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social safety net
Faith Leaders Blast GOP's Attacks on Poor and Tax Cuts for the Rich
"We are releasing this powerful report to expose for the American people how immoral, dangerous, and insane the administration's proposed economic decisions are," said Bishop William Barber.
Mar 05, 2025
Leaders from various faiths came together in Washington, D.C. on Christians' Ash Wednesday to share an open letter and report calling out efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration and Republicans in Congress to rip resources away from the working class to fund tax giveaways for the ultrarich.
"Budgets are moral documents," said Bishop William J. Barber II, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, in a statement. "We are releasing this powerful report to expose for the American people how immoral, dangerous, and insane the administration's proposed economic decisions are and how they are going to hurt people."
"At this critical moment in our nation's history, we need a government that promotes unity and love towards all members of the human family, not division and hatred," added Barber, whose group released the report in partnership with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
"The Trump-GOP agenda would tilt the playing field even further away from poor and low-income people in favor of the wealthy and big corporations."
The report—titled The High Moral Stakes of the Policy Battles Raging in Washington—explains that "social safety net and housing programs are under attack from two fronts," pointing to both Republican lawmakers' pursuit of cuts and Elon Musk, the unelected leader of Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The document details attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. It also warns that other "vital" initiatives such as the early childhood education program Head Start and federal rental assistance "could be on the chopping block."
EPI president Heidi Shierholz said that "as this report shows, these cuts will be profoundly destructive to incomes and economic security for this country's most vulnerable households—and they are being done for the sole purpose of providing tax cuts that will go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest households."
"This is an upside-down agenda that literally takes from struggling families to line the pockets of billionaires," she stressed. "We stand against this—and we stand for moral economic policies that lift up the most vulnerable, strengthen our communities, and ensure prosperity is shared by all."
Specifically, the GOP aims to extend expiring provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that, as the report notes, "delivered huge windfalls to the rich and large corporations and contributed to the exploding wealth and power of our country's billionaire class."
"The Trump-GOP agenda puts recent improvements in the U.S. unemployment rate, low-income workers' real wages, and labor protections at risk. They have already rolled back some gains and indicated opposition to raising the federal minimum wage," the report continues, highlighting that while some states have higher hourly rates, the nationwide minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009.
The publication also blasts Trump's anti-immigrant policies, emphasizing that "immigrants are a vital part of our communities and economy," and the president's mass deportations "would devastate undocumented and authorized immigrants and citizens alike."
The document concludes with a section on Trump's "alarming moves toward more widespread use of the U.S. war machine both around the world, and within the United States," citing his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, attempt to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, and proposed takeovers of the Gaza Strip, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.
"This report's data make clear that the Trump-GOP agenda would tilt the playing field even further away from poor and low-income people in favor of the wealthy and big corporations," said IPS executive director Tope Folarin. "We will see more families go hungry, lose healthcare, and struggle to pay rent while Republicans give huge tax windfalls and unprecedented political power to the wealthiest Americans and throw more tax dollars into the machines of war and mass deportation."
Former IPS director John Cavanagh, who is now a senior adviser, joined faith leaders outside the U.S. Supreme Court in D.C. for a gathering to discuss the new report and the letter, which Barber read to the crowd and which can be signed on his group's website.
"We write to issue this call for repentance and truth-telling because our most basic moral commitments have been betrayed by our political leaders," the letter declares. "We have struggled to realize a republic committed to equality and freedom for all of us."
"We write today to confess that we have become subject to the tyranny of technology," it continues. "Awed by the possibilities of progress and the promise of limitless growth, our political leaders have allowed corporate power to go unchecked for decades. Our courts have ruled that corporations should be treated like people while everyday people have been increasingly treated like things. In the richest nation in the history of the world, poverty has become epidemic as the fourth leading cause of death."
"As people of faith, we stand together in the public square to say, 'We repent.' We are not afraid of the false god of efficiency, and we will not bow to any tyranny that claims control of our common life," the letter states. "We invite our colleagues to assemble on the town square, at city hall, or on the state house lawn in communities across this land and join this call. As we have in Washington today, we invite communities to study the report on the true state of our nation."
The livestreamed event was followed by a march to the U.S. Capitol to deliver the documents to congressional leadership.
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'We Won't Let Them,' Vows Sanders as Trump Endorses House GOP Attack on Medicaid
"If Trump only needed 12 hours to go all-in on slashing Medicaid to fund giveaways to the wealthy, why should anyone expect other entitlements to be off the table?" wrote one editor in an op-ed for MSNBC.
Feb 25, 2025
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had sharp words for a GOP budget resolution that seeks to fund trillions of dollars in tax cuts by almost certainly making major cuts to programs that lower-income Americans rely on, like Medicaid, and could be voted on in the House of Representatives as soon as Tuesday evening.
Medicaid, Sanders wrote on social media Monday, provides coverage for over 60% of people in nursing homes and millions of children. "Trump and his Republican friends want to enact massive cuts to the program. We won't let them," wrote Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats.
While the budget resolution doesn't explicitly call for cuts to Medicaid, the resolution directs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid spending, to come up with $880 billion in cuts.
Sanders' post on social media was accompanied by a clip from an MSNBCinterview from last week, where he and host Ali Velshi discussed U.S. President Donald Trump's backtracking on his statement that he would not make cuts to Medicaid.
On February 18, Trump toldFox News that "Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched." Less than 24 hours later Trump endorsed the House budget blueprint on Truth Social, saying he liked that plan better than a separate Senate version.
"The House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda, EVERYTHING, not just parts of it!" Trump wrote.
That flip flop inspired an op-ed from James Downie, an editor for MSNBC, who wrote Monday that "that pirouette should worry not only the millions of Americans on Medicaid, but those drawing Medicare and even Social Security benefits as well."
"If Trump only needed 12 hours to go all-in on slashing Medicaid to fund giveaways to the wealthy, why should anyone expect other entitlements to be off the table?" Downie wrote.
Cutting the federal government's share of Medicaid spending could mean millions of Americans lose health coverage unless states step up and fill the gap, according to The New York Times.
"House Republicans hunting for ways to pay for President Trump's tax cuts have called for cutting the federal government's share of Medicaid spending, including a proposal that would effectively gut the Affordable Care Act's 2014 expansion of the program," the outlet reported Tuesday.
Meanwhile, steep cuts in the budget outline have made some GOP House members nervous. With a razor-thin majority in the House, Republicans can't afford more than a single defection if they want to pass the resolution—and a couple have already said they are against the measure.
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Dictator Donald Thinks He’s Invincible; He’s Not
Unless he changes course, he will be brought down by corruption throughout his ranks, plunging polls, resistance by many states, and a Congressional GOP realizing that it is their political skin or Trump’s.
Feb 01, 2025
Convicted felon Donald Trump has declared war on Americans. In less than two weeks, he has become the dictator, a role he celebrated in his campaign. He is using illegal executive orders as poisoned spears against just about every program the federal government administers to advance the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans.
Until temporarily enjoined by a federal court, Trump pushed to cut all monies that fund schools, housing, nutrition programs, and healthcare—especially Medicaid for over 80 million children, women, and men and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). Essentially, he and his minions are going berserk, smashing the law, tearing up our Constitution, and inviting lawsuits which they can delay, with your tax dollars, until they reach Trump’s handpicked corrupt U.S. Supreme Court cronies.
The media can scarcely keep up with just listing the vicious cruelty of Der Fuhrer driven by vengeance and greed arising out of his deeply unstable egomania. Trump’s abuses of power can be divided into three categories:
- Driving to destroy the historic safety net leads to a collective homicide. Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not;
- Omnicide coming from directly shutting down federal agencies and their cooperation with other nations (quitting the Paris climate accords) from continuing the fight against climate violence and the accelerating intensity of wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, extreme heat waves, and rising sea levels, and subordinating renewable energy to greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. Trump also quit the World Health Organization and froze federal programs working to foresee and forestall deadly pandemics;
- Genocide by continuing former President Joe Biden’s co-belligerency with mass killer and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adding support for the expulsion of the remaining survivors in Gaza to their death in the desert. Add these criminal mayhems to the censorship or persecution of anyone who opposes Trump.
With his fascistic henchmen (assured of Trump’s pardons for any criminal actions) to head the FBI and other crackdown agencies, he is unleashing a police state the likes of which American history has not seen since the days of slavery. The Trumpsters are also enabling expansion of private corporate prisons to incarcerate his enemies.
Together with Elon Musk, the Trump administration is moving to turn the civil service back into the spoils system. Musk is also going berserk, offering out-of-nowhere 2 million federal employees buyouts with pay until September. This is totally crazy, illegal, and dictated by a private mega-billionaire. You may remember the former Musk who warned about global warming and lethally out of control robots (AI).
These moves are part of a purge of experienced public servants, who serve people every day, to be replaced by the tribunes and agents of the corporate state or the final takeover of our government, by big business, with Trump at its head.
Right now, Trump, the failed gambling czar in the White House, and his minions think they are invincible. The GOP in Congress is cowed. The courts are Trump’s at the top level, and if they balk, he issues pardons. Who’s going to stop him and the rampaging Trumpsters?
In a word, The People. Already his polls are dropping. Under direct threat by Trump, the mass media is not all going to turn into Fox News. The stories of the pain, deprivation, and chaotic sadism imposed on totally innocent American families and workers will generate spontaneous resistance that translates into lower consumer buying amid higher inflation and the instability that small businesses dread. Even Chambers of Commerce will recoil at yet more tax dollars being unavailable for public infrastructure and instead going for more weapons of mass destruction to enlarge the military state.
All of this is to say that the demented Trump is deeply un-American as he touts America seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, together with his designs on Canada.
Unless he changes course, he will be brought down by corruption throughout his ranks, plunging polls, resistance by many states and their attorneys general, and finally by a Congressional GOP realizing that it is their political skin or Trump’s. They will choose their own political survival.
Remember, during the Watergate scandal in 1974, a delegation of Republican Senators went to the White House and told then-President Richard Nixon that his time was up and that he had to resign for far, far fewer transgressions.
Trump knows no boundaries, no self-restraint, and has often declared that he will do whatever he wants, meaning operating in massive violation of the laws of our land. He is now ruling by dictates that are getting more sweeping and penetrating by the day. He should read a history book.
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