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Senate Advances Backwards Budget
Last night, Republicans in the Senate made another step towards giving massive tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations at the expense of working families. While many Republicans in Congress and the Administration claim that middle-class families will benefit from their tax plan, the details that have been released thus far show that it is the wealthy that would reap much of the benefits.
Earlier this month, the House passed its budget resolution, which contained trillions in cuts to critical programs in order to pay for tax cuts.
And last night, the Senate narrowly passed its budget resolution, 51-49. Like the House budget, the Senate budget resolution proposes trillions in program cuts, just later in the next decade. Republican Senators even rejected amendments that would have protected Medicaid and Medicare from cuts. Furthermore, despite polling showing that Americans don’t want to raise the deficit to cut taxes, the Senate budget proposes increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion to do so.
Despite their minor differences, the House and Senate versions of the FY 2018 budget resolution share the same reverse-Robin Hood strategy—take from low- and middle-income families to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy few.
But Congress still has another chance to correct its backwards budget priorities.
The Senate budget resolution will go to the House, where the House can vote to pass that version. If the House does not pass the Senate version, then Members of the House and Senate will meet in a conference committee to reconcile the differences between the two versions and form a joint budget resolution. If there’s a joint budget resolution in place, Republicans can use reconciliation to push their tax cuts through the Senate with a simple majority—and that would spell disaster for all but the richest among us.
It’s more important than ever for us to call on Congress to stop this reverse-Robin Hood strategy and get Congress to prioritize investments in women and families. Instead of prioritizing the wealthy and big corporations, Congress should pass a budget that protects women and families, expands economic opportunity for all of us, and closes tax loopholes so the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
