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Economy
Rev. Barber Leads Moral Monday March Against 'Big Beautiful Bill' Amid Senate Debate
The bill would "rob the poor, starve children, and deny care to the sick in order to line the pockets of the wealthy."
Jun 02, 2025
As the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" made its way to the U.S. Senate Monday, with lawmakers preparing to consider cuts to Medicaid and food assistance and an extension of tax cuts for the rich, one of the nation's top anti-poverty campaigners warned that the proposed budget "is not just bad policy, it is sin."
Rev. William J. Barber II led a "Moral Monday" rally and march through Washington, D.C. to the U.S. Capitol, where he and other advocates spoke out against the proposal that was narrowly passed by the House last month and would "rob the poor, starve children, and deny care to the sick in order to line the pockets of the wealthy."
"We will not stand by while it preys on the most vulnerable," said Barber.
Along with the Institute for Policy Studies and the Economic Policy Institute, Barber's organization, Repairers of the Breach, re-released an earlier report Monday on the proposed budget with additional information about communities that would be impacted if the budget is passed into law.
The budget, said Repairers of the Breach, would result in:
- A loss of health insurance for an estimated 8.6 million Medicaid enrollees, due to new work requirements that would penalize the minority of beneficiaries who don't work—those who attend school, care for family members, or have a disability;
- A loss of coverage for an additional 4 million people whose tax credits would expire;
- The end of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for 11 million people who would be subject to work requirements or whose states would be forced to cut back on aid;
- The loss of the child tax credit for 4.5 million children whose parents don't have Social Security numbers; and
- More than $100 billion for border wall construction, new immigration detention centers, and new investments in community arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At the rally, Barber spoke about how members of the House voted for a budget that could directly harm hundreds of thousands of their constituents.
"They don't want us to talk about the fact that the largest portion of Medicaid enrollees are families with incomes below $40,000," said Barber. "These are working poor people... In West Virginia for instance, 28% of the entire population is covered by Medicaid. Over 500,000 [people]. And yet every Republican from West Virginia voted to cut. In Ohio, 26% of the people are covered by Medicaid. That's where [Vice President JD] Vance is from... We're talking about children and pregnant women, and adults and people with disabilities."
Repairers of the Breach said it would send delegations into the Senate office buildings to hand senators a petition calling on them to oppose the "immoral cuts" in the proposed budget.
Republicans in the Senate can only afford to lose three votes. Lawmakers including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have suggested major changes will need to be made to the House-passed bill in order for it to be approved—with the senators expressing concern more for the federal deficit than the well-being of millions of Americans who would lose healthcare and food assistance.
"I think there are four of us at this point, and I would be very surprised if the bill at least is not modified in a good direction," Paul told CBS News on Sunday.
Barber told rally-goers on Monday: "We have to stop believing when they say something's over."
"It ain't over until it's over," he said, "and it's not over until all of us have spoken."
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'Start Over From Scratch': Nobel Laureate Economists Denounce GOP Budget Bill
"The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them."
Jun 02, 2025
Half a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists on Monday expressed their "grave concerns" about the sprawling budget reconciliation package passed last month by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, warning that slashing an already frayed social safety net and exploding the record deficit in service of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest households will worsen the nation's economic woes.
"The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits," Daron Acemoglu, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an open letter published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
"The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation's commitment to providing access to healthcare for all," the economists continued. "Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults. But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well."
🚨NEW: 6 Nobel laureate economists signed an open letter opposing the House budget bill 🚨 The bill adds significantly to the national debt while reducing incomes for the bottom 40%, they say. The most acute & immediate damage? Millions losing Medicaid & SNAP benefits: www.epi.org/publication/...
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) June 2, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Addressing the bill's staggering impact on public debt, the letter asserts that "U.S. structural deficits are already too high, with real debt service payments approaching their historic highs in the past year."
"The House bill layers $3.8 trillion in additional tax cuts ($5.3 trillion if all provisions are made permanent) on top of these existing fiscal gaps—and these tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the highest-income households," the Nobel laureates noted. "Even with the safety net cuts, the House bill leads to public debt rising by over $3 trillion in coming years (and over $5 trillion over the next decade if provisions are made permanent rather than phasing out). The higher debt and deficits will put noticeable upward pressure on both inflation and interest rates in coming years."
"The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income," the economists warned. "Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S households."
"The United States has a number of pressing economic challenges to address, many of which require a greater level of state capacity to navigate—capacity that will be eroded by large tax cuts," the letter concludes. "The House bill addresses none of the nation's key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them. The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget."
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill is now in the Senate, where Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed on behalf of Democrats to "fight it with everything we've got."
"The Republican plan is simple: Sell out working and middle-class families to pay off the rich and well-connected," Schumer said in a "dear colleague" letter on Sunday. "The bill would raise costs and taxes by an average of more than $800 for 40% of American families. Twenty million Americans would see their healthcare costs skyrocket, while almost 14 million would lose their health insurance all together, including millions of children and seniors."
Furthermore, Schumer noted that "11 million people, including 4 million children, could lose access to safe and affordable food, while every one of the 40 million Americans receiving federal food assistance would get less support every month. All the while, their radical plan would see double-digit energy cost increases for American households and businesses, and threaten close to 800,000 good-paying jobs in the clean-energy economy."
"Their entire agenda," Schumer said of Republicans, "can be boiled down to this: Billionaires win and families lose."
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'A Betrayal': Colorado's Democratic Governor Vetoes Bill Targeting Algorithmic Rent-Setting
The veto, said one critic, "sends the devastating message that corporate landlords can keep using secret price-fixing algorithms to take extra rent from people who have the least."
May 30, 2025
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, used his veto pen on Thursday to block legislation aimed at banning rent-setting algorithms that corporate landlords have used to drive up housing costs across the country.
The bill, known as H.B. 1004, would have prohibited algorithmic software "sold or distributed with the intent that it will be used by two or more landlords in the same market or a related market to set or recommend the amount of rent, level of occupancy, or other commercial term associated with the occupancy of a residential premises."
A report issued late last year by the Biden White House estimated that algorithmic rent-setting cost U.S. renters a combined $3.8 billion in 2023. According to the Biden administration's analysis, Denver tenants have been paying an average of $1,600 more on rent each year because of rent-setting algorithms. The approximate monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is $1,600.
Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, called Polis' veto "a betrayal" that makes "his priorities clear."
"Governor Polis had a simple choice: stand with working Coloradans or side with corporate landlords using secretive algorithms to allegedly price-fix rents," said Garofalo. "The governor talks a big game about affordability and abundance, but when given the chance to take real action—at no cost to taxpayers—he protected profiteers and let families keep paying a 13th month of rent. It's a betrayal of the values he claims to champion, and Colorado renters won't soon forget it."
"Governor Polis vetoed the most meaningful legislation we had to lower costs for renters."
Sam Gilman, co-founder and president of the Denver-based Community Economic Defense Project, said that the governor's veto "sends the devastating message that corporate landlords can keep using secret price-fixing algorithms to take extra rent from people who have the least."
"At a time when costs keep rising for working people and Republicans in Washington are attacking the social safety net," Gilman added, "Governor Polis vetoed the most meaningful legislation we had to lower costs for renters."
In a letter explaining his veto, Polis voiced agreement with the bill's supporters that "collusion between landlords for purposes of artificially constraining rental supply and increasing costs on renters is wrong." But he warned the bill could have the unintended effect of banning software that helps "efficiently manage residential real estate."
The governor's reasoning did not assuage critics.
"It stood up to corporate power," Gilman said of the legislation. "It promised to bring apartments back online. And it took on economic abuse that steals $1,600 a year from renters."
State Rep. Steven Woodrow (D-2) said it is "unfortunate that someone who claims to care so deeply about saving people money has chosen the interests of large corporate landlords over those of hard-working Coloradans."
State and local legislative efforts to rein in algorithmic rent-setting have gained steam in recent years following an explosive ProPublicastory in 2022 detailing RealPage's sale of "software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units."
"RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money," the investigative outlet reported. "One of the algorithm's developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had 'too much empathy' compared to computer-generated pricing. Apartment managers can reject the software's suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees."
The Denver Postreported Thursday that the vetoed bill "essentially targeted RealPage," which lobbied aggressively against a similar measure that died in the Colorado Legislature last year.
Polis also used his veto authority on Thursday to tank legislation that would have "limited how much ambulance services can charge for transporting patients and required health insurance companies to cover the cost, minus deductibles or copays," The Colorado Sunreported.
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Court Applauded for Slapping Down 'Corrupt, Authoritarian' Trump Tariff Scheme
"This is a huge political defeat, and Trump has nobody to blame except his own overreach," wrote one economist.
May 29, 2025
A panel of three federal judges late Wednesday unanimously ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump overstepped his authority by invoking emergency powers to impose broad-based tariffs on imports, a significant blow to a trade agenda that has wreaked havoc on small businesses, consumers, and the global economy.
The judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade, including one Trump appointee, halted the 10% import tariffs that Trump unilaterally imposed in April on goods from nearly every country, as well as additional levies on certain products from Canada and Mexico.
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which Trump cited as the authority underlying his tariff scheme, does not confer "such unbounded authority" to the president, the court ruled Wednesday.
Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, said in a statement that "Trump abused sweeping, unstrategic tariffs as part of a corrupt, authoritarian power grab to bully foreign countries and force U.S. companies to bend the knee to him and his billionaire friends."
"We welcome the court's decision striking down Trump's misuse of tariffs," St. Louis added.
The Trump administration almost immediately signaled plans to file an appeal in the case, which could ultimately wind up before the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.
Economist Paul Krugman wrote in response to the Wednesday decision that "presumably the Trumpists will try to undo this judgment, one way or another—exploiting other loopholes in the law, maybe trying to bully the court into submission, maybe just defying the court altogether."
"But this is a huge political defeat," Krugman added, "and Trump has nobody to blame except his own overreach."
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