A Postcard Full of Lies

I don't know about you, but I've gotten more than what seems like my share of mailings from the Mafia Mulligan campaign. If they were at all careful with their money and knew how to use a mailing list, they would know that it's a waste to send anything to someone with my name at my address.

Yet I have received at least four multi-piece fundraising letters from the national campaign, and today I got this postcard from the Republican Party of Minnesota:

Yeah, I guess they know that I'm approaching the age of retirement and Medicare, but so what? They also know what party I'm registered in and that this is a waste of their money, or they should if they have any idea what they're doing. (Not a guarantee with the Minnesota Republican party.)

But that's not why I'm writing about, as evidenced by the fact that I haven't written about the earlier wasted fundraising letters. I'm writing because of the lies all over this postcard.

Social Security and Medicare are not stronger than ever under this administration. Mulligan may have promised back in 2016 to protect them, but his budgets have cut them. For instance, Medicare faces a $500 billion cut through 2030 in his 2021 budget.

Most recently, Mulligan proposed suspending the payroll tax (what we used to call FICA) that funds both programs through the end of the year. In his usual half-assed way, he later said he would extend the suspension beyond December 31 and then said he would "terminate" the tax altogether. That means defunding the programs, especially Medicare, which has almost no cushion in reserve from past payroll tax payments compared to Social Security. Here's a Snopes article documenting all that.

On the postcard, it also says that Mulligan "issued the first-ever executive order protecting pre-existing conditions." I suppose that may be technically true in the sense of issuing an executive order, a piece of paper, but since pre-existing conditions are already covered under the Affordable Care Act, his executive order doesn't matter and it's just like his claim to have signed the Veterans Choice healthcare law, which was signed by Obama. 

The claim that he "capped the price of insulin for seniors at $35 dollars" (sic) is also not true, though it is a bit less clearly false. It might be true at some later date, but it's not true yet, according to Snopes and a number of other sources. Again, he issued an executive order, but that's not really how these things are done so it hasn't had an effect on prices yet, though it might at some time, somehow. And I wonder if it does, if it will affect all the types of insulin that real diabetics use (long-acting versions, doses that are already setup in disposable injectibles, the kind that is needed to use with pumps, etc.) rather than the cheapest form that hypothetical diabetics could use (and should be using but don't, for some never-mentioned reason, according to some Minnesota Republicans who write op-eds).

I know, I know, he lies all the time. It just makes me angry to see it all in print in my own house. 

Minnesota Republicans, how do you sleep at night?