The Trump Administration’s budget proposes to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-rich on the backs of low-income and working people.
During the “tax reform” battle a few months ago, anti-poverty and racial justice advocates warned that the GOP tax plan was really just step one in a harmful two-step fiscal agenda
Step one: Deliver massive tax giveaways to our country’s largest corporations and wealthiest households, while eventually raising taxes on millions of low- and moderate-income families. We are now at step two: Use the massive fiscal shortfalls created by the tax bill to justify deep cuts to key programs that millions of low-income people rely upon for basic quality of life and a fair chance for upward mobility.
The Trump Administration’s budget, if implemented, would cause massive suffering. Among the budget’s measures, it:
- Proposes repealing the Affordable Care Act and slashing Medicaid and Medicare, taking health insurance from tens of millions of low-income people;
- Radically restructures and guts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by roughly 30 percent, promising to send hunger soaring;
- Cuts already-meager basic cash assistance for low-income families and people with disabilities, threatening to increase deep and extreme poverty;
- Raises rents on and slashes housing assistance for low-income families during one of our country’s most dire affordable housing crises;
- Totally eliminates the Low-income Heating Assistance Program as well as numerous other block grants to states that support crucial anti-poverty efforts, like Meals on Wheels for seniors;
- Aims to undermine the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a key federal agency tasked with protecting everyday consumers from financial exploitation;
- Defunds the Legal Services Corporation, taking access to lawyers away from millions of low-income people and depriving them of the ability to assert their legal and civil rights just as the Administration itself retreats from enforcing those rights;
- Strengthens and expands ineffective and costly “work requirements”associated with food, housing, and medical assistance;
- Undermines employment opportunities and outcomes for low-income adults by gutting supports and programs that make it possible for them to pursue and maintain work;
- Continues the Trump Administration’s attack on immigrant communities through increased funding for deportation efforts and a wall along the southern border, while ignoring the some 800,000 Dreamers whose DACA protection was recklessly and cruelly rescinded last fall;
- Shifts massive costs to and fiscally paralyzes state governments by slashing and capping federal funding for Medicaid.
The Trump budget is part of a sustained attack on low-income people and people of color in this country.
And the administration has not showed signs of slowing down: Just last week, various news outlets obtained a draft federal rule that would effectively punish immigrants for using public services and benefits for which they are legally eligible, jeopardizing the physical and financial safety of millions of families around the country.
Budgets are profoundly moral.
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