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The Rich vs. the Rest of Us: Big Tax Cut Payoff Edition [1]
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Date: 2025-02-16
$4.5 trillion.
That’s the number we can never forget. That’s the number we can never let the Republican Party bury under their phony rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, the dire consequences of our national debt, or their trickle-down economics bullshit.
Say it with me: $4.5 trillion.
$4.5 trillion. That’s what Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are willing to add to our nation’s debt over 10 years in tax cuts that will mainly favor the wealthy as they prepare to approve an extension of the expiring cuts from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and other pieces of the president’s tax agenda.
To help partially mitigate the damage they’re ready to slash up to $2 trillion in “mandatory” spending during the next decade, much of it from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. Both programs help lower-income Americans.
Mandatory spending is spending mandated by existing laws. It amounted to $3.8 trillion in fiscal year 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In addition to Medicaid and SNAP, it includes Social Security and Medicare -- which combine to account for over half the total -- income security programs, federal civilian and military retirement programs, certain veteran programs, and student loan programs.
So, there’s a lot of targets for cuts there.
The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee approved a spending plan outline this week that will now go to the various House committees – all controlled by Republicans – to flesh out the details. They hope to have a full House vote the last week of February.
It could be a very contentious process, and they can afford to lose only one vote if they want to pass something without any Democratic support. The Senate is working on its own proposal that would hold off the tax cuts for later legislation.
Still, the Republicans’ intention is clear. As an article from The American Prospect said, this “reverse Robin Hood resolution,” would “take food and medicine from the poor and give the money to the rich.”
Let’s take a look.
The budget resolution calls for up to $4.5 trillion to be added to the deficit for tax cuts while cutting at least $1.5 trillion from mandatory programs over the coming decade. But there’s a catch. The $4.5 trillion comes into play only if they can cut $2 trillion in spending. Anything less would be subtracted from the tax cuts, so if they can only reach the $1.5 trillion minimum requirement then the tax cuts are dropped to $4 trillion.
So, we’re looking at a minimum of $4 trillion in cuts with the incentive to do more damage to programs that help people, that so many people count on. All to satisfy the insatiable hunger of their rich donors for more and more money.
Does this math look funny to you?
You’re right. It leaves us $2.5 trillion in the hole. Don’t worry, Republicans plan to just add that to our national debt, which now stands at about $33 trillion.
You remember the national debt. It’s that thing the GOP rails about when a Democrat is in the White House only to shamelessly add to it when they’re in power.
Yes, it’s always been about the tax cuts. It’s never been about immigration or the Right’s phony culture wars. Those were just smoke screens. It’s always been about getting more money into the pockets of the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class.
“Extending the tax cuts would give households with incomes in the top 1 percent, who make roughly $743,000 a year or more, a tax cut averaging $62,000 a year – significantly more than the total income of most households at risk of losing Medicaid or SNAP,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies
“This budget rips health care away from millions while handing out $4.5 trillion in tax breaks, the overwhelming majority of which go to billionaires and wealthy corporations,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the budget committee. “It slashes at least $230 billion from food assistance programs at a time when grocery prices remain at record highs. And it proposes, and I hope every American listens to this, it proposes at least $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. ... All so billionaires can get even a bigger tax cut that they don’t need and the hard-working people in this country can’t afford to give them.”
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The GOP proposal doesn’t list specific programs to cut. Instead, it assigns quotas to various house committees. “The resolution telegraphs where it will look to cut spending by the committees where it allocates the cuts,” the American Prospect said. They include:
*$880 billion in cuts for the Energy and Commerce Committee. The bulk of those savings would probably have to come from Medicaid, which currently insures more than 70 million Americans.
*$230 billion in cuts for the Agriculture Committee. The SNAP program helps feed more than 40 million Americans and will likely incur a reduction in benefits to help meet this goal.
*$330 billion in cuts for the Education and Workforce Committee. This is expected to come from student loan programs.
The federal government picks up, on average, about 70 percent of Medicaid spending, with the rest the responsibility of the states. A cut in federal funds would likely lead states to reduce the number of eligible residents along with the care that enrollees receive.
Medicaid is a pretty big deal, and it helps a lot of people. No wonder Republicans hate it.
One idea that’s been kicked around to really screw over Medicaid recipients are per-capita caps. Under these a state’s federal Medicaid payment would be based on population instead of being open-ended as it is now.
These caps could lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts, according to a Politico story, and Brett Guthrie, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would “love” to see them enacted (of course he would), except he doesn’t think the votes are there for it.
Another target for cuts could be the enhanced federal subsidies for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. About 20 million people are in the program due to the expansion.
More than 3 million Americans would be at risk of immediately losing health coverage if federal spending is cut. That’s because there are nine states that have “trigger laws” that would end the ACA’s Medicaid expansion immediately if federal funding is reduced. Expect more to follow.
Not surprisingly, six of these states – Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah – voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The others are Illinois, New Hampshire, and Virginia.
Republicans like to talk about work requirements, “But the cuts the new budget document envisions would likely require savings well beyond what adding work requirements or eliminating fraud would generate,” the HuffPost reported.
A word about work requirements. Republicans want you to believe there’s a giant army of able-bodied people out there who’re willing to sit at home in order to get a few hundred dollars in food stamps and some other benefits instead of earning a steady paycheck that would give them more money in their pockets so they can better enjoy their lives and do more for their families.
They want you to forget about the single mothers out there who can’t afford to go to work because of the high cost of child care, and that Democrats wanted to help them so they could get in the workforce while Republicans couldn’t care less.
They don’t want you to know that, in reality, the majority of Medicaid beneficiaries already work, or cannot because they’re disabled or are caring for another person, among other reasons, according to the HuffPost.
Or that past attempts to attach work requirements to Medicaid ended up reducing Medicaid rolls substantially, but studies have later found that work requirements frequently took coverage away from people who qualified and simply couldn’t make their way through the reporting requirements, the HuffPost said.
Let me know when Republicans are serious about work requirements, which would include helping those who need assistance in finding jobs, providing training in our ever-changing job market, and helping parents who would struggle with child care costs.
Until then, just like when they’re ready to address concerns about Social Security by raising the cap on the maximum income that’s taxed instead of looking for ways to cut the program, they can just shut up and sit down.
Here's a detailed look at the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act showing how it’s nothing more than a pro-rich, rip-off scheme.
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I’ll be interested in seeing how Democrats play this if there’re aren’t enough Republican votes in the house to pass a bill, considering that the government would shut down March 15 without a budget plan approved by both chambers of Congress.
That could provide a lot of leverage for the Democrats, but I’m afraid their lack of a killer instinct will lead them to let the GOP off the hook without extracting enough in return, something they’ve done in the past.
They know the stakes. They know who’ll suffer. Will that be enough for them to put up the fight that’s called for? I really don’t know. I do know that this is another test for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
This would be a good one for him to pass.
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