Today, the Trump administration and nearly all Republicans in the House of Representatives took another step toward advancing their top economic priority: keeping taxes for the wealthy and corporations at rock-bottom rates, by any means necessary. The budget reconciliation bill that the House passed today, H.R. 1, represents a massive redistribution of income to the richest households in the country at the expense of some of the poorest. Under this legislation, the bottom 40% of households would lose income and resources while the top 1% of households—those making nearly $800,000 a year—would gain enormously. Further, the tax cuts in the bill are such massive giveaways to the rich that despite draconian cuts for the most vulnerable, they would still increase the deficit by trillions.
In direct contradiction to promises from President Trump and the reconciliation bill’s backers that they won’t cut Medicaid or cause pain for working-class families, this bill would:
- Kick millions of low-income people off of Medicaid and threaten operations for strained hospital systems across the country, particularly in rural areas;
- Make it harder for parents of children as young as age seven to qualify for food stamps;
- Put millions of kids at risk of poverty by excluding their families from the Child Tax Credit.
In exchange for these massive spending cuts to justify a $3.8 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, this bill offers workers almost nothing—just paltry tax gimmicks that put pennies into the pockets of a small sliver of the working class. The bill’s immigration provisions are purely punitive—imposing fees on migrants making asylum claims and giving the Trump administration billions of dollars to unleash internal immigration enforcement within our borders, looking for any excuse to deport or harass immigrants and their families. Voting for this bill’s passage represents an ultimate betrayal of U.S. workers and the economy. The Senate should reject this bill.