Why isn’t Donald Trump worried about a Democratic sweep in the midterms because he’s cutting America’s safety nets by $1trillion to pay for his $4.5 trillion tax cut that saves billions for the wealthy but loses money for working Americans?
The answer is in a shameful deceit of American voters imbedded in Trump’s bill that is now law. It delays the $1 trillion in safety-net cuts until after the 2026 elections so voters won’t feel the pain until after they vote. Not surprisingly though, the tax cuts for the wealthy take effect in 2025 and 2026.
The bill will reduce federal revenues by $5 trillion and will be paid for as follows:
- By cutting billions of dollars from Medicaid and Medicare and added work requirements that will eliminate 11.8 million people from Medicaid. But they won’t be felt until 2027 – notably after the primaries.
- Low-income seniors won’t benefit at all from Trump’s promise not to tax Social Security. The biggest beneficiaries will be upper-middle-class seniors with significant wealth.
- The tax cuts do the most damage to the neediest. Factoring in the cost of the cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, the bottom income quintile will suffer the largest losses. In contrast, those in the top income quintile gain more than $65,000 per year.
- Trump’s promise to raise income for working Americans by “at least $13,000 a year” is a fiction because it’s based on assumed economic growth that never happened in any of the five times Trump and other Republicans promised it would.
- Those with incomes below $34,600 would see an approximate $150 decrease in their taxes. The top 1% will receive tax cuts totaling $1.02 trillion, and federal taxes paid by them will fall by $422 billion.
- Cutting foreign aid which is expected to cause around 23 million children to lose access to education, 95 million people to lose access to basic healthcare, and more than 3 million deaths per year.
- Tragically, Trump’s bill recovers some of the lost tax revenues by dismantling agencies that provide disaster relief which could have saved most – maybe all – of the 120 people killed in Kerr County, Texas and the 160 people still missing. Trump’s firing of federal rescue agency employees contributed heavily to the disaster.
What’s most heinous about these tax cuts is that they became law when the income and wealth gaps between the wealthy and working Americans have never been greater and continue to widen. The rich have become and continue to become richer, while the bottom 40% have become poorer.
- The richest 1% of Americans earn 140% of the income of the bottom 20%.
- The top 1% of Americans average wealth holdings is $140 million, while the bottom 50%’s is $192,700 and have experienced a steady decline from 2.7% in 2022.
- The top 1% own more than 50% of stocks and mutual fund shares while thebottom half ownonly 1 percent.
Congressional Republican are more to blame than Trump for the bill’s assault on working Americans. Trump is one of the 2% of American adults that suffer from sociopathy. He’s incapable of experiencing guilt, shame, remorse, or empathy and he intimidates and threatens (successfully) to maintain control, has difficulty controlling impulses and acts without considering the consequences of his decisions.
Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, are rational and know better. But they’ve checked their spines at the door to avoid Trump’s endorsement of a primary challenger. So they knowingly confirmed the most unqualified and dangerous cabinet nominees in our history, and handed Trump a band of enablers who will condone any decision no matter how pernicious, dangerous and harmful to Americans.
They should be replaced in the primaries by other Republicans that are not intimidated by Trump and have the courage to oppose him, or by Democrats in the national elections.