Award winning economist Paul Krugman breaks down the incredibly cruel budget Republicans are trying to pass and the damage it's going to do to the most vulnerable in our country. As we already discussed here, the bill would slash not just Medicaid and SNAP benefits, but also $500 billion from Medicare.

And as Krugman wrote in his Substack post, the cruelty is the point:

Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.

OK, news at 11. Isn’t this what Republicans always do? But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.

And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

Krugman made an appearance on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell and discussed what he meant by "zombie ideas" in his article:

O'DONNELL: Let's begin with what is the difference between this latest version of Republican budget bill compared to the last Republican budget bills we saw in the previous Trump presidency?

KRUGMAN: Well, first of all, last time Trump passed a tax cut, which was, you know, a very, a very Republican tax cut, big cuts for the rich, crumbs for people further down the scale, but separately tried to kill the Affordable Care Act.

So the, the damage to healthcare was a separate vote which failed, so that didn't go through, so at least the tax bill, although it was money coming from nothing, it was deficit spending, it looked like it was doing people a favor.

Now it's tied together. Now you have a tax bill. That's overwhelmingly just for the top 0.1% of the population, combined with truly savage cuts, primarily to Medicaid, also to food stamps.

So basically, the social safety net, we're ripping up the social safety net network, leading to a lot of people being impoverished, probably quite a few people dying because of lack of aid, all in the interest of somewhat reducing the explosion of the deficit that comes from cutting taxes on the rich.

O'DONNELL: One of the arguments that Republicans make is we're not cutting Medicaid. They don't accept that phrasing. They say we're just making it work better, for example, imposing work requirements on people to be able to be able to enroll in Medicaid.

KRUGMAN: Okay, and this is when I, when I talk about zombie ideas. So zombie idea is something that should be dead, that's been proved wrong again and again, and yet it still keeps on shambling along, eating people's brains.

We've been through this many times. There are essentially no people, able-bodied adults who could be working, who are on Medicaid and not working. There just is nothing. Their work requirement is not going to get anybody who isn't working to work.

There's a handful of people who on paper might be working that aren't, but it's, it's a tiny, it's 3% of the total Medicaid rolls, and almost surely there are special circumstances there. So this just doesn't happen.

We know that work requirements don't actually make people work because they already are. The US US benefits are too small for people to just, you know, live on the dole. You can't do that in in 20 21st century America.

So all that these work requirements do is they just create hurdles, they create paperwork, they make it hard for people to enroll and particularly the kind of people who need this help, tend to have jobs that are not, you know, they're, they're informal, they're... they don't have employers who are producing nice W-2 forms that they can use to prove that they're employed, but that doesn't mean they're not working.

So this is just all about basically denying people healthcare, denying people nutritional aid, but doing it in a way that you pretend that you're doing something positive. And you know, I hate to use the word evil, but this really is evil.

This illustration from Krugman's article breaks down the number of people not working who are receiving Medicaid benefits.

The Bullwark has a long but very good article on the work requirements, which have been tried before in Arkansas and Georgia and did not work you can read here: The GOP’s Big Medicaid Idea Was Tried Before—And Failed Badly