Michael Knowles

I think that unless you connect it to a broader program of slashing these programs and restructuring these programs, it's very difficult to see it moving the needle.

And this is kind of what I was referring to earlier.

As long as the Republican Party is the party of, yeah, we should have these gigantic social welfare systems, but we'll just make them slightly more efficient.

And the Democratic Party is that's ungenerous and you should spend more money on them.

I think you lose that argument every time.

The whole point of the if you go back to the original sort of iteration of the pushback against the welfare state, which really had to wait until Ronald Reagan, the sort of welfare queen argument, right?

The idea that people are driving around Cadillacs based on welfare.

That was an argument that was not devoted to the idea that people were bilking the welfare system purely.

And so we should crack down on the fraud.

The idea was.

We may need to cut welfare entirely or we need to heavily chop into welfare.

We need to completely restructure the system as it works.

And that culminated, of course, in actual welfare reform in the 1990s under Newt Gingrich, which is, I still think, one of the single most transformative things Republicans have done over the course of the last half century.

Well, now you look at what Republicans are talking about and they're saying, OK, you know, we'll do the Doge.

Doge will save us all the money because we'll go and we'll eliminate this line item that shouldn't have happened.

Or we'll do an investigation.

We'll cut this little piece of fraud out.

That's not going to get anybody animated.

The argument here is that Medicaid itself has huge systemic flaws.

And you need to remove those gigantic systemic flaws because Medicaid has turned into a gigantic fraud program that is not helping the people it was set out to help and many of the people it was set out to help.