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unrig our economy
GOP Proposes $4.5 Trillion Tax Giveaway to the Rich While 'Ransacking' Food Stamps and Medicaid
"House Republican leadership put a giant bullseye on Medicaid, with the intent to strip Americans of their healthcare benefits to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations."
Feb 12, 2025
House Republicans unveiled a draft budget resolution on Wednesday that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax breaks that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy while proposing $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs.
Lawmakers are set to mark up the House GOP's budget blueprint on Thursday as Republicans look to craft a sprawling reconciliation bill that can pass both chambers of Congress with a simple-majority vote. Last week, Senate Republicans released their own budget resolution that proposed significant cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other spending that benefits working-class families.
"Instead of tackling rising prices and delivering relief for American families, House Republicans are charging ahead with trillions of dollars in deeply unpopular tax breaks for billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk," Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said Wednesday in response to the House GOP resolution.
"And, they're paying for their billionaire handouts by ransacking healthcare, food assistance, and other vital programs that American workers and families rely on," Jacquez added.
The new resolution released by the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee specifically calls on the chamber's energy and commerce panel to "submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than" $880 billion over the next decade. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over Medicaid.
The measure also instructs the House Committee on Agriculture, which has jurisdiction over SNAP, to cut no less than $230 billion in spending between fiscal years 2025 and 2034.
"They wanna do a giant tax cut that disproportionately helps the rich while taking away people's health insurance and food while still adding trillions to the debt," Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer who is now senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, wrote in response to the resolution.
Overall, the House GOP's budget resolution calls for $2 trillion in cuts to "mandatory spending" over the next decade, taking aim at a category that includes Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and SNAP. While Social Security benefits cannot be cut through the reconciliation process, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can.
Congressional Republicans have outlined a number of ways they could slash Medicaid and SNAP, including punitive new work requirements that analysts say would strip benefits from tens of millions of low-income people.
But Families USA executive director Anthony Wright said Wednesday that "we don't need to know the mechanisms of how Medicaid would be cut to know the impact would be catastrophic: The sheer size of the proposed cuts means millions of Americans losing coverage, hospitals and clinics plunged into budget shortfalls, and healthcare services we all depend on being eliminated."
"This budget resolution is a five-alarm fire alert for our healthcare," said Wright. "House Republican leadership put a giant bullseye on Medicaid, with the intent to strip Americans of their healthcare benefits to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations."
Kobie Christian, a spokesperson for the progressive coalition Unrig Our Economy, issued a similarly scathing statement on Wednesday, arguing that House Republicans "showed us that what they value is more tax breaks for greedy billionaires and giant corporations with everyday people paying the price."
"At a time when everyday Americans face increasingly higher prices, Speaker Johnson and his stooges want to write billionaires a check and force working-class people to foot the bill for their outrageous tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy," said Christian. "Everyday Americans will not stand for these games—it's time for Republicans in Congress to end their campaign that puts the ultra-wealthy first on the backs of the rest of us."
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Project 2025 Would Lower Taxes for Rich, Hike Them for Everyone Else: Analysis
"This analysis lays bare how the extreme, conservative Project 2025 plan is more of the same from conservative leaders—delivering handouts to the wealthy and corporations on the backs of working people."
Aug 28, 2024
The Center for American Progress on Tuesday released an analysis of the tax plans in Project 2025, a right-wing manifesto whose authors have close ties to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, showing that conservatives aim to lower taxes on corporations and the rich while raising them on working- and middle-class Americans.
The liberal research and advocacy group, which published the analysis as part of a series of in-depth articles on Project 2025, found that the right-wing plan would raise income taxes for the median family of four by about $3,000, cut taxes by at least $1.5 million for a household earning more than $10 million per year, on average, and cut the corporate tax rate to 18% from 21%, an already historically low rate instituted by Republicans in 2017.
The analysis, authored by Brendan Duke, a senior director of economic policy at CAP, shows that, of households with a married couple and two children, only those earning more than $170,000 per year would see a tax break under the Project 2025 plan.
"This analysis lays bare how the extreme, conservative Project 2025 plan is more of the same from conservative leaders—delivering handouts to the wealthy and corporations on the backs of working people," Kobie Christian, a spokesperson at Unrig Our Economy, an advocacy group, said in a statement.
Project 2025’s income tax plan would increase taxes on middle class families. Only families making over $170,000 would get a tax cut.
cc: @amprog pic.twitter.com/O76weQ9MGm
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) August 27, 2024
The Project 2025 plan would consolidate seven tax brackets into just two—15% and 30%—on the grounds that it would "simplify" the tax code. However, CAP says that the existing number of tax brackets don't create any additional complexity and are easily dealt with by tax-filing software. Moreover, 70% of tax filers only deal with the two lowest tax brackets—10% and 12%—"so they effectively are already in a two-bracket system," Duke wrote.
CAP's findings about the impact of Project 2025's tax proposals on median earners are in keeping with those of the Democrats on the U.S. congressional Joint Economic Committee, who released a similar analysis earlier this month.
CAP included projections of the impact that Project 2025 would have on median income earners in each state and in the District of Columbia. Only in D.C., a high-earning area, were median earners projected to pay lower taxes under the right-wing plan; in all 50 states, their taxes went up.
It's unclear how popular the Project 2025 tax plans would be. Polling from Navigator Research, a progressive polling firm, in February showed that the vast majority of Americans favor increasing taxes on the rich and large corporations.
In addition to the immediate tax plans laid out above, Project 2025 also puts forth a long-term plan to replace all income taxes with a value-added tax—a flat, regressive proposal endorsed by some U.S. House Republicans. In addition to the injustice of such a plan, it may also be impractical. CAP found that it would require a value-added tax—similar to a sales tax—on everything, even essential items such as groceries and healthcare, of at least 45%, if it were to replace lost government revenues, and warned that this would cause inflation.
Project 2025 policy agenda is a 920-page manifesto written by right-wing groups including the Heritage Foundation. The plan has drawn intense media attention in recent months and has proven unpopular with the American public, leading Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, to repeatedly try to distance himself from it. However, 140 of his former administration officials helped create the manifesto.
Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation fellow and an outside economic adviser to Trump, helped write Project 2025 tax plan, according to Duke. Moore drew scrutiny this week for questioning the need for the child tax credit.
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'No Surprise': Big Pharma Sues Biden Over Effort to Lower Drug Prices for Americans
"This legal action underscores how critical it is to have a president in the White House who will fight for lower health costs for Americans," said U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden.
Jun 21, 2023
Aiming to protect wealthy pharmaceutical companies from any reduction in their tens of billions of dollars in annual profits or lavish CEO compensation packages, the industry's biggest lobbying group on Wednesday announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its policy allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for consumers.
Part of the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed last year, the Medicare negotiation provision has been a key demand of progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for several years, as the United States pays more per person for prescribed drugs than any other country and nearly a third of Americans said in one survey last year that they have avoided taking medications due to costs.
Although a Congressional Budget Office analysis found last year that allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices would save the U.S. nearly $290 billion in new revenue and savings over a decade, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) on Wednesday became the latest pro-industry group to sue over the provision, arguing the law is unconstitutional.
PhRMA argued in a court filing in the Western District of Texas that the provision violates the constitutional requirement for checks and balances by placing too much authority in the hands of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the due process clause by denying drug companies input regarding pricing, and the Eighth Amendment's ban on "excessive" fines due to the excise tax Big Pharma companies will be required to pay if they refuse to negotiate.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said it was "no surprise" that pharmaceutical companies want to stop Medicare from saving millions of senior citizens out-of-pocket costs—and warned that they'll likely be successful if a Republican candidate wins the presidency in 2024.
"I expect the Biden administration to vigorously defend Medicare's bargaining power so seniors will see the lower drug prices they expect," said Wyden. "This legal action underscores how critical it is to have a president in the White House who will fight for lower health costs for Americans. I have deep concerns that a Republican administration would roll out the red carpet for Big Pharma and once again ban Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices."
PhRMA was joined by the National Infusion Center Association and the Global Colon Cancer Association in the legal challenge, which follows a lawsuit filed by drugmaker Merck earlier this month. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bristol Myers Squibb have also sued over the provision this month, with the latter claiming, as PhRMA did Wednesday, that the law is "bad for innovation."
"We remain very concerned about the impact this law will have on patients and future innovation," PhRMA CEO Steve Ubl said.
The economic justice campaign Unrig Our Economy said Big Pharma is fighting any provision to help Medicare beneficiaries "while hardworking families struggle to pay for lifesaving medicine."
\u201cWish we were shocked but we're not \n\nWhile hard working families struggle to pay for life saving medicine, @PhRMA , @Merck\u00a0 and @bmsnews, and @USChamber are suing the government for letting Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices\n\nhttps://t.co/GN02FLksUK\u201d— Unrig Our Economy (@Unrig Our Economy) 1687364021
PhRMA is seeking a permanent injunction to stop the negotiation process, three months before the government is scheduled to choose the first 10 drugs to which the provision will apply. The new prices are set to take effect in 2026.
"We will vigorously defend the president's drug price negotiation law, which is already helping to lower healthcare costs for seniors and people with disabilities," a spokesperson for HHS told The Hill. "The law is on our side."
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