The proposed reductions to low- and moderate-income programs would increase the number of uninsured by substantially more than 23 million; significantly undermine the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), which now provides basic food aid to more than 40 million low-income Americans; and dramatically reduce job training and education aid, which are essential to helping people move out of poverty by securing decent jobs.At the same time, the President proposes roughly $6 trillion in tax cuts (from his tax plan and from the House-passed bill, which he has endorsed, to repeal the Affordable Care Act) over the next decade. They’re so skewed to the top that the tiny fraction of households with annual incomes above $1 million would get more than $2 trillion in tax cuts. In other words, millionaires would gain trillions from the Trump plan.
As we’ve detailed, the Trump tax plan has little to offer low- and moderate-income families but many tax cuts that are heavily tilted to the wealthy and corporations — and no credible way to offset their cost. They include slashing the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent, which would mainly benefit wealthy investors, and repealing the estate tax, which would only benefit the heirs of the wealthiest 2 out of every 1,000 estates in the country. Those two tax cuts alone would cost $2.5 trillion — essentially the same as the cut in low-and moderate-income programs. (See chart.)
The President’s budget tries to obscure this massive income shift by not accounting for the vast majority of the tax cuts’ costs. But his priorities remain clear: tax-cut windfalls for the wealthy and corporations, and huge cuts in health, food, job training, and other basic aid, producing greater hardship for struggling families.
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'If, while there is yet time, we turn to Justice and obey her, if we trust Liberty and follow her, the dangers that now threaten must disappear, the forces that now menace will turn to agencies of elevation. Think of the powers now wasted; of the infinite fields of knowledge yet to be explored; of the possibilities of which the wondrous inventions of this century give us but a hint. With want destroyed, with greed changed to noble passions, with the fraternity that is born of equality taking the place of the jealousy and fear that now array men against each other, with mental power loosened by conditions which give to the humblest comfort and leisure; who shall measure the heights to which our civilisation may soar?
"The rise of wages, the opening of opportunities for all to make an easy and comfortable living, would at once lessen and would soon eliminate from society the thieves, swindlers, and other classes of criminals who spring from the unequal distribution of wealth...
"Industrial changes imply social changes and necessitate political changes.
"Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
"For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.
“If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and save. THIS is the natural order.”
-Henry George 1839 – 1897
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