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WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU)- Today's rally in Wilkes-Barre centers around the ongoing debate over the controversial Republican healthcare bill.

Right now, lawmakers are discussing reforming and possibly repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Some of the biggest concerns from Democrats with the two proposals? Dramatic cuts to Medicaid- spending would be cut by 26%. Those cuts would start in 2021 and accelerate into 2025.

Opponents of the healthcare bill, which will be front and center in Washington after the July Fourth holiday say it wil lhave a devastating impact on people who rely on Medicaid for healthcare.

Among those impacted- the poor and those who are caught up in the ongoing opioid epidemic.

They all came from all walks of life, but with a single mission: stop the Republican driven healthcare bill.

"How absolutely inhumane," says Representative Eddie Pashinski. "We're going to cut the program and we're going to take the money away from the program so people who need it won't have it and give it to people who don't need it. The millionaires and billionaires."

The folks here are concerned the legislation would eliminate funding for all types of treatment programs. The biggest concerns? The opiod crisis. Based on the current pace, 142 people are expected to die from overdoses in LuzerneCounty this year.

"If you do the math, that breaks down to one person every two and a half days," says Steve Ross, Director of theLuzerne-WyomingCounty Drug-Alcohol Agency.

"We are making progress because of Medicaid expansion," says Senator Bob Casey.

Casey is one of the Democrats leading the charge against both versions of the Republican replacement for Obamacare.

"We cannot afford this Senate bill to pass," says Casey. "It will cut that Medicaid, city those services to people who are benefiting right now from the kinds of services, those kinds of treatment."

Other folks in the crowd like Martha Hart say they rely on Medicaid for their basic healthcare. If it's not there, they will be out in the cold.

"Medicaid means so much to me," says Hart. "I'm on disability. I worked for 35 years in healthcare myself. The only way for me to get anything is to go on disability."

Casey also says he's concerned about the recent rise in the numbers of people addicted to meth. He says those people are being forgotten in the broader concern with the opioid epidemic. He wants to make sure funding is available to help those folks as well.

Senators return from break the week of July 10th. That gives them three weeks before the Republican-imposed deadline of August 1st to make changes to their bill, pass it, and then send it to the house.

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Rally in Wilkes-Barre over Republican healthcare bill - PA home page

The debate promises to test the enduring relevance of one of the most fundamental principles of modern conservatism supply side economics, the idea that if you cut taxes far enough, the economy will expand to the point that it generates new tax revenue.

With the federal deficit growing and economic growth sputtering along in the low single digits, the Republican Party is facing questions from within over what many see as a blind faith in the theory that deep tax cuts are the shot of economic adrenaline a languid economy needs.

Tax cuts good. And thats about as much thinking that goes into it, said Chris Buskirk, a radio host and publisher of American Greatness, a conservative online journal. Now, he said, Republicans in Washington seem to be in an arms race to the lowest rates possible.

Everybody is trying to overbid each other, Mr. Buskirk said. How much more can we cut?

Outside Washington, Republicans are discovering there are limits.

In South Carolina, Republicans overrode their governors veto and a blocked a filibuster to increase the gas tax. They also rejected a series of broader tax cuts on the grounds that they were too expensive and voted instead to create a smaller tax incentive for low-income families.

The Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, signed into law the first increase in the states gas tax in almost three decades. He defied conservative groups that said a state with a $1.1 billion budget surplus had no business asking people to hand over more of their money.

And in the most striking rebuke of conservative tax policy in recent memory, Republicans in Kansas have undone much of the tax overhaul that Gov. Sam Brownback held up as a model for other states and the federal government to emulate.

A fantastic way to go, he said this year, urging Mr. Trump and Congress to follow suit with deep reductions to corporate and individual rates. But Republican lawmakers in Kansas decided that they could cut only so much without doing irreparable harm to vital services and voted to increase taxes by $1.2 billion last month. Mr. Brownback vetoed the plan, but Republicans overrode him.

Much of the devotion to tax cuts as an inviolable Republican principle stems from the success that President Ronald Reagan and Congress had in 1981 when they agreed to an economic recovery package that included a rate cut of about 25 percent for individuals.

But at that time, the highest marginal tax rates approached 70 percent, leaving much more to cut and a much larger chunk of money to be injected back into the economy. At some point, economists said, tax policy that is too aggressive leaves too little money to inject to make a difference.

Bruce Bartlett, who advised Reagan on the 1981 tax cuts, chastised Republicans for what he described as their reflexive desire to drive rates lower.

The essence of what the supply-siders were trying to accomplish was accomplished by the end of the Reagan administration, Mr. Bartlett said.

Yet, he added, Republican policy still mimics what was done under Reagan. Theyve got to keep pressing ahead no matter what, he said.

The situation in Kansas was, for at least some conservatives, a jolting realization that tax cuts can be too blunt an economic instrument.

After Mr. Brownback took office in 2011, he pursued a plan that included cuts and, in some cases, an outright elimination of taxes for businesses and individuals to help invigorate the states underperforming economy. He described it as an experiment in conservative governance that could demonstrate what Republicans were capable of if they controlled legislative and executive branches across the country. (He is Kansas first Republican governor since 2003.)

The conservative movement got behind him. The plan was approved with the lobbying muscle of the billionaire Koch brothers political network, which is overseen from Wichita, where one of the brothers, Charles G. Koch lives. It had the blessing of prominent conservative economists like Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, the Republican Partys foremost supply-side evangelist.

In urging the Kansas Legislature to act, Mr. Laffer and Mr. Moore said the cuts would have a near immediate positive impact on the economy. Mr. Brownback said the plan would pay for itself.

That is where the parallels with Washington start to trouble those who are critical of the plan the Trump administration has laid out. The plan would slash the rate paid by businesses to 15 percent and shrink the number of individual income tax brackets from seven to three 10, 25 and 35 percent.

Mr. Laffer and Mr. Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist, have both helped shape the presidents tax policy.

Steven T. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves with the economic growth they would inevitably create.

In Kansas, the predicted economic bloom did not materialize. Employment and economic growth have lagged far behind the rest of the nation. The state treasury had so little money to spread around that the Kansas Supreme Court found that the states spending on public education was unconstitutionally low.

If there were three words I could say to Congress right now, said Stephanie Clayton, a Republican state representative from a district in the Kansas City area, they would be, Dont do it.

She criticized what she said was a desire by her party to be more faithful to the principle than to the people Republicans were elected to help. Mr. Brownback and many conservatives, she said, overpromised on the tax cuts as a sort-of Ayn Rand utopia, a red-state model, citing the author whose works have influenced the American libertarian movement.

And I loved Ayn Rand when I was 18 before I had children and figured out how the world really works, Ms. Clayton added. Thats not how it works, as it turns out.

Mr. Trump and Republicans in Washington are undeterred. Kansas, they argue, is not an economic microcosm for the country, with its unique dependence on energy, agriculture and aircraft manufacturing. And lawmakers there never could reduce spending enough to correspond to the much lower level of tax revenue coming into the state treasury.

Many conservatives who support a tax overhaul said they anticipated considerable growth with a reduction in corporate rates, which are among the highest in the world. If those are lowered to 15 percent, down from the current 35 percent, businesses will not only reinvest in the United States but relocate here, they said.

At 15 percent, Swiss bankers will move here, said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

But restraining federal spending is still going to be a key part of the equation. What you need is not an explosion of spending, Mr. Norquist added. And you need the economy to grow faster than the size of the government.

In a world in which Mr. Trumps deconstruction of the administrative state reduces the size and cost of the government, the tax cuts make sense. But if lawmakers do not have the nerve to find savings somewhere, like in the social safety net for retirees, the outcome could end up resembling something close to Kansas failed experiment.

The question is whether you can put together some kind of revenue-neutral tax reform, said N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. I dont see the political will to do that right now. Certainly not in this environment.

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2017, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Cut Taxes? In States, G.O.P. Goes Other Way.

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How Low Can Taxes Go? Outside Washington, Republicans Find ... - New York Times

Sen. Ben Sasse on Sunday charged that President Trump wants to weaponize distrust in the press and warned that America is headed down a dangerous path if citizens listen only to media outlets and political leaders that reinforce their own personal views.

Speaking on CNNs State of the Union, the Nebraska Republican and frequent critic of the president laid out what he believes is a direct threat to the First Amendment, arguing there are potential long-term ramifications to the nation if current trends continue. He said media outlets must be held accountable and called out for errors and obvious bias, but that blanket criticism of the entire media is the wrong approach.

Theres an important distinction to draw between bad stories or crappy coverage, and the right citizens have to argue about that and complain about that, and trying to weaponize distrust. The First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment and you dont get to separate the freedoms that are in there, Mr. Sasse said.

The freshman Republican went on to suggest that many Americans, including Mr. Trump, are perpetuating a society in which citizens listen only to those who agree with their own political views, and that the bedrock idea of absolute, indisputable facts on which everyone can agree is going by the wayside.

The reality is journalism is really going to change a lot more int he digital era and we have a risk of getting to a place where we dont have shared public facts. A republican will not work if we dont have shared facts, he said. It is going to be possible in the next three or five or 10 years for people to surround themselves only with echo chambers and silos and people who believe only what they already believe. Thats a recipe for a new kind of tribalism, and America wont work if we do that.

Mr. Sasses comments come after the president over the weekend launched yet another attack on the media, a strategy that was a hallmark of his 2016 campaign and of his tenure so far in the White House. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called on Mr. Trump to stop such attacks.

Its not helpful to call the press the enemy of the American people, Mr. Sasse said.

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Trump trying to 'weaponize distrust' in the media, Sen. Ben Sasse says - Washington Times

ERIE, PA Max Bloomstine has a positive view of the nations growing diversity, believes the American dream is attainable (but doesnt believe hes entitled to it) and is more into the we instead of the me.

He is politically independent but leans conservative, attends church on a regular basis, and views his parents not sports figures or celebrities as role models.

Right now, though, two things weigh heavily on his mind: where to attend college next year (Its either going to be the University of Pittsburgh or Rochester) and working on a summer job.

I am a good entrepreneur when it comes to online gaming administration, he said.

Say hello to Generation Z, the most recent to come of age. It is the youth of America, with its oldest members in their early 20s.

Sometimes referred to as the iGeneration, as they literally grew up with technology and social media in their hands, they are poised to dramatically change the cultural, economic and political landscape for some time to come.

Born between 1996 and 2010, they are very similar to their Gen X parents, that small, pragmatic generation that fell between the larger baby boomer and millennial generations.

Gen Z actually like and trust their parents, who have been transparent with them, much more than any generation before, said Jeff Brauer, a political-science professor at Keystone College in suburban Scranton, Pa., who has produced one of the first comprehensive studies on the next generation.

Analyzing research from Wright State University in Ohio on 1,200 Generation Z students at 15 colleges and universities across the country, Brauer also used exit polling from CNN and census data to draw his conclusions.

Gen Z actually like and trust their parents, who have been transparent with them, much more than any generation before.

They are not as impressed with fame celebrities, athletes, politicians as are their predecessors, since fame in their lifetime has become rather easy to obtain with social media and reality TV, Brauer added.

Generation Z is diverse. They are only 55 percent white and will be the last majority-white generation in America. And they have the most positive outlook towards the nations growing diversity than any previous generation.

Generation Z is a product of 9/11, global terrorism, school shootings, perpetual wars, the Great Recession, high unemployment and constant budget cuts. Because of all that, they are cautious, even fearful, of an uncertain world and economy. Security and safety are very important to them, as they have grown up in such an unstable society.

They are distrustful of big employers because theyve seen good people, who did all the right things, get laid off from longstanding jobs and careers. They are cautious with finances, always looking for the best deals and the best value.

When I shop, which I do almost exclusively online, I compare everything until I get the best quality for the least cost, said Bloomstine.

Generation Z is also more religious than preceding generations attending organized weekly church services at about twice the rate of millennials, Generation Xers and baby boomers.

They are interested in issues that involve themselves but that also impact the broader community education, employment, security and the environment all concern them.

Politically, Generation Z is liberal-moderate with social issues, like support for marriage equality and civil rights, and moderate-conservative with fiscal and security issues, said Brauer.

While many are not connected to the two major parties and lean independent, Gen Zs inclinations generally fit moderate Republicans.

The Republican Party, if it plays its cards right, could make lasting inroads with this generation, even at an early age something the GOP has struggled with for decades.

Had he been able to vote last November, Bloomstine definitely would have picked Donald Trump for president.

I was not old enough to vote for him, but I was very engaged and informed all throughout the election, Bloomstine said. I liked most his independence from the political parties and his willingness to challenge them when he felt they were not serving the American people.

If Trump runs in four years would Bloomstine vote for him? As long as he continues to be himself, absolutely.

Last year was the first presidential election in which Generation Z voted, according to Brauer, yet, there was virtually no attention paid to this demographic.

In fact, in almost every case, its members were simply lumped in with their significantly different counterparts, the millennials, in the 18-to-29 age group.

This was disingenuous and unfortunate and didnt give the true picture of the election, said Brauer. Looking at the data, there was virtually no attempt to separate these two very different generations of voters.

Brauer explains that, from 2012 to 2016, Democratic candidates lost 5 percent of the youth vote nationally (down from 60 percent to 55 percent). In Florida, Democrats margin of victory among the young dropped 16 percentage points. In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, the drop was 19 points. In Wisconsin, 20 points.

It is unlikely that such significant drops were simply due to the more-liberal millennial generation changing their minds from one election to the next, said Brauer.

It is much more likely the precipitous drops were due to the more conservative Generation Z being able, for the first time, to express their political inclinations, especially in the economically hard-hit swing states.

Therefore, Generation Z possibly had a major, yet completely overlooked, impact in this historic election. Generation Z voters were likely attracted to Trump because of his strong stances on national security and economic recovery the main concerns of that generation, said Brauer.

This generation is different, and they are about to have a profound impact on commerce, politics and trends, Brauer concludes. If politicians and business leaders arent paying attention yet, they better, because they are about to change the world.

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Why the generation after millennials will vote Republican | New York ... - New York Post

After weeks of staying on the sidelines of the Senate's Obamacare reform talks, President Trump dived into the debate this week with a characteristic mix of disciplined negotiating tactics and off-message detours.

Trump's increased role in promoting the healthcare legislation came as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell headed into a weeklong recess with his caucus fractured and the fate of his Obamacare repeal measure uncertain.

But the president's personal involvement has not come without its disruptions. Trump rankled GOP leadership Friday when he tweeted support for a healthcare strategy that would involve repealing Obamacare immediately and replacing it later with a new system an approach he had personally criticized in the past and one that is favored only by the most conservative members of Congress.

"Senate Republicans recognize that this a put-up or shut-up moment, and yet they are still gripped by inaction and are unable to do their job," said Ford O'Connell, a GOP strategist. "So, frankly, President Trump attempting to provide them cover to pass anything possible is certainly a welcome development."

O'Connell suggested the Republicans' inability to agree on a piece of legislation this week despite a full-court press from the Trump administration could demonstrate just how sharply the GOP is divided on healthcare.

"The fact that Senate Republicans are still not able to reach a verbal consensus shows the limits of White House power and how deep the rift is on this issue within the GOP Senate caucus," he said.

Trump began his efforts to help McConnell scrape together the 50 votes necessary to pass the Better Care Reconciliation Act last weekend by calling a handful of Republican senators who expressed doubts about the bill shortly after its release.

After McConnell delayed a planned procedural vote on the measure amid wavering GOP support, Trump invited all 52 members of the Republican caucus to the White House on Tuesday and conducted what was later described as a productive meeting about the need to move forward on an Obamacare repeal plan.

And, by Wednesday, Trump was projecting optimism that his party would soon deliver a "big surprise" on healthcare.

Officials in the cabinet and West Wing worked behind the scenes this week to supplement the president's public promotion. Trump dispatched White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to build support for the healthcare bill.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price hosted a "listening session" for people affected by Obamacare in Utah and traveled to Dallas for another healthcare "listening session" with doctors on Monday, and he placed a pair of op-eds that the White House later promoted.

Just as he did when a similar Obamacare repeal plan was working its way through the House, Vice President Mike Pence has played a particularly active role in promoting the Senate's healthcare bill publicly and cobbling together support for it privately.

On Monday, Pence and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma hosted a "listening session" at the White House complex with "victims of Obamacare" many of them from Missouri, where major insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield recently exited the individual market and left thousands of people facing the possibility of having zero coverage options in 2018.

Pence journeyed to Capitol Hill Tuesday for the weekly Senate Republican lunch and hosted a handful of GOP lawmakers at his home later that evening for dinner, where the group was expected to discuss the healthcare legislation.

On Wednesday, Pence traveled to Cleveland, where he toured a manufacturing plant and delivered a speech aimed at selling the bill in a state where the Republican senator stands opposed to the GOP plan as it is written. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman has expressed concern about the legislation's cuts to the growth of Medicaid.

Pence returned to the Capitol on Thursday for meetings with skeptical Republicans including Sens. Ted Cruz, Susan Collins and Shelley Moore Capito and held talks with McConnell, which he documented on his Twitter feed.

But the Trump administration's efforts may not be enough to persuade seven of the nine Republican senators who oppose the bill to support it. With objectors ranging from centrists who see the legislation's cuts as too dramatic to conservatives who fear the bill leaves too much of Obamacare's regulatory framework intact, McConnell could struggle to reconcile the diverse concerns coming out of his caucus.

And Trump's journey off script on Friday could further complicate the negotiations.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a conservative critic of the bill whose vote is seen as one of the most difficult to win over in the Obamacare reform fight, quickly agreed with Trump's suggestion that Republicans should cleanly repeal the Affordable Care Act before setting to work on a replacement. While few others rushed to affirm or condemn the president's tweet, the mere mention of the conservatives' preferred approach to healthcare from the president could empower other opponents of the BCRA to resist McConnell's efforts at winning them over in the hopes that Trump would support a delay between the repeal and the replacement of Obamacare.

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Trump wades into healthcare fight amid wavering Republican support - Washington Examiner