Tax cuts for the rich, health care cuts for everyone else

Opinion

Their View: Tax cuts for the rich, health care cuts for everyone else

 

Our Picks

By Sara Dady and Michael Rothman

Posted Oct 14, 2018 at 1:00 PM

Less than a year ago, U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger and his Republican colleagues in the House voted for a tax bill that gave over a trillion dollars in tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations.

With a country facing so many important and expensive problems, from out-of-control health care costs to a crumbling infrastructure to a woefully underfunded education system, this Congress decided that tax cuts for the rich were their No. 1 priority. They made their choice, and this November, voters in Illinois’ 16th District have a choice of their own to make. Do they want a Congress that’s going to help working families, or do they want one that’s going to focus on making the rich richer?

This Congress has shown that it cannot be trusted to act with the interests of average American families in mind. Despite what many of them claim, last year’s tax bill wasn’t a middle-class tax cut, it was a massive handout to the ultra-wealthy.

Take it from one of us, a wealthy businessman who knows better than most just how much preferential treatment the top 1 percent get in this new Republican tax code: the entire thing was designed to funnel even more money towards those at the top, money that we don’t need. With 83 percent of the bill’s $1.9 trillion in tax cuts projected to go to the top 1 percent, there’s barely more than crumbs left for the rest of the population. And instead of leading to higher wages for workers, the huge corporate tax cuts in this bill have led to higher bonuses for CEOs and nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks that just make wealthy investors richer.

Even worse, the Republican tax bill doesn’t just give too much to the wealthy and too little to working families — it actually makes life harder, and sicker, for millions of Americans. In order to free up more money for corporate tax cuts, Republicans eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, deliberately sabotaging American healthcare markets. With this change, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Republican tax bill will, over the next decade, cause 13 million fewer Americans to have health insurance and increase premiums by as much as an additional 10 percent each year. Rising healthcare costs are already hurting Illinois families, and if Republicans in Congress get their way, things are about to get much worse.

House Republicans are already using the deficit that they themselves created as an excuse to make massive cuts to programs that millions of Americans rely on. But don’t take our word for it, look at what they themselves have proposed. Earlier this year the Republican House budget proposal, their vision for what government spending “should” look like, included over $500 billion in cuts to Medicare and $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other health programs, all in the name of fiscal responsibility.

There’s nothing responsible about giving away $2 trillion in tax cuts to millionaires and corporations and then trying to pay for it by taking healthcare away from poor and elderly Americans who rely on those programs to survive. Those are massive cuts to programs that are absolutely essential to modern American life, and there’s simply no world in which this is an acceptable tradeoff to the American people or the people of Illinois’ 16th.

With rising healthcare costs and Medicare and Medicaid in jeopardy, thousands of families in Illinois’ 16th District are at risk of losing access to life-saving treatment because Adam Kinzinger and his colleagues in Washington decided that their health was less important than corporate profits. This is unacceptable. Health care is already too expensive for too many Illinoisans without our elected officials working against us. We need a Congress focused on making health care cheaper and more accessible, not taking it away from the most vulnerable among us.

Simply put, last year’s Republican tax bill was a disaster for our country that we can’t afford to repeat. This Congress, Rep. Kinzinger included, has shown itself to be either incapable or unwilling to actually work to make life better for normal Americans. We need legislation coming out of Washington that puts working families first, not their billionaire donors. It’s time we had a government that worked for the people, and to get there, we need new leadership in Congress.

Sara Dady of Rockford is the Democratic candidate for U.S. representative in the 16th district. Michael Rothman is CEO of Conger Management and a member of the Patriotic Millionaires.

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/opinion/20181014/their-view-tax-cuts-for-rich-health-care-cuts-for-everyone-else