In Republican parlance, “entitlement” programs mean food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare and Medicaid health insurance for the elderly, poor and disabled, as well as other programs created to assist the needy.

How it will work: Reductions on taxes for corporations and the wealthy will raise the federal budget deficit and U.S. debt by about $1 trillion over 10 years. To pay for that, a Congressional budget rule requires cuts to mandatory spending programs like Medicare (Social Security and food stamps are exempt):

Enacting the tax bill would trigger automatic cuts to a variety of programs, including Medicare, due to a congressional budget rule that requires laws that increase the deficit to offset it with cuts to mandatory spending programs.

The “pay-as-you-go” rule applies to the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, but cuts to that program would be capped at 4 percent, or up to $28 billion in 2018, according to government estimates.

Also exempt from the cuts are Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the poor. In order to avoid Medicare cuts:

Congress must pass separate legislation to override automatic Medicare cuts triggered by passage of the tax bill.

Ryan has actually been talking to Trump about this since 2016. Here's a video of him saying so.

This is the tax bill from hell. It does not help small business. It helps the wealthiest among us, including huge corporations, and will hurt sole proprietors and small businesses by taking away their ability to itemize expenses.

When will clueless Republicans wake up and realize they are supporting a tax bill that starves their own Grandmas?

Ryan will come up with some bullsh*t "stimulus" program that is larded with tax-cuts and other goodies, and he will offer it to the White House in exchange for his life's dream of shredding what's left of the social safety net. He will put together a big pot of offal, slap a label reading "Medicare" on it, and then peddle it to the suckers.

As for Democrats, they are so fixated on their success in bringing down gropers in their midst, they have abandoned other issues (which in my view are of far more consequence to all Democrats:)

During the campaign, coverage of the issues was blotted out by coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s broad suite of sociopathic tendencies. And of the issues that did receive any attention, a conspicuously missing one was Paul Ryan’s plan to push Medicare beneficiaries into private health insurance. Reporters just assumed that, since Trump never talked about it, it won’t happen. But Paul Ryan still wants it to happen. And in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Ryan said Medicare privatization is on.

Ryan has falsely argued for years that Obamacare is making Medicare broke:

[According to Ryan} “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is false. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of the truth. The Medicare trust fund has been extended 11 years as a result of the passage of Obamacare, whose cost reforms have helped bring health care inflation to historic lows. It is also untrue that repealing Obamacare requires changing traditional Medicare. But Ryan clearly believes he needs to make this claim in order to sell his plan, or probably even to convince fellow Republicans to support it.

The tax bill is not yet law. The House and Senate versions still have to be reconciled. Democrats need to take a break from their obsession with celebrity and congressional gropers and oppose the tax cut plan.