With all Democratic Senators and Representatives voting against it, Trump and the Republicans rammed through the horrible budget bill.
At the bill’s signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. Tax cuts were the centerpiece of Ronald Reagan’s economic plan, proposed during the Republican presidential primary in 1980. Called “voodoo economics” at the time by George H.W. Bush, it was later dubbed Reaganomics.
As he signed the recent budget bill, Trump proclaimed: “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.” But in fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3 percent in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4 percent in the same time frame.
From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10 percent of households will receive about 80 percent of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20 percent of earners can expect to receive nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20 percent of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.
Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt. Like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.
The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981. The Republicans’ new law continues the cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.
What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265 percent in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s yearly budget.
Economist Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury, wrote that this horrendous budget bill made him “ashamed of my country”:
Over the holiday weekend, while the president was celebrating tax cuts that over 10 years will deliver an average of more than $1 million to families in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, medical professionals were considering questions like these:
What should they say to seriously disabled patients, who can live at home only because Medicaid pays for rides to their medical appointments, now that those people could lose that coverage?
What should they recommend to the relatives caring for poor patients at home, who will no longer be able to work when payments for home-health aides are no longer available?
How should they advise the hospital to handle patients who can’t afford rehab or nursing facilities and can’t live at home, but who currently occupy rooms desperately needed by acutely ill patients?
Should they still feel proud of and committed to the work of giving comfort to the lonely, poor, and elderly, when their country’s leaders have decided that more money for the most fortunate is a higher priority?
How can they face patients who will be evicted from the hospital with perhaps as little as a cab voucher when their stays end?
The Republican budget bill, just enacted, could leave millions without insurance and lead to at least 16,000 annual preventable deaths, according to research published in Annals of Internal Medicine. This is immoral or just plain evil.
