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Dear Rob,
Right now, many of us have our eyes trained on Hurricane Irma, concerned about people in the path of its progress. When it rains, it pours. There’s a storm of a whole other kind brewing in our nation’s capitol—it’s one that’s not being tracked by radar on national news, and doesn’t have a catchy name: The national tax package!
Let’s call it Hurricane Trump.
Extremists in the U.S. Congress, along with President Trump, are gearing up to pass a tax package that will have long-term impacts on income inequality, as well as our education, health care, access to healthy food, the safety of the roads we drive on, and of course whether or not our federal government can help in times of crisis like Hurricane Harvey and Irma, or whether they will spend our money instead to benefit the wealthy and powerful.
This summer we beat back the attempt of extremists in Congress and Trump to take away our health care, but now we need your help in beating back their plans to take away important programs that boost our families’ health, nutrition, education, and emergency response funds in order to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations.
Yes, you heard me right—they want to cut programs like Medicaid, SNAP (or food stamps), after school programs, Medicare, disaster relief, and Meals on Wheels in order to line the pockets of Wall Street executives and people who own multiple yachts (not to mention to funnel money into building that ridiculous and highly destructive wall!).
Here’s the lowdown: In order to pay for the tax cuts that President Trump and U.S. Congressional Republicans want for their rich cronies and Wall Street corporations, they need to make massive budget cuts in other places. Their not-so-bright idea is to cut critical programs like Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP (food stamps), Meals on Wheels, disaster relief, and education programs; so the Republican leadership will be able to hand out trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the already wealthy. Boooooo! For example, under Trump’s tax plan, the 400 richest families (like Trump) would get a $9 million tax cut each year on average, and hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, and major real estate developers (again, like Trump and his kids) would see their tax rate slashed (from 39.6% to 15%). [1,2] Meanwhile, our working families, especially people with disabilities, who live in rural communities, come from communities of color, and/or low-income families, could lose our health care since in order to pay for this, Medicaid would be slashed—and Republican leaders are still looking for ways to chip away at the successful Affordable Care Act (ACA).
What do we get out of this tax plan? Nada! In fact, it hurts our economy because it takes funds out of the pockets of consumers who fuel our economy with everyday purchases in grocery stores, back to school supplies, shoes for growing kids, and more. Meanwhile the already wealthy get to line their pockets, lock more money away in offshore bank accounts, and further take advantage of corporate tax loopholes. This hurts our families and economy alike!
The fact of the matter is, Congressional leaders are expecting every day moms, dads, and concerned voters to remain silent while they give away tons of our tax dollars to wealthy individuals and major corporations. There is a lot to be distracted by these days, but much like we did during the health care fight, we need to make sure our voices are heard, that we stand up for our families, neighbors, and economy, and we must stop these awful tax plans from becoming a reality.
Here’s why: Under Trump’s tax plan the top 1% would walk away with an extra $214,000 a year in tax cuts. [3] Meanwhile average families struggling to get by will see our health care slashed, our education suffer, and other critical services that boost our families receive national budget cuts. This damages our economy and our families.
Trump and his supporters’ ideas about taxes are outdated and have proven to never yield the promised economic results. [4] "Trickle down" simply doesn’t happen to the degree necessary for corporate handouts to pay off. Our families will suffer. Our economy will suffer. The rich will get richer and wealthy corporations will continue to hoard their profits while not passing any of the benefits down to workers (in the form of higher salaries or greater benefits, not to mention lowering the cost of their products). The fact is there is nothing in these tax proposals for YOU. But there is a lot that we could lose including our health care, education, nutrition support, and other important programs (like the disaster relief that will be currently needed in Houston or research for diseases that impact our children and families being conducted by the Centers for Disease Control).
Taxes pay for those programs that boost our economy and our struggling families, like Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, and Meals on Wheels; as well as, the public investments all of us benefit from, like roads, bridges, clean air and water, strong schools, and research to cure diseases. We should all be in this together and pay our fair share. It’s time for wealthy, big corporations, and millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes, too. When they take unfair advantage of the many loopholes in the tax code, the rest of us pick up the tab. It’s because of these tax breaks that we are seeing some of the most aggressive budget cuts in decades and income and opportunity inequality is exponentially increasing.
Once you sign our letter, please make sure to forward this email to your friends and family. You can also post our action link to Facebook and Twitter—much like the fight to protect our health care, we are going to need as many people as possible speaking out against unfair tax policies and for funding for programs that boost our families.
We are all in this together—now join me in raising your voice!
-Elyssa, Donna, Kristin, and the entire MomsRising.org/MamásConPoder team
[3] Economic Policy Institute. “CEOs Made 296 Times Typical Workers in 2013.” June 12, 2014.
[4] John Wasik. “How the Trump Zombie Tax Plan Will Hurt You.” Forbes, April 26, 2017.
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