Skip to main content
This week, President Trump released his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018 to well-deserved backlash. This budget—based on bad math and accounting tricks—recklessly cuts $3.6 trillion from critical investments that create jobs and provide needed resources for working families. It abandons the poor while providing tax breaks to the wealthy, slashes funding for investment in clean energy innovation and jobs of the future, and cuts cancer research and public health programs. Here are just some of the stories that outline this reckless and cruel budget proposal:
Congressional Republicans seem to have already forgotten the wreckage left in the wake of the financial bubble of the late 2000s. During the 2008 financial crisis and related recession, 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs, 3.8 million homes were foreclosed on, and households lost $17 trillion in wealth. As a result of Wall Street’s actions, the U.S. economy lost an estimated $7.6 trillion in goods and services from 2008 to 2018—lost output that Americans are still feeling today.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnunchin recently claimed long-term economic growth will pay for the cost of President Trump’s proposed tax reform plan. This claim relies on using so-called “dynamic scoring,” a tactic long exploited by Republicans to justify not paying for immense tax cuts. However, dynamic scoring methodologies can lead to wildly different estimates that often underestimate how much these tax cuts increase the budget deficit.
Republicans are trying to revive a health care bill that would be a disaster for seniors, children, and millions of hard-working American families. What’s worse — the latest version of TrumpCare would take away protections from millions across the country with pre-existing conditions.
Republicans aren’t waiting for the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to tell the American people how TrumpCare is a disaster, but instead appear to be pushing ahead without a score. Without a CBO score, Americans won’t know just how bad TrumpCare could be for them.