Revenues, based on a 20% state tax on sales, are anticipated to be $52 million a year.Public lands advocates were, of course, up in arms against the government redirecting funds away from the protection of public lands as expressly dictated in the referendum that passed in November 2020. 8 Gianforte’s budget also proposed redirecting about $11 million to be saved from a two-month halt to paying into the fund that pays the state’s share of its employee’s health insurance, along with a similar pause in contributions to the retirement of Montana’s judges, citing surpluses in both. Roughly $11 million of the reductions Gianforte proposes come from a two-month pause in the money the state pays as its share of employees’ health insurance premiums. Another controversial proposal in the governor’s budget was the proposal to garner about $24 million in savings by cutting staffing across state agencies by about 4%. Opponents argued that many state agencies were already severely understaffed. The governor’s proposal to not spend down the current surplus, as proposed in Governor Bullock’s budget, also motivated significant opposition. Governor Gianforte has touted this as yet another good faith demonstration of his conservative fiscal credentials. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the Republican Legislative Caucus was busy too during the 2020 campaign season, signaling their intentions. In September 2020, anticipating with good reason a Gianforte victory, and its continued legislative majority in both houses all but guaranteed, House Republicans released their plan that enumerated their priorities, including reducing the “property tax burden,” reducing the “income tax burden,” a flat budget , lowering Medicaid Reimbursement rate to primary care hospitals , increase taxes on renewable energy generation, weaken the renewable portfolio requirement , introduce a series of voter repression laws , “remove nonessential services” , lower state employee FTE, literally disallow state gas tax monies from being used on bike paths and trails , promote school choice, a variety of anti-choice abortion proposals ,cannabis drying racks undermine the ability of public health officials and the governor’s office from imposing restrictions during public health emergencies , undermine union rights and of course, strengthening law and order.
Hence, as Montana headed into the 67th Session, it was assumed that there would be a rightward tilt in taxation and spending, and in a host of other bills. However, the details of what would pass and in what form were not. What follows is a summary of what happened during the session, turning attention first to the budget, then tax policy, and then more briefly describing what is intended to be a representative sampling of other bills in an effort to provide “a sense of the session.” Montana’s Medicaid program provides coverage for one-in-four Montanans , of who 100,000 are covered as part of Medicaid Expansion. Medicaid expansion has been contentious in Montana since it first passed during the 2015 legislature. In 2019, its fate was once again in doubt as many Republicans were opposed to the expansion. However, in the end it survived when Democrats joined with a group of moderate Republicans to pass the legislation, this time with work requirements that were insisted upon by the moderate Republicans. While the Trump Administration encouraged states to pass work requirements, this has since been reversed by the Biden Administration. As reported by Andrea Halland of Kaiser Health News in August 2021, “CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] has communicated to [the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services] that a five-year extension of the Medicaid expansion waiver will not include work/community engagement requirements,” health officials wrote in a Medicaid waiver amendment application out for public review.In other words, while the Trump Administration was friendly to state level work requirements, it never completed the approval process for Montana, and the Biden Administration has told Montana that it will not accept a work requirement. As of this writing, no work requirements have been imposed on Medicaid recipients, nor are they likely to be at least for the remainder of the Biden Administration Medicaid expansion has survived at least in part by virtue of the fact that so many Montana state legislators come from poor rural communities heavily enrolled in Medicaid Expansion.
While the will of the Republican legislative majority and governor is clearly in favor of imposing work requirements of 80 hours a month, at least for now, the state seems ready to continue expansion even without work requirements, at least until 2025, when the legislature and governor will again have to vote to extend the program. Another important and politically contentious issue related to Medicaid expansion is continuous coverage. At play here is whether or not a person can or cannot maintain continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months even if their income fluctuates during that time period. The 2021 legislature voted to terminate continuous coverage despite concerns expressed by many advocates of low-income health care concerned this will adversely affect a large number of Montanans. Tax cuts advantageous for wealthy Montanans and the businesses they own are foundational to Gianforte’s Montana Comeback Plan and the Republican legislative majority. According to the Montana Budget & Policy Center, “the 2021 Legislature enacted 21 pieces of legislation to cut taxes ultimately costing the state $77 million in lost revenue in the next biennium. While the state also will see some new revenue from the taxation of recreational cannabis, the state projects a net loss of revenue of $19 million over the 2023 biennium.” The cost of these tax breaks over the course of the 2025 biennium is estimated to be 109 million dollars. And, absent unforeseen changes in Montana’s legislative make-up, forecasting additional tax cuts during the 2023 legislative session seems likely. Of the tax breaks, the most regressive and the most expensive was SB 159, which cut the top income tax rate in Montana from 6.9% to 6.75%. This one was important to the governor and his supporters. The governor’s vision is that it “will keep more money in the hands of those who earn it and attract more wealthy investors to live in Montana,” which of course, is a good thing from perspective of the proponents. The critique is that most of these benefits go to the wealthy, and is thus unfair, and also that it costs the state revenues. The two other most important tax cuts were in capital gains and the business equipment tax. Despite the highly party polarized tenor of most committee and floor debate over most of the tax cut proposals, some bills did generate bipartisan support. Notable amongst them was HB 191, which provided residential property tax credit for the elderly, with an anticipated fiscal impact of $5.8 million over the course of the 2023 Biennium and about the same for the 2025 Biennium; HB 340, which provided tax incentives to film companies to shoot in Montana, with an anticipated fiscal impact of 2.0 million over the course of the 2023 Biennium and twice that in the2025 Biennium; HB 629, which provided for job creation tax credits; HB 663, which directed state tax revenues from recreational marijuana to public schools in an effort to decrease school funding pressures placed on local property taxpayers. Only one of these bills was key sponsored by a Democrat. Democrats, of course, put forward a series of efforts at progressive tax reform,hydroponic cannabis system all of which were defeated. House Bill 631 would have increased the state Earned Income Tax Credit. It was tabled in House Taxation Committee on a party-line vote. Other examples included a bill that would have created an income tax credit to help lower-income Montanans pay property taxes.
Another one would have bumped up income taxes on high earners to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. The value contrasts here are strikingly clear. Rs wanted tax breaks for businesses and wealthy individuals, and Ds wanted tax increases on the wealthy and tax breaks for middle class, working class, and low-income people. Self-cutting can be understood clinically as a symptomatic behavior, on the one hand, and as a bodily practice embedded in a cultural imaginary and identity on the other. It is present in a variety of ways including the 1993 memoir of Susanna Kaysen “Girl, Interrupted” , the 1995 acknowledgment by Princess Diana that she identified herself as a “cutter,” and the 2011 video “F**kin’ Perfect” by the pop music performer Pink. The Internet has become a massively popular resource for cutters to share information , and one study identified more than 400 message boards about cutting generated via five search engines . Youths may identify with “Emo” or “Goth” culture which lionize depression and cultivate self-cutting as a cultural practice . Popular concern about perceived dangers of self-cutting has at times been heightened to the point that one cultural historian suggested that “Cutting has become a new moral panic about the dangers confronting today’s youth” . Anthropology has not been disposed toward addressing cutting as a problematic cultural or clinical phenomenon given the disciplinary propensity to understand body mutilation and modification in terms of rituals and cultural practices. This is perhaps because ritual meaning is not so dependent on distinguishing whether harm is inflicted by others or by oneself or on differentiating cultural practice from psychopathology. One other anthropological observation has been provided by Lester, who notes that current explanations of self-harm can be grouped into four categories: communicating emotional pain, emotional or physiological self-regulation, interpersonal strategy, and cultural trend. She notes that these categories share the idea that self-harm manifests individual pathology or dysfunction, with the cultural assumption of the individual as a rational actor. In contrast, an anthropological perspective emphasizes the “cultural actor who embodies and responds to cultural systems of meaning to internal psychological or physiological states” . Emphasizing the powerful symbolic significance and long cross-cultural record of self-harm and blood shedding as ritual and even therapeutic practices, she suggests that contemporary cutting may be seen as privatized and decontextualized social rituals affecting transformation parallel to collective initiation rituals that operate in a cycle of self-harm and repair, especially in the case of adolescent girls struggling with the aftermath of sexual abuse and/or with contradictory gender messages . Sociocultural characteristics of a typical “self-cutter” emerged in the 1960s as Euro-American, attractive, intelligent, and possibly sexually adventurous teenage girls, that Brickman claimed was partially taken up in medical discourse in a manner that “pathologizes the female body, relying on the notion of ‘femininity as a disease’” . Gilman took exception to assumptions of pathology with the provocative claim that “self-cutting is a reasonable response to an irrational world” . From a clinical vantage point, self-cutting is often viewed as a type of injury or harm to the self. The historical backdrop to this development can be traced to Menninger’s attention to self-mutilation as distinguished from suicidality. The distinction between “delicate” and “coarse” self-cutting was made by Pao , with Weissman focusing on wrist-cutting syndrome and Pattison and Kahan proposing the existence of a deliberate self-harm syndrome. Favazza provided cases of extreme and highly unusual forms of self-mutilation in excruciating detail, with an attempt to classify types based on severity. With the provisional emergence of non-suicidal self-injury disorder criteria in the fifth version of the Statistical and Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-V ,the distinction between self-harm as within a normative or pathological range remains equivocal. This is illustrative of the manner in which conceptualizations of self-cutting continue to be embedded in a complex cultural history of changes in the incidence, popular awareness, and social conditions in which such phenomena occur.While it is possible to find clinical, psychometric, survey, and historical approaches to the phenomenon of self-cutting, we lack an ethnographic account with a substantive locus in the interactions of individuals, grounded in the specificity of bodily experience and the immediacy of struggle in the face of existential precarity . In this article, we take a step toward such an account with a discussion situated at the intersection of two anthropological concerns. First is the ethnographic understanding of experiential specificity through anthropological adaptation of phenomenological method .