Trump and the Republican’s proposed tax and budget bill is a massive handout to the richest people in the country, and an enormous increase to military spending — to be paid for by gutting programs that poor and working-class people need to survive. The agenda of the Trump administration is increasingly clear for all to see: to serve the interest of the billionaires by declaring war on our lives.
The richest people in the U.S. would get about $3.8 trillion dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. The richest 1%, and those making over $1 million dollars would see tax cuts of over $90,000 per year, while taxes for people making less than $15,000 per year would actually go up — a blatant handout to the rich.
Also, the military budget is proposed to increase to over $1 trillion, the highest ever. Some Republicans are even pushing to raise it even higher. And the Department of Homeland Security’s budget is proposed to increase to over $100 billion, the highest on record, an increase of 65%. The message here is loud and clear: they intend to further build up the military in order to impose U.S. interests around the world, while they enlarge their forces on the ground to go after immigrants and those who resist and stand up to these policies here at home.
And how will they pay for all of this? By going after the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and waging an all-out attack on working people and our livelihoods.
Their budget would eviscerate funding for healthcare for the poorest in society by cutting Medicaid by $715 billion over the next ten years. Medicaid gives states federal assistance to help provide health insurance to the poor, and those with disabilities. If passed, an estimated 14 million people would lose health insurance. The Trump administration also wants to use these cuts as leverage to pressure states to cancel any health care programs offered to undocumented immigrants. Some states have already caved, like California with Governor Gavin Newsom, who has announced plans to cancel funding for healthcare for undocumented immigrants.
They also want to slash the ability of millions of the poorest families to put food on the table by cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — also known also as “food stamps” — by $290 billion dollars, or about 30% of its current budget. This would cut access to food assistance for about 9 million people.
As housing costs skyrocket, the administration also wants to cut funding for housing assistance nearly in half, threatening hundreds of thousands of people with homelessness. And they want to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay their energy costs. Currently 1 in 4 people can’t afford their energy bills for at least one month, and these cuts would likely mean that many households could have their water or power shut off.
And, as this administration ramps up the extraction of fossil fuels, worsening the environmental crisis, this bill proposes to slash funding for disaster relief, and defunds programs that provide access to clean drinking water.
All of these cuts come on top of decades of cuts to social services, education, and other sectors by both Democrats and Republicans. These latest cuts aim to push things as far as they think they can go.
And the Trump administration is banking on workers falling in line and accepting these attacks as they try to bribe some of us with cuts to taxes on tips and overtime, which would certainly help some workers who rely on regular overtime to survive. But the small gains some workers might receive in tax cuts would be eliminated by billions of dollars in cuts to other services. We can’t fall for their ploy to gain support for a bill that destroys ordinary people’s lives only to make the rich richer.
With this new budget bill, the Trump administration’s message is clear: we will have to pay for this budget with our lives. They want us to pay to make the billionaires richer. They want us to pay for their support of genocide. They want us to pay for more wars of destruction that put the whole world at risk. They want us to pay to destroy our environment and threaten the future of generations. And they think we will just roll over and accept all of these attacks as they hand over our education, our health, and our lives to a tiny class of billionaires. That’s their message. That’s the future they want to impose on us.
But that doesn’t mean we have to accept any of this. The Democrats won’t put a stop to this. The courts won’t put a stop to this. If we wait for others to fight our battles for us, we will be waiting forever. Working people have the power to stop these attacks because we are the majority, and we do all of the work to make their system run. The only ones who can put a stop to these attacks are ourselves.
