The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have reduced the revenues taken in by the treasury by slightly more than the cost of the ten-year war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, if we hadn’t cut taxes early in the last decade, we could have paid for those wars completely. On the other hand, if we hadn’t committed either blunder, we’d have nearly three trillion dollars to pay down the debt or make investments in our country. What’s going on now is an aggressive effort to make middle class people pay for the wars, with interest included. If rich people had paid their taxes over the past decade, we wouldn’t be in this position. What we’re doing today is filling the hole created by Bush’s tax cuts. So, for example, we’re going to cut spending on education and transportation and research to make up for the fact that Steve Forbes didn’t pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes over the last ten years. But, as the White House points out, the Republicans Cut, Cap, and Balance Plan is even worse. The plan would pay for Donald Trump’s decade of tax evasion by doing the following:
The bill would abruptly cut more than $100 billion in spending in the first year alone, a step that Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf stated would “affect our projections for GDP growth over the next two years.”
The House Budget Resolution plan would cut clean energy investments by 70 percent, infrastructure investments by a third, and education and training by 25 percent – cutting 320,000 children from Head Start and reducing aid for families trying to put their kids through college by hundreds, or even thousands of dollars.
It would cut Medicaid by one-third over the decade, and by nearly 50% by 2030. This could, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, result in 36 million people losing Medicaid coverage, including people with disabilities and seniors in nursing homes. And that comes on top of the 17 million who would lose coverage due to repealing subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.
And it would cut programs for the most vulnerable – for example, by food stamp benefits for a family of four by $1,760 per year or cut 8 million households from the program.
Finally, the House Budget Resolution proposed to convert Medicare to a voucher program, increasing costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,400 a year beginning in 2021 – with those higher costs increasing over time.
The bill won’t pass in the Senate. But it’s a clear statement about Republican values.
