Dear Bryan:
In last week’s Bonneville Democrats column, I recommended using a portion of Idaho’s projected record $1.48 billion in unallocated funding, including a $630 million budget surplus, to benefit all Idahoans: investing in public education withering from chronic underfunding, continued funding for Medicaid expansion and direct support to low-income families facing additional hardships, including winter evictions because of the pandemic.
By contrast, you urged in last week’s Bonneville Republicans column that the surplus be used for “massive tax relief” because “Idaho is loaded with cash.” Yet you expressed zero desire to invest the likely once-in-a-lifetime surplus in public education, or Idaho’s economy or to help Idahoans who have lost their jobs directly because of COVID-19.
You said you want help to go only to working people so that those who aren’t working “won’t get free cash from the state.” Yet, according to the federalpay.org website, your own law firm, Smith, Driscoll and Associates, received $133,000, and Medical Recovery Services, long associated with you, received $72,200 in Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal government this year — so, free cash from the federal government.
Let me get this straight: Your law firm and the medical debt collection company with ties to you should get $205,200 that will not need to be repaid, but someone who is laid off due to no fault of their own desperately needing temporary help for food, shelter and to try to get a different job should get nothing? To me, this is extreme hypocrisy. Add to that in your Dec. 2 column, your recommendation to cease funding for Medicaid expansion. Idaho should forfeit the 90% of federal funding for Medicaid expansion, which stimulates the economy, and lower-income workers should be deprived of medical care except in a hospital emergency room already filled with COVID-19 emergencies?
As you well know, tax cuts benefit the wealthy, and the greater the wealth, the greater the benefit. Have you forgotten that before the pandemic 40% of employed Idahoans were working hard sometimes at two or three jobs, and it is these people who most often have lost their jobs during the pandemic? Have you forgotten that lower-income people actually spend government support on products that help spur the economy, whereas tax cuts for the wealthy go into savings accounts, the stock market, individual retirement accounts — you name it — but don’t qualitatively stimulate the Idaho economy? Have you not noticed that lower-income Idahoans are desperate? Do you not care that Medicaid expansion has provided health care for the first time to 90,000 working Idahoans and potentially saved 325 lives this year?
May I suggest role-playing? Stand in line at the Community Food Basket to pick up emergency groceries that will have to last you the week, stand outside in the cold for an hour and experience the plight of jobless Idahoans facing eviction during the dead of winter, and sleep in your car tonight. Then contemplate using the surplus, instead of providing a windfall for the wealthy, to help those in desperate need and the intelligence behind the Idaho core value of empathy.
Pat Tucker is the chairwoman of the Bonneville County Democratic Central Committee.