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.
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A Trump-appointed judge on Monday blocked the Biden administration's pause on approvals of new liquefied natural gas export permits, the latest move by the nation's conservative-dominated judiciary to stop the federal government from taking action against the worsening climate emergency.
Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana sided with more than a dozen Republican-led states that sued over the pause earlier this year, claiming it would harm their economies.
Cain wrote in his ruling that the pause, which temporarily halted the approval process for facilities exporting LNG to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S., was "perhaps the epiphany [sic] of ideocracy." The judge falsely characterized the pause as a "ban."
A Department of Energy (DOE) spokesperson said the agency "disagrees" with Cain's decision and "continues to review the court's order and evaluate next steps."
Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, called Cain's ruling an "absurd and nakedly partisan decision untethered from reality."
"There is no 'LNG Export Ban' for the court to overturn," Henn wrote on social media. "DOE has simply paused new licenses while conducting a review of LNG's impacts."
This is an absurd and nakedly partisan decision untethered from reality.
There is no “LNG Export Ban” for the court to overturn. DOE has simply paused new licenses while conducting a review of LNG’s impacts. https://t.co/4TQFjYal4M
— Jamie Henn (@jamieclimate) July 1, 2024
The Congressional Research Service notes that under the Natural Gas Act, LNG exports to non-FTA countries "are presumed to be in the public interest, unless, after opportunity for a hearing, the DOE finds that the authorization would not be consistent with the public interest." Environmental groups have implored the Energy Department to develop a public-interest test that thoroughly weighs the climate impacts of LNG exports.
The Washington Postreported late Monday that Cain's ruling "means the Energy Department must resume its consideration of permit applications for new LNG export projects." The administration's pause put at least 14 pending gas export projects on hold, according to Earthjustice.
Craig Segall, the vice president of Evergreen Action, argued Monday that Cain's "deeply misguided" ruling "should have no impact on the Department of Energy's statutory authority over what must be included in a public-interest determination." Segall added that "pause or no pause, the science is clear: No sound analysis that accounts for the climate and environmental harm inflicted by LNG exports could possibly determine that these deadly facilities are in the public interest."
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Climate advocates have argued that the United States' status as the world's largest LNG exporter is harmful to both consumers and the planet, pushing up domestic energy costs while threatening to lock in decades of potent emissions as fossil fuel-driven extreme weather intensifies and scientists warn the world is barreling toward devastation.
"Coupled with last week's court rulings, rolling back the LNG pause shows that Trump judges are hellbent on torching environmental safeguards, the climate, and our democracy," Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said in a statement Monday. "This ruling means the Energy Department should deny any more LNG exports and facilities. Halting the massive and dangerous expansion of these exports is the right thing to do for Gulf Coast communities, wildlife, and all of us who hope to keep living on a sustainable planet."
Cain's decision to block the Biden administration's LNG export pause came after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down several rulings that could imperil federal agencies' ability to limit planet-warming pollution.
“Coupled with last week’s court rulings, rolling back the LNG pause shows that Trump judges are hellbent on torching environmental safeguards, the climate, and our democracy," said Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute. "This ruling means the Energy Department should deny any more LNG exports and facilities. Halting the massive and dangerous expansion of these exports is the right thing to do for Gulf Coast communities, wildlife, and all of us who hope to keep living on a sustainable planet."
Cain's ruling also came days after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—an agency increasingly embraced by Republicans and the fossil fuel industry—approved Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) LNG terminal, which if completed would become the nation's largest fracked gas export terminal and increase daily U.S. gas exports by roughly 20%.
"A rubber stamp from FERC is business-as-usual for fossil fuel projects," Lukas Ross, climate and energy justice deputy director at Friends of the Earth,
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As the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives uses the appropriations process to promote the GOP agenda ahead of the November elections, Planned Parenthood Action Fund on Monday highlighted how the spending bills attack health within and beyond the United States.
"Once again, anti-abortion rights politicians in Congress are manipulating the federal appropriations process to push for a recycled slate of dangerous and unpopular provisions to block access to sexual and reproductive healthcare across the country and around the world," states the new PPFA memo.
The PPFA document details anti-health policies in spending legislation for fiscal year 2025 that House Republicans have advanced recently, which include provisions "eliminating the Title X family planning program and reinstating the Trump-era expanded global gag rule."
The global gag rule bars U.S. government funding for foreign groups that provide information, referrals, or services for abortion care, or advocate for decriminalization or increasing access. It was initially implemented by former Republican President Ronald Reagan as the Mexico City policy, then reinstated and expanded by former President Donald Trump.
"In all, anti-abortion rights politicians continue to act in defiance of the vast majority of their constituents who believe that the government has no right to control people's personal healthcare decisions with attacks on abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming care."
Despite Trump's ongoing legal battles, he is the presumptive Republican nominee to face Democratic President Joe Biden in November. Biden rescinded his predecessor's gag rule shortly after taking office in 2021. Reproductive freedom has been a key issue in not only that contest but races at all levels of U.S. politics this cycle, as GOP policymakers and candidates have set their sights on abortion care, birth control, and in vitro fertilization.
The gag rule was included in the appropriations bill for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs, which the House on Friday passed 212-200. The only Democrat who voted in favor was Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington—who supports reproductive rights and has shared her own abortion story.
That bill would also "cap funding for international family planning and reproductive health programs at $461 million, a nearly 25% cut," and end funding for United Nations entities including the U.N. Population Fund, as the PPFA memo notes. It would also "restrict information about and access to gender-affirming care," and "maintain the Helms Amendment in addition to restrictions on abortion coverage for Peace Corps volunteers."
Speaking out against the legislation last week, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said that "much like last year, the fiscal year 2025 state and foreign operations bill resurrects the doomed isolationism of the early 20th century."
"For the sake of our national security, women's health globally, and our response to the climate crisis, Republicans must abandon this reckless and partisan path and join Democrats at the table to govern," declared DeLauro, who raised the alarm about House GOP appropriations proposals throughout June.
Taking aim at the labor, health and human services, and education legislation last week, she said that "in keeping with the majority's other partisan bills, this bill is chock full of dozens of poison pill riders, including multiple provisions that attack women's freedom and block abortion and reproductive healthcare services."
Specifically, as the PPFA memo points out, it would interfere with postgraduate training in abortion care, impose the Hyde and Weldon amendments, restrict access to gender-affirming care, block Biden administration executive orders intended to boost abortion care access in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and eliminate funding for Title X family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs while pouring money into abstinence-only-until-marriage initiatives.
It would also "defund" Planned Parenthood, preventing people in communities across the United States—particularly in rural and medically underserved areas—from accessing services including sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, cancer screenings, and birth control, as the memo outlines.
The recently introduced commerce, justice, and science bill would block most federal prisoners from attaining abortion coverage and prevent the U.S. Department of Justice from suing state or local governments over anti-choice laws, according to the memo. The financial services and general government legislation would reverse a District of Columbia law protecting workers from being fired for their reproductive healthcare choices, bar D.C. from using local funds to cover abortion care, and ban Federal Employee Health Benefits Program coverage of most abortions.
"In all, anti-abortion rights politicians continue to act in defiance of the vast majority of their constituents who believe that the government has no right to control people's personal healthcare decisions with attacks on abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming care," the publication states.
The document also targets provisions in multiple recently passed spending bills focused on homeland security, the Pentagon, and veterans—including attacks on abortion and gender-affirming care for current and former service members and their families as well as anyone in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
"Anti-abortion rights lawmakers recently included similar measures in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—an annual must-pass bill," the memo highlights.
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After the mid-June NDAA vote, PPFA president Alexis McGill Johnson said that "it's like Groundhog Day. Anti-abortion rights House members use must-pass bills as a vehicle to force through their deeply unpopular and dangerous agenda—again and again and again. Everyone deserves access to abortion and gender-affirming care, including service members and their families. But these lawmakers would rather play games with our fundamental rights in their attempt to control our bodies, lives, and futures."
The NDAA and spending bills aren't expected to pass the Senate—which is narrowly controlled by Democrats—in their current forms, but they send a message about what Republicans would prioritize if they fully reclaimed Congress and the White House.
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"Our chance to finally achieve fair maps in Ohio is just around the corner," said one supporter of the proposed constitutional amendment.
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The campaign for an Ohio ballot measure for a state constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering has collected more than 730,000 signatures, according to the initiative's organizers.
The Citizens Not Politicians campaign said it delivered 731,306 signatures to the office of Ohio's secretary of state in Columbus on Monday, significantly more than the 413,487 valid signatures needed to qualify for November's ballot.
If approved, the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment will:
- Create the 15-member Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission made up of Republican, Democratic, and Independent citizens who broadly represent the different geographic areas and demographics of the state;
- Ban current or former politicians, political party officials, and lobbyists from sitting on the commission;
- Require fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician; and
- Require the commission to operate under an open and independent process.
Nearly 100 organizations, businesses, and thought leaders across Ohio are supporting the amendment. If the measure is certified for November's ballot and approved by voters, the new commission could draw maps for use as soon as the 2026 elections. Seven other states have similar independent commissions: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and Washington.
After the delivery, hundreds of campaign staff, volunteers, and supporters rallied in the Statehouse Atrium to celebrate their achievement and send a message to gerrymandering politicians.
"This is our house, the people's house, and with today's signature turn-in, we move one giant step closer to ensuring that the citizens decide who serves here, not the politicians who just scheme and rig the game to stay in power," said retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a Republican who helped write the amendment. "This constitutional amendment will restore power to Ohio citizens and take it away from the self-serving politicians and their lobbyist friends and big-money donors."
Ted Linscott, a retired bricklayer from Appalachian Ohio, said: "Where I come from, we believe in fairness and working together to do what's right. For too long, career politicians and their lobbyist friends have manipulated our districts to serve their interests. It's time we put an end to this. We need a system that is open, transparent, and fair."
According to the Citizens Not Politicians campaign:
Nationally, Ohio is recognized as one of the worst states for gerrymandering, undermining proportional representation and leading to political stagnation and ineffective policy.
More than 9 million Ohioans, or 77% of the state population, live in districts where one party has a severe advantage in the 2024 Ohio House of Representatives elections, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.
"In my work for voter access and education, I have seen firsthand how gerrymandering creates a Legislature that is ineffective and unresponsive to the needs of Ohio voters," amendment supporter Tucker Sutherland said. "They don't have to care what we think because they draw themselves into cozy districts where they often don't even face opposition for reelection."
Equal Districts, a coalition of 30 advocacy groups,
said on social media that "our chance to finally achieve fair maps in Ohio is just around the corner."
"Let's end gerrymandering in Ohio," the group added.
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