The hard fact is almost everybody gets screwed to give the rich a tax cut
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the Republican legislation speeding through the U.S. House of Representatives would cut household resources for the bottom 10% of Americans while delivering gains to the wealthiest in the form of tax breaks.
"If enacted, this would be the largest transfer of
wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history," Bobby
Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American
Progress, said in response to the CBO analysis, which was released shortly before the start of a
dead-of-night House Rules Committee hearing on the Republican reconciliation
package.
On average, according to the CBO, U.S. households would
"see an increase in the resources provided to them by the government over
the 2026–2034 period."
But the resources "would not be evenly distributed among households," the CBO found, estimating that "in general, resources would decrease for households in the lowest decile (tenth) of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the highest decile."
The analysis takes into account an extension of soon-to-expire provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts as well as Republicans' push for around $1 trillion in combined cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which would primarily harm low-income Americans.
"The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's
unprecedented analysis has confirmed what Democrats have known to be true—the
GOP Tax Scam will hurt working families the most while delivering massive tax
breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk," said
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who joined Rep. Brendan Boyle
(D-Pa.) in requesting the distributional analysis.
"Any claims otherwise are intentionally deceptive
regarding the Republican plans to rip healthcare away from nearly 14 million
Americans and take food out of the mouths of millions of people, including
children and seniors," said Jeffries. "Republicans are attempting to
quickly jam this unpopular legislation through the House because they know that
the longer they wait, the more will come to light about this cruel and
unconscionable bill. For a party that claims to be for the working class, this
analysis indicates the opposite."
Boyle, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said that "this is what Republicans are fighting for—lining the pockets of their billionaire donors while children go hungry and families get kicked off their healthcare."
"CBO's nonpartisan analysis makes it crystal clear:
[President] Donald
Trump and House Republicans are selling out the middle class to make
the ultra-rich even richer. Every word out of Trump's mouth about helping
working Americans was a lie."
The CBO also said Tuesday
that the Republican reconciliation package, which Trump has championed, would
trigger automatic cuts to Medicare spending—reductions that the nonpartisan
body did not factor into its distributional analysis.
The CBO's analysis also did not include the impact of
a tentative deal to boost the cap on state and local tax
deductions (SALT), a change that would primarily benefit wealthy households.
"This reported SALT deal and accelerated Medicaid cuts
would make the bill even more effective at transferring resources from
low-income to high-income households," said Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, referring to GOP hardliners' push for an earlier start date for
Medicaid work requirements, which experts have decried as cruel and ineffective.
