Campaign Action
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's Republicans are busy this week ramming through the vehicle they will use to push their tax cut plan, their budget resolution. The entire document expresses the very essence of what it is to be a Republican. It cuts Medicare by $473 billion, Medicaid by $1 trillion, and a tax plan that gives massive breaks to the super wealthy and adds up to $1.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Because you know how much they care about the deficit. Republicans are absolutely shamelessly putting their priorities on full display, and will probably pass this thing by the end of the day Thursday.
It's a proposal that, on the whole, would "cause most Americans' incomes to fall more than they would gain from the tax cuts themselves." That’s because the tax cuts are so concentrated on the rich, and the cuts involved would take so much away from low- and middle-income families. Those cuts would hurt the children of those families particularly.
Here's what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities identifies as getting the worst budget hits:
To offset the cost of a $1.5 trillion tax cut, Medicare payments to doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans would be automatically cut 4 percent for each of the next ten years, on top of the 2-percent cuts that those payments are already experiencing under the sequestration triggered by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
In addition, the automatic cuts would bring the complete elimination of more than 150 mandatory payments for farmers, health insurance, the military retirement trust fund, housing, social services, victims of crime, child nutrition, and many others, all lasting a decade.
By the way, this: "The plan breaks with longstanding promises by top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan that the upcoming tax drive won't add to the nation's $20 trillion debt."
Given Ryan's math skills, it's entirely possible that he believes that. But the reality is he doesn't give a damn about the deficit. He's never given a damn about the deficit, nor has any other Republican. Driving up the deficit with this tax cut for the wealthy just gives them more fodder to come back in five years, screaming about the deficit, to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid even more deeply. Or to abolish them altogether.