March, 09 2023, 02:42pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Michelle Bazie,202-408-1080,bazie@cbpp.org
President Biden's 2024 Budget Moves Us Toward Nation Where Everyone Can Thrive
Statement of Sharon Parrott, CBPP President, on President Biden’s 2024 Budget
President Biden’s 2024 budget invests in people and communities and creates a 21st century tax system that supports these investments to build toward an economy that works for everyone. It lays out an agenda that would move us closer to a nation where everyone — regardless of their background, identities, or where they live — has the resources they need to thrive and share in the nation’s prosperity.
The President’s budget would broaden opportunity, including among people and communities who have long been underinvested in.The budget makes important investments in a range of areas, including in children, supports for workers, housing affordability, education, and core government functions, among others, and finances these investments by raising taxes on high-income people and profitable corporations that have benefitted the most from the nation’s economy. The President’s budget would broaden opportunity, including among people and communities who have long been underinvested in, such as people with low incomes, people of color, Indigenous communities, and people in rural communities, among others.
The President’s budget priorities stand in stark contrast with the emerging House Republican agenda — an agenda that pushes more tax cuts for the wealthy and profitable corporations, and holds the economy hostage by demanding deep spending cuts in areas like K-12 schools, health care, medical research, college tuition help, and help buying groceries as the price for raising the debt limit. Taken together, this emerging agenda would increase hardship and narrow access to opportunity; widen already large differences in outcomes by race, ethnicity, and geography; and hurt the country as a whole.
As Congress and the Administration engage in the budget process this year, a central part of the debate will be deciding funding levels for defense, veterans’ medical care, and “non-defense discretionary” programs (outside of veterans’ health care) through annual appropriations. Non-defense discretionary programs fund a wide range of priorities including many that are central to strengthening the economy and promoting opportunity, as well as delivering basic government functions. The President’s budget makes sound investments here, showing an increase in overall funding for non-defense discretionary programs (outside of veterans’ health care) of about 7.3 percent as compared to 2023 funding levels, offsetting the effects of inflation and providing modest but meaningful resources for new investments in key areas. (The percent increase figures for program areas cited below do not take inflation into account.)
For example, the budget invests in helping people afford rent and supporting people experiencing homelessness. It provides $2.4 billion in additional funding for Housing Choice Vouchers, which bridge the gap between what a household can afford and the cost of rent in their communities, and an $122 million increase for homelessness services and supports, with $6 million targeted to people living with HIV/AIDS who need housing assistance.
The budget also increases discretionary child care funding by almost $1 billion (12 percent), building on a robust investment made in 2023, and boosts support for Head Start by $1.1 billion. Even with these increases, funding will remain well below what is needed to ensure that all families with low or moderate incomes have access to affordable and quality child care.
The budget invests in education, boosting Pell Grant funding and raising the maximum award by $500, building on progress in raising the grant level over the last two years to help students with low and moderate incomes afford college. The budget also increases K-12 funding that supports schools, students with low incomes, and students with disabilities.
The budget recognizes the importance of ensuring effective operation of basic government functions, increasing funding for the Social Security Administration by $1.4 billion or 10 percent, to begin addressing long wait times, short-staffed field offices, and long delays in disability benefit decisions, due to deep funding cuts since 2010.
The budget proposes to increase base funding for the IRS by $1.8 billion or 15 percent over the 2023 level. The increase reflects a commitment to deliver an IRS that honest taxpayers and business owners deserve: one that provides taxpayer assistance, efficiently processes tax returns, and collects legally owed taxes from people who would try to cheat. The budget recognizes that this will require both sufficient annual appropriations for the agency’s ongoing base operations as well as the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
These important proposals would move the nation forward, but most are modest in scope. The President’s budget recognizes that more significant investments in a number of areas are needed outside of appropriations to advance economic, health, and racial justice, and it lays out a more robust agenda that would support families and workers, address the affordable housing crisis, expand health coverage, and support older adults and people with disabilities. While political disagreements mean that most larger-scale advances can’t be achieved this year, putting them forward offers a clear vision of the policies necessary to create broadly shared prosperity.
For example, the budget supports families by expanding the Child Tax Credit. It permanently extends the credit to the 19 million children — including nearly half of Black children, more than 1 in 3 Latino and American Indian and Alaska Native children, and 1 in 6 white and Asian children — who currently receive a partial credit or none at all because their families’ incomes are too low. And it permanently allows families to receive the credit on a monthly basis. The budget also temporarily increases the amount of the credit through 2025 (when policymakers must revisit tax policy because of the expiration of the individual tax cuts in the 2017 tax law). We know an expanded Child Tax Credit works. The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expanded Child Tax Credit provided the full credit for the first time to children in families with low incomes and to 17-year-olds and increased the credit amount overall, which helped drive down overall child poverty dramatically and narrowed the large differences in child poverty across racial and ethnic categories when these provisions were in effect in 2021.
Other provisions in the President’s budget also help workers and families. The budget’s game-changing $600 billion in new investments in child care and pre-K would support children’s development, help families make ends meet, and boost the economy by helping more parents afford the care they need to work, while the proposal for a national paid family and medical leave program would help workers take time off to care for their families while staying connected to their jobs. And the budget would permanently expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without minor children at home to supplement the wages of low-paid workers and help them make ends meet.
The President’s budget makes some important advances in addressing the affordable housing crisis. In addition to the rental assistance funding for 2024 through regular appropriations, it includes $22 billion in additional funding over the next ten years for vouchers through the “mandatory” part of the budget: $9 billion to support the estimated 20,000 youth who age out of foster care each year and $13 billion to expand assistance to 450,000 veteran families with extremely low incomes, though more resources will be needed to reach all such families. While an important step forward, substantially more investment will ultimately be needed to help all of the 16 million households paying more than half of their income on rent or experiencing homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding. But this is an important down payment and a recognition that resources outside of appropriations are necessary.
The budget takes significant steps toward universal health coverage and would improve health equity. It would expand coverage to more than 2 million people — most of whom are Black or Latinx — who lack any path to coverage because they live in states that have refused to adopt the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion. It also makes permanent expanded premium tax credits that make ACA marketplace coverage more affordable for millions of people and have resulted in higher coverage rates. The budget continues to lower prescription drug costs, saving money for consumers and for the federal government. And it increases funding for home- and community-based services through Medicaid, which are critical for helping older people and people with disabilities remain in the community and get the care they need.
In addition, the budget protects Social Security and Medicare, which provide income and health coverage to tens of millions of older and disabled people. It also shores up Medicare financing by securing further prescription drug savings, closing a tax loophole that deprives the program of revenues, and modestly raising the Medicare tax rate on high-income households. But protecting these programs from harmful cuts is not enough to meet the needs of low-income older adults and people with disabilities, and additional targeted support is needed, such as improvements in income support through the Supplemental Security Income program.
The budget calls for strengthening federal nutrition assistance programs as part of this year’s debate around the farm bill, which will reauthorize both SNAP, which helps millions of households buy groceries, along with farm and conservation programs. While some congressional Republicans have called for deep cuts in SNAP, the President’s budget calls for a farm bill that eliminates barriers to food assistance for vulnerable groups and moves the nation toward the goal of ensuring everyone has access to healthy, affordable food.
The budget raises revenues to pay for its investments and reduce the deficit. The revenue proposals move the country away from the flawed trickle-down path of the 2017 tax law and toward a tax code that raises more needed revenues, reins in multinational corporations’ ability to shift their profits offshore to avoid taxes, is more progressive and equitable, and supports investments that make the economy work for everyone.
The proposals address the long-standing problem that many of the wealthiest households who have gained the most from the nation’s economy pay very little in individual income taxes, and sometimes none at all. They push against high levels of inequality, help address longer-term fiscal challenges, and begin to restore the public’s faith that the government works on behalf of all people, not just the well-heeled. Altogether, the budget shows that its proposed policies would reduce deficits over the next decade by nearly $3 trillion.
The revenue increases take revenues as a share of the economy back to late-1990s levels, when growth was strong. Evidence is sorely lacking that the benefits from recent rounds of corporate tax cuts have trickled down, while multinationals continue to shift substantial profits offshore. The recent, deep cut in the corporate tax rate needs to be revisited and the U.S. needs to align our international tax rules with the global minimum tax agreement, as the President’s budget proposes. Moreover, the budget addresses a fundamental flaw in our tax code that allows some of the wealthiest households in the country to pay little or nothing each year in individual income taxes — the main federal tax — by requiring very wealthy people to pay taxes on a primary source of their income, unrealized capital gains.
The U.S. has high levels of hardship, with millions of households even before the pandemic unable to afford the basics. This level of hardship is a policy choice, not an economic inevitability.
We saw during the pandemic that public policy can sharply reduce poverty and hardship, with poverty overall and among children reaching historically low levels in 2021; those efforts, however, have ended. Other wealthy nations make different policy choices and have different outcomes: lower poverty rates, universal health coverage, affordable child care, and better protections for workers. Taken together, these higher-investment policies often result in higher labor force participation rates than in the U.S.
The President’s budget lays out a vision of 21st century investments paid for by a sound tax system that requires those who have benefitted the most from our economy to pay a more reasonable amount in taxes. That path is one that leads to broader opportunity, greater economic and health security, lower levels of hardship, and a nation where everyone can thrive.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the nation's premier policy organizations working at the federal and state levels on fiscal policy and public programs that affect low- and moderate-income families and individuals.
LATEST NEWS
Ignore the Cosplay. Trump's Record Shows He 'Does Not Give a Damn About Working-Class People'
"Donald Trump left workers behind when he was president," said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
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The final stretch of the 2024 U.S. presidential race has seen Donald Trump, the billionaire Republican nominee, perform a staged shift at a Pennsylvania McDonald's and dress as a garbage truck driver in a clear effort to appeal to working-class voters who are set to play a decisive role in Tuesday's election.
But a detailed examination of Trump's first four-year term in the White House shows that despite his recent cosplaying, the GOP nominee was no ally of the working class when he was in a position to influence and enact policy.
"When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled," the investigative outlet ProPublicareported over the weekend. "He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance."
Additionally, the outlet noted, Trump "tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers' tips" and succeeded in enacting "a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year"—all of which casts serious doubt on the Republican candidate's pledge to prioritize the economic interests of U.S. workers in a second term.
ProPublica also analyzed Trump's proposed federal budgets from 2018 to 2021 and found that the former president "advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut healthcare, food, and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans."
Meanwhile, Trump worked with his Republican allies in Congress to ram through a massive tax cut for the rich and large corporations—a measure he wants to double down on if he defeats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday.
Trump's 2024 campaign has featured some policy proposals aimed at boosting the working class, such as eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay.
But economists and progressive organizers have argued that the benefits of such policy changes would be marginal compared to broader proposals that Trump has not backed, such as raising the federal minimum wage and eliminating subminimum wages for tipped workers. A recent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis found that Trump's economic plans overall would cut taxes for the richest 5% of U.S. households while raising them for the bottom 95%.
During his McDonald's stunt last month, Trump ignored a question about whether he supports raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for over 15 years. Harris, by contrast, has expressed support for lifting the federal wage floor to at least $15 an hour.
"He does not give a damn about working-class people," United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said of Trump during an appearance on MSNBC alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) late last week. "Donald Trump left workers behind when he was president. He did nothing to stop manufacturing plants leaving this country."
"With the Harris and Biden administration, we have seen a bigger investment in this country and manufacturing than I have ever seen in my lifetime. They walk the walk," Fain added. "Trump is all talk."
In a video message to the country ahead of Election Day, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) similarly criticized Trump as an opponent of union rights and argued Harris is the "clear" choice for those who want to improve the lives of working-class Americans.
"While some of us may have differences of opinion and disagree with Kamala Harris on this or that issue, I hope very much we will not sit out this election. We cannot sit it out," said Sanders. "So let's get involved. Let's do everything we can. Let's come out and vote on Election Day, and let's make sure that Donald Trump is defeated and that Kamala Harris is our next president."
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At least 1 in 5 potential battleground state electors for former U.S. President Donald Trump are linked to the Republican nominee's attempt to subvert the 2020 election, according to an analysis published Monday.
Politico reported that "of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states, eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020."
Five additional possible electors signed similar documents in 2020 but were not criminally charged, according to the reporting, while at least half a dozen others "played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."
"These people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
With numerous Trump aides and GOP officials facing criminal charges for their alleged roles in the former president's bogus "Stop the Steal" scheme, experts say it is somewhat less likely that the Republican nominee or his allies would attempt another such plot. However, Trump and his boosters have recycled similar claims of election fraud in what critics say is a bid to spread misinformation and sow doubt about the outcome of Tuesday's contest if the 2020 loser is defeated by Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It does show a lack of regard for the criminal and ethical problems with doing this," Mary McCord, a Georgetown law professor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told Politico.
As Politico notes:
Six of the returning fake electors hail from Michigan. John Haggard, Hank Choate, Timothy King, Meshawn Maddock, Amy Facchinello, and Marian Sheridan were among the group of Michiganders who signed a document in 2020 purporting to be official electoral certificates claiming the state’s electoral votes went to Donald Trump, despite Biden winning Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against them, including forgery-related crimes punishable by up to 14 years. Those cases are ongoing and all have pleaded not guilty.
In the battleground state of Wisconsin—where President Joe Biden defeated Trump by less than 21,000 votes, or 0.63%, in 2020—"election deniers are back at it, laying the groundwork to run the Big Lie playbook once again through actions designed to attack the electoral process, sow seeds of chaos set to bloom post-election, and further undermine confidence in our democracy," warned Wisconsin Democracy Campaign executive director Nick Ramos in a Sunday opinion piece in the Cap Times.
"That is exactly what their antics wrought after the 2020 election—chaos resulting in the January 6 insurrection and years of baseless conspiracy theories that did not, and will not, succeed in changing a single election result but did succeed in undermining the confidence of millions of Americans in our democracy," he continued.
"The bullies are back again, continuing their strategy to interfere in Wisconsin's elections," Ramos added.
While some observers claim that would-be election subversives are likely to tread gingerly in light of the potential criminal consequences for alleged Big Lie conspirators, McCord said that "it would appear that the party leadership in the states where there are fraudulent electors serving as electors again are not taking seriously things like the criminal charges that have been brought against these fraudulent electors."
Amy Tarkanian, a former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, told Politico that "these people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
"It's definitely disappointing," she lamented.
In Arizona—where former state GOP chief Kelli Ward and 11 other Republican officials have been criminally charged in connection with the alleged fake electors scheme—current Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda has been pushing spurious election fraud claims. This, even as Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of a right-wing women's group who falsely attested that Trump won Arizona in 2020, earlier this year became the first person convicted in the state's fake electors case.
Democracy defenders have sounded the alarm on the potential for violence fueled by baseless claims of election fraud.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said last week that it is "seeing the same warning signs of political violence based on election denialism combined with violent language across fringe platforms that we saw in the weeks before the 2020 election and before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol."
According to a YouGov poll published Saturday, just over two-thirds of respondents—including more than 80% of surveyed Democrats and 55% of Republicans— believe it is either "somewhat" or "very likely" that Trump will refuse to concede if he loses to Harris.
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New Reporting Details 'Large Scale' Use of Human Shields by Israel in Gaza
"The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began," one human rights expert said. "The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer."
Nov 04, 2024
The Israel Defense Forces routinely use detained Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, according to testimony from four Palestinians and one IDF soldier shared withThe Washington Post.
Their stories, published on Sunday, build on other accounts from Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the international press, and Defense for Children International to reveal a pattern of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians—including children—to enter buildings or tunnels ahead of them to check for militants or explosives, in clear violation of international law.
"This wasn't something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places," Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, told The Washington Post.
"My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands."
The incidents recounted to the Post occurred between January and August. One man, 20-year-old Mohammed Saad, said he was detained by the IDF in June and interrogated for several days. Then, a new pattern began. Every day, he and two other Palestinian men were blindfolded and taken to a different location. They were made to wear IDF uniforms, given cameras, and told to enter buildings ahead of the Israeli soldiers to film and check for explosives. On the second day, an explosion went off after Saad had made his forced investigation.
"They tied my hands and threw me on the sand," he recalled. "They took turns beating me. I still don't know where the explosion came from."
Another time, the captain of the unit he was detained by showed him an image of his family home destroyed by bombing.
"If you do not cooperate with us, we will kill all your family members like this," the captain said.
On the 15th day of Saab's ordeal, he was given civilian clothes and told to walk. As he did so, he felt a pain and realized he had been shot in the back.
The other three Palestinians interviewed by the Post were detained during the IDF's raid on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City in March. One was a surgeon at the hospital, while the other two were taken from their homes nearby. They were made to enter the hospital building ahead of IDF troops, remove any barriers, and take pictures of each room they entered.
"I was telling them that my hands are precious for my work; I am the only vascular surgeon here," the surgeon, Omar al-Jadba recalled to the Post. "My hospital was turning into rubble, and they were asking me to demolish it with my own hands."
The IDF soldier, who spoke anonymously, said that two Palestinian detainees were placed with his unit to make sure that buildings were safe to enter. One of them was only a teenager. His commander said the two men were terrorists, but then later said they could be released after the mission was over.
"At this point we understood that if we could release them, then they were not terrorists," the soldier, a reservist, told the Post. "The officer just lied to us."
"Every one of their accusations is a confession."
Another group of soldiers questioned the use of human shields, telling a higher-level commander that it was against international law.
"He told us that international law is not important and the only thing that simple soldiers need to think about is the ethical code of the IDF," the soldier told the Post.
However, the IDF said in a statement that its orders prohibit the use of human shields.
Breaking the Silence, a group that records testimonies from Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, said the reservist's account was in line with others they had received.
"The earliest testimony we have on it is from a soldier who was aware of it just a few weeks after the ground invasion began," Carmel said. "The latest testimony we have on this is from the summer."
The
Post reporting came the same day as a major Associated Press investigation into Israeli raids on three hospitals in northern Gaza at the end of 2023. Israel has often justified its hospital raids with the claim that Hamas operates from the inside, turning all the patients and doctors into human shields. However, the AP concluded that
"Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence at the three" hospitals it considered: the al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals.
"What do [former U.S. President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have in common?" asked journalist Mehdi Hasan in response to the Post's reporting. "Many things but especially... projection. Every one of their accusations is a confession."
Other commenters responded to the clear violations of international law and questioned why the U.S. continues to provide weapons and funding to the IDF while it engages in war crimes.
The Austin for Palestine coalition shared a quote from the article, noting that what it described was "paid for by our tax dollars."
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