
Yes, but it is the same tactic used to dismantle all entitlements. Do you think people who lost jobs and businesses are suddenly whole? The people being removed from medicaid qualify by today’s standards not by pandemic standards.
Which “entitlements” do you fantasize have been “dismantled?”
People being kicked off SNAP and medicaid. Medicare privatization that curbs coverage, via denials.
The people being “kicked off” SNAP and Medicaid now were the people who got an emergency limited-time favor from Uncle Sugar due to the pandemic. Which has been over for some time now.
Medicare faux-“privatization” as it has existed so far has consisted of allowing people to supplement standard Medicare benefits with low-cost OPTIONAL plans.
Except that many are being automatically enrolled without consent and little niceties are covered while more serious needs are held back. Further, the private insurers have been caught in fraud, stealing money from the government and taking a large percentage for profit in general rather than directing it toward care.
And again, the people who are being kicked off medicaid qualify under requirements for today, not by pandemic standards. It seems you are against social safety nets for anyone, so trying to discuss this with you is like banging hands on a brick wall.
“It seems you are against social safety nets for anyone”
1) That’s irrelevant to whether the things that you keep fantasizing about have or have not happened. They haven’t. That’s just a fact, regardless of what I think about them.
2) I’m all in favor of social safety nets. I’m not in favor of government-run scams fraudulently passed off as social safety nets.
It’s not at all irrelevant when you use terms like “uncle sugar” for programs that could mean life or death for people.
Those programs DO mean life or death for people.
You seem to think it’s a good thing for people’s lives to be in the hands of death cultists.
I don’t.
The people who provide the actual care aren’t death cultists.
Really?
Do you happen to know who agitated for medical licensing, and why?
Does your doctor want to kill you? If so, I suggest you find an alternative.
People, meaning voters, get nervous when they hear such talk – as well they should.
There has been shit thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Raising the retirement age to 70 is one I have heard.
The only politician to seriously address the impending insolvency of Social Security in the last eight years, at least that I’ve noticed, was Chris Christie in 2016. His plan involved raising the retirement age by one month each year until the program was revenue-neutral, and also means-testing it (if your income for the year was more than $200k, no Social Security check).
I’m not personally invested in “saving” the Ponzi scheme, and have always assumed that it won’t be there for me when I retire. But if it IS to be “saved,” it’s going to have to change. And none of those in power have made any serious attempt to change it.
AS EARLY AS 1984 and as recently as 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden called for cuts to Social Security in the name of saving the program and balancing the federal budget…“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he told the Senate in 1995. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.” (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)…BIDEN’S FIXATION on cutting Social Security dates back to the Reagan era. One of Ronald Reagan’s first major moves as president was to implement a mammoth tax cut, tilted toward the wealthy, and to increase defense spending. Biden, a Delaware senator at the time, supported both moves. The heightened spending and reduced revenue focused public attention on the debt and deficit, giving fuel to a push for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
In the midst of that debate, Biden teamed up with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to call for a freeze on federal spending, and insisted on including Social Security in that freeze, even as the Reagan administration fought to protect the program from cuts. …
As vice president, Biden was involved in multiple administration attempts to cut Social Security as part of a “grand bargain” with Republicans, all of them blocked by tea party Republicans, who couldn’t agree to any tax increases. In 2014, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said at a conservative event that Biden had privately told him he was supporting of raising the retirement age and means-testing Social Security benefits. “I asked the vice president, don’t we have to raise the age? Wouldn’t means-testing and raising the age solve the problem?” Paul recounted , with Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on stage, adding that Biden said, “Yes in private, but will not say it in public.” Paul hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
A few years later, at a Brookings Institution event in April 2018, Biden addressed Social Security again. “Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code. What’s the first thing he decided we had to go after? Social Security and Medicare. Now, we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare,” Biden said, then added in a whisper: “That’s the only way you can find room to pay for it.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/13/biden-cuts-social-security/
Find any of those bill numbers yet?
Stop playing this game. The inside deals are worked out first, then the cuts happen in pretend compromise.
And that might happen, someday.
But it hasn’t yet.
I guess if you interpret “throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks” as “seriously addressing” then I agree with you. But here’s some shit the top three republicans running for president have thrown against the wall.
Trump:
“This proposal would not include anyone who is currently retired or about to retire. Don’t put your water skis back in the basement; it would be set for those who would retire well into the third or fourth-decade of the twenty-first century. A firm limit at age seventy makes sense for people now under forty. We’re living longer. We’re working longer. New medicines are extending healthy human life. Besides, how many times will you really want to take that trailer to the Grand Canyon?”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis voted for a budget resolution in 2013 that proposed raising the age to qualify for both Medicare and Social Security.
Haley: “What you would do is, for those in their 20s coming into the system, we would change the retirement age so that it matches life expectancy,” Haley said Thursday on Fox News.
While all of those are sensible (and probably absolutely necessary) ideas if the goal is to “save” the programs, they’re also incredibly unlikely to ever actually happen.
About a quarter of the population are 45-64 years of age and don’t want to have to wait longer to retire. Another 18% or so are beyond 65 years of age and regard any changes other than increased COLAs, etc. as a slippery slope / stalking horse that might eventually take THEIR benefits down.
Those groups are a de facto majority — they vote at higher rates, and care more about those issues than the younger demographics.
Ecept, that is, on one specific area: The higher taxes that a smaller and smaller working demographic are going to have to pay to keep a larger and larger retired demographic in benefits.
For a politician to eke out a majority, he can’t seriously piss off the older bloc with any threat that the checks will stop coming, or the younger bloc with any threat that taxes will have to rise.
Therefore, the system will almost certainly just crank along as is until it, and the government running it, collapse.
At which point, everyone will blame everyone else for everything bad.
The bet most politicians make is that they themselves will be retired (and maybe dead) before that happens.
I don’t disagree with any of that. I responded to you asking what bills republicans had sponsored that would cut medicare and social security. When I said they were “throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks”, I meant that in the sense that if some of that shit sticks, then the chance of an actual bill that does fuck with medicare and Social Security could appear.
But that’s the thing: The shit has never stuck and isn’t going to start sticking. Most people will let the whole ship go down rather than accepting one red cent less than they believe they’re owed.
A bit disingenuous, given that the GOP talking points invariably contain references to reining in SS spending due to impending insolvencies, which is obviously what ED is referring to.
Someone in Congress could win the election if they got up and said “Screw the rest of the world. It’s time we listen to the American people and address THEIR needs. It’s not America First, it’s Constitutional duty!”
The purpose of the Constitution was to put the pre-revolutionary planter/merchant aristocracy back in charge (minus a king to restrain them) and the serfs back in their place.
In that sense, the American political class remains fully committed to “constitutional duty.” They no longer have to send full armies into the field to suppress the serfs (as they did in the 1790s).
The intra-political-class factional fight that seemed settled in 1865 is threatening to break out again, though. And when it does, the serfs will once again suffer the fallout.
The American people, the REAL American people who work and pay taxes and obey the laws and respect the Constitution, did NOT vote to give welfare to a NAZI warring state practicing genocide on its own people!
So ? AND………????
The US workers will face salary and pension delays if the US government doen’t reign in deficit spending.
FJB
Too damn bad.. maybe Zelensky could sell one of his yachts.
Are you sure Zelensky has yachts to sell?
That’s funny. LOLOL. Ukraine went from threatening us that “Russia will invade us if we stop sending money” to threatening us that “Ukraine’s economy will be pushed into ‘survival’ mode.” Even their “fearmongering” war is collapsing.
What a terrible shame. I’ll lose sleep over this…. Not. Maybe Zelensky can mortgage a few of his villas to help out.
“Push” on! Why immunise them from the pain being felt by others by their war.
We’ll soon, if not already, have to pay the salaries of Israel’s bureaucracy, … and that makes Ukraine 2nd, and us 3rd, in line, … or maybe fifth, after the illegals.
Aww gee whiz. The homeless Americans are so worried the US govt won’t be able to pay for the Ukrainian pensioners. But it’s all good. Blackrock and Goldman Sachs will create enough homelessness and misery in Ukraine for it all to even out. As long as the ones in power got yachts and several mansions and vacation homes, everything will be A-ok for everyone. Don’t forget to build a bunker with your bribes and kickbacks.
LOL. Good one. But sorry, I found a typo: “Don’t forget to build a bunker
withFOR* your bribes and kickbacks.”I would say F subsidising small businesses, but Ukranians have to feed their families. Most of the men are in the trenches, dead or alive. Or, with the draft, soon will be. Since the MAGA have vetoed giving them more ammo, they may be more dead than alive. Better to go down fighting than surrender and be used by Pootin in meat-wave attacks against Poland. Live free or die.
You are welcome to sign up for the cause.
Poland huh. what do they have that Russia couldn’t supply them with in the first place.
Well, that’s their choice. But I shouldn’t have to pay for it. It’s not my war.
What a terrible shame. I’ll lose sleep over this…. Not. Maybe Zelensky can mortgage a few of his villas to help out….
no need to worry they are all dead.