So why are Republicans trying to cut Medicaid (which effects Medicare), SNAP, school meals, and veterans benefits? Let’s get into it..
Government efficiency and spending is always part of politics but this year it feels different. There is a fever pitch to cut everything with the DOGE clowns trying to save as much as possible (Note: no report yet on any actual savings of significance). So, why is this year so wildly different then past years (other than Project 2025 and the clown show administration) and it turns out once again we just have to follow the money.
See the thing is, in order to extend Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 they need to find the money to pay for it. It’s hard to free up a are in a panic to figure out how to free up the trillions of dollars needed to make them permanent:
Congressional Republicans’ plan for a massive extension of the Trump-era tax cuts comes with a hefty price tag: up to $5.5 trillion over the next decade if extensions of certain business provisions are also included. The majority of these benefits would flow to wealthy individuals and businesses, leaving everyone else with a token tax cut and saddling the nation with a massive increase in the national debt. ( ITEP )
The package being proposed would benefit the wealthy and toss some table scraps to the vast majority of Americans:
Last year, we found that extending the 2017 law would direct more than two-thirds of the benefits to the richest 20 percent of households. A family making $20,000 a year would see a modest tax cut of a hundred dollars, while a millionaire would receive tens of thousands. This approach is designed to offer small tax cuts to working families as political cover while delivering massive benefits to the wealthiest Americans — at the cost of a ballooning federal deficit. ( ITEP )
They could scale back the tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses but that would be too difficult given the amount of money they donate to their campaigns:
The simplest and most equitable way to reduce the deficit impact of the Republican tax plan would be to scale back tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. The Treasury Department recently reported that limiting tax breaks to families earning less than $400,000 would cut the proposal’s cost by more than half. But Republican lawmakers have refused this practical and reasonable approach. ( ITEP )
If Republican lawmakers were serious about deficit-neutral tax reform, they would focus on increasing taxes for the ultra-wealthy and large corporations. A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office laid out policy options that — combined with a limited approach to extending the 2017 tax law — could offset much of the revenue loss. Raising the corporate tax rate by just 1 percent could generate over $100 billion, for example. Taxing U.S. corporations’ foreign income at the domestic rate would yield more than $300 billion. Closing loopholes, such as the Gingrich-Edwards loophole that allows high-income business owners to avoid certain taxes, could raise over $400 billion.( ITEP )
Now, Republicans would have you believe that these tax breaks from 2017 paid for themselves and the new ones will continue to as well. And, while there’s a bit of truth to that in an obscure context, it’s not that simple and not really the case:
If you just look at the raw numbers, it does seem like the 2017 tax cuts paid for themselves. From 2018 to 2024, the federal government took in $1.5 trillion more than the Congressional Budget Office had projected.
“About two-thirds of that? Comes directly from inflation,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “But if you adjust it for inflation and look at the real numbers there was no higher-than expected gains.”
So, she said, the increased revenue didn’t come from economic growth driven by the tax cuts. Companies did take in more revenue. But it was because, with inflation soaring, they charged higher prices.
Kimberly Clausing, professor of tax law and policy at UCLA, said businesses did report higher profits on their tax returns. “Because they’re selling their goods for higher prices but they haven’t already adjusted the wages for their workers so the revenues are going up but the costs aren’t going up as much as the revenues. So that can also drive higher corporate and business tax revenue,” said Clausing. ( Marketplace )
There’s no indication, even from the actual proposal from Republican’s that suggests the tax cut wouldn’t cost upwards of 3 trillion dollars.
But don’t be fooled by the debate over “current law” versus “current policy” baselines, or by unfounded claims that tax cuts pay for themselves. No matter how Congress formally scores the price of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), as well as other Trump initiatives, accounting legerdemain can’t make fiscal reality disappear. No Matter How Congress Labels It, Extending The 2017 Tax Cuts Will Cost $4 Trillion-Plus
Despite claims that tax cuts pay for themselves, analyses from across the political spectrum have found that the economic effects of extending the expiring parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would offset 1 to 14 percent of the revenue loss — falling well short of the 100 percent needed to pay for itself. TCJA Extension Might Not Pay for Any of Itself
Trump’s Tax Cut Fueled Investment but Did Not Pay for Itself, Study Finds ( NYT )
So if you’re not going to tax the rich or businesses how are you going to pay for this? Well you tax the poor and middle class more of course! The bummer here is that you aren’t going to make up 4 trillion by just taxing us poor people. So how do you do it you might ask? You cut the most expensive programs (not defense of course) that rich people don’t need such as Mediciad and Social Security, and SNAP.
And while there is already an agency called the Accoutability Office to identify waste that operates under actual laws, but this time it’s different. This time it’s billionaires under the guise of “waste, fraud, and abuse” that are given full and illegal access to Federal Government systems to essentially flip over the couch cushions looking for anything they don’t like to label as “waste, fraud, and abuse”. Remember the Federal Workforce accounts for a tiny fraction of the overall Federal budget. They aren’t firing people to reduce the budget, they are firing them to get them out of the way. But, that’s been discussed in plenty of other articles.
All this chaos and carrying on is to get you to believe that it is things like SS fraud, free school lunch, SNAP and people getting cheaper insulin that’s causing the issues. When in reality what they aren’t looking into is defense spending. The pentagon hasn’t passed an audit YET. Defense contractors are some of the biggest raiders of the federal government. They don’t want you to look at things like the contracts with Space-X (Musk), Microsoft’s Azure AI, or Amazon AWS (Bezos). If they were truly serious about finding waste, fraud, and abuse they would start with the Pentagon. The only problem there is that there are way too many heavy hitter donors and lobbyist in the nearly 1 trillion dollar defense budget.
Now that the proposal is out we can clearly see where the republican priorities are. You can see how it might imapact you more here.