Senate Republicans recently released their budget for 2018. Following the lead of previous Republican budgets written by President Donald Trump – and by Paul Ryan and Tom Price before him – the Senate Republicans’ budget would make devastating cuts to programs working families rely on, while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy, according to a new report by Senate Budget Committee staff.
In total, the Republican budget would cut more than $5 trillion over the next decade from education, health care, affordable housing, child care, nutrition assistance, transportation and other programs that working people desperately need.
The budget would make it harder for children to get a decent education, harder for families to get the health care they desperately need, harder for families to put food on the table, harder to protect our environment and harder for the elderly to live their retirement years in dignity.
The Republican budget is a massive transfer of wealth from working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor to the top 1 percent.
Not only would it cut Medicaid by $1 trillion, it would also cut Medicare by more than $470 billion in order to pay for hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America. Further, the Republican tax plan this budget calls for would increase the federal deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, which will likely pave the way for savage cuts to Social Security.
The top 1 percent would receive about 80 percent of the benefits of the Republican tax plan, while 30 percent of Americans making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year would see their taxes go up by an average of more than $1,000 a year at the end of the decade, according to the Tax Policy Center. The wealthiest 0.1 percent would receive an annual average tax cut of more than $1 million within 10 years under the Republican plan.
Read the full report here.