Washington, D.C. — The emerging House Republican tax package would raise working- and middle-class families’ costs to shower the wealthiest Americans with tax giveaways. A new column from the Center for American Progress and Families Over Billionaires outlines four ways House Republicans’ emerging tax package would put billionaires over families:
- Most tax benefits would go to high-income households. The 2017 Trump tax cuts cost $1.9 trillion and had enormous giveaways for the wealthy and the biggest corporations, with more than half of the tax cuts going to the top 10 percent of Americans. Extending the Trump tax cuts would have little to no benefit for low-income and middle-class families but would deliver enormous benefits to billionaires.
- House Republicans plan to slash investments in health care, nutrition assistance, education, and manufacturing to pay for tax giveaways for the wealthy. This includes potentially slashing up to $2 trillion from Medicaid; reversing the 2021 increase in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Thrifty Food Plan that helped increase benefits for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients; and gutting investments in energy and manufacturing tax incentives, which would result in a 10 percent average spike in monthly energy bills.
- Financial mechanisms in the House Republican tax package would raise families’ housing and grocery bills. This package, paired with Trump’s proposed across-the-board taxes on imported goods, would raise prices of household goods in an attempt to raise the revenue to pay for tax giveaways to the wealthy and large corporations.
- The first tax law failed to fulfill its promises. The 2017 Trump tax cuts helped the rich get richer and did not deliver on their promise to raise wages, create jobs, and simplify the tax code.
“Despite promising to lower costs for the American people, House Republicans are now putting forward proposals that would slash essential services while raising housing and grocery costs— all so they can give a tax handout to billionaires,” said Chad Bolt, chief strategist at Families Over Billionaires. “These proposals are indefensible by any reasonable metric—and make clear whose side they’ve decided to take.”
“The House Republicans’ proposed tax package is putting billionaires on a pedestal, delivering benefits to help the rich get richer while working- and middle-class families pay the price,” said Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at CAP and co-author of the column. “This plan doesn’t address the needs of hardworking families; it does the exact opposite. Billionaires will get their payday while families work hard to make ends meet.”
Read the column: “4 Ways House Republicans’ Emerging Tax Package Would Put Billionaires Over Families” by Chad Bolt and Brendan Duke
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