Shocking: Republicans don’t care about fiscal conservatism very much when it comes to funding their—and their rich friends’—agendas.
Mike Johnson and House Republicans on Wednesday released their budget plan, which would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion dollars in order to dole out $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy. They also threw in $2 trillion of compulsory cuts to Medicaid, which could make care healthcare even more expensive and inaccessible for large swathes of America.
Adding $4 trillion dollars to the national debt limit is a deeply ironic move for a party that is currently allowing the richest man in the world to destroy crucial federal institutions that he doesn’t like in the name of “efficiency.” The programs that the Department of Government Efficiency is cutting are nowhere near as expensive as this blatantly pro-billionaire handout.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, costs the government about $40 billion a year. The GOP’s tax cuts will eclipse that yearly amount easily, but Republicans are justifying it with classic trickle-down economics.
“There will be a lot of economic growth. And if you think about what happened in 2017 — dramatic economic growth, possibly even more this time,” Representative Steve Scalise said to HuffPost last Friday.
This appears to be a more shameless redux of the 2017 tax cuts, which crippled the country’s revenue base while lining the pockets of corporations and the wealthy.
