While the Senate is busy holding confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees this week, House Republicans are focusing on moving his legislative agenda forward. Their baseline goal will likely sound reasonable to the average listener: cut government spending and use the money to help fund his policies. But even the slightest scrutiny shows just how much pain millions of Americans will have to tolerate to pay for the GOP’s massive handout to the country’s wealthiest few.
Republicans scored their last major legislative victory under the first Trump administration in 2017. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which rewrote large sections of the tax code, skewed strongly toward the country’s top earners and corporations. And Republican claims that the cuts would ultimately pay for themselves proved unsurprisingly inaccurate, adding $1 to 2 trillion to the federal debt.
Even the slightest scrutiny shows just how much pain millions of Americans will have to tolerate to pay for the GOP’s massive handout to the country’s wealthiest few.
Many of those reduced tax rates from the act are due to expire at the end of this year, making their renewal — and potential expansion — Republicans’ top priority. On top of that, the tax cuts that Trump promised on the campaign trail, if enacted in full, could cost up to $10 trillion. Hoping to preserve their entirely undeserved reputation as champions of fiscal health, congressional Republicans are now on the hunt for options to counter that giant price tag.
The most obvious solution would be raise revenues elsewhere. Even President Joe Biden advocated keeping some of the TCJA’s cuts but would have offset those by allowing the rates for the wealthiest Americans to rise. That is, of course, a nonstarter for the Republicans whose main function in Congress is to protect the rich from any hardship.
Trump has claimed that his plans to slap tariffs on most American imports would pay for most of his agenda. Those new fees could pour as much as $2.7 trillion into the Treasury over the next 10 years, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — well short of Trump’s promised cuts. And companies would likely pass those costs onto U.S. consumers, making the tariffs a double-edged sword at best.
To close the gap, House Republicans are reportedly circulating a list of potential spending cuts that could be made to cover the costs of their offering to the top 1% of earners. Politico published a document last Friday that lists up to $5.7 trillion in top-line savings over the next decade. Rather than the framework of a bill, though, a House GOP source told Politico that the “document is not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider.” (Politico’s reporting had not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News as of Tuesday afternoon.)
The items on the list, which originated with the House Budget Committee, are coated in the kind of double-talk that conservatives have long relied on to make their draconian policies seem more palatable. A section titled “Making Medicaid work for the most vulnerable” promises to cut $2.3 trillion in spending via “per capita caps” (up to $981 billion cut over a decade) and “equaliz[ing] Medicaid payments for able-bodied adults” (up to $690 billion). Translated though, that would mean that states would receive a maximum amount of Medicaid reimbursements based on their population, hurting bigger states and forcing them to choose who gets what money, and reducing coverage for enrollees who aren’t a poor child or disabled adult.
It is a testament to the priorities of congressional Republicans that the most important item on their agenda is trading support for struggling Americans in favor of another boost for the wealthy.
Republicans are also looking at changes to the Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. That could include a reform of the “Thrifty Food Plan” (set to save up to $274 billion). Cuts of that size likely would require changing the formula for specifying what foods an average low-income family would need to survive to only factor in cheaper, less nourishing options. A further $100 billion in cuts to the social safety net are also proposed under the heading “ending cradle-to-grave dependence.”
There are also many suggested cuts to Biden’s climate policies listed, the consequences of which would fall most heavily on the poor and needy. A proposal to “restrict emergency spending to [the] recent average” would most likely harm people who are suffering from the effect of climate change-fueled natural disasters. We’re already seeing fights in Congress well up over allocating disaster aid for crises like the California fires outside of the regular budget process. It is not the wealthy who will most feel the impact of those restrictions.
It is a testament to the priorities of congressional Republicans that the most important item on their agenda is trading support for struggling Americans in favor of another boost for the wealthy. It’s galling that this commitment is determined to not just lessen the quality of life for Americans today but far into the future as the impacts of climate change multiply. But in the conservative ethos, there is no shame in keeping money in the hands of those who have too much by withholding it from those who have too little.
