Certainly not to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and billionaires.
No cuts! No way. No how!

This Budget Resolution Would:

• In the case of Medicaid, most of the cuts would come through combining three tactical elements: (a) work reporting requirements, (b) reductions in expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and (c) caps on aid directly to states.

• The dramatic cuts to Medicaid are projected to leave millions without health insurance. Medicaid together with its companion, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), currently reach 38 million children, comprising nearly half of all enrollments. The work reporting requirements aim to push about 36 million people off health care with tricky bureaucracy and unnecessary administrative processes. The cautious Congressional Budget Office estimates about 600,000 people would certainly become uninsured. Changing the ACA would threaten 20 million people who have been added to Medicaid recently. A recent study out of Chicago University found that Congress saved 27,400 lives when it expanded Medicaid to cover millions of poor people during the period of 2014 – 2022. These cuts to ACA tax credits would increase health insurance premiums by as much as 100%, including at least 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers among that 20 million.

• The caps – ask Puerto Rico about Medicaid caps – could mean tens of millions losing health care coverage as states seek to tighten budgets, narrow eligibility, and reduce the levels of care offered rather than improve efficacy and efficiency over time.

On Hunger:

• In the case of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)(food stamps), $230 billion in cuts are sought through two main tactical elements: (a) reductions in the meager daily benefit of $6.20 to $4.80 and (b) limiting participation periods.

• Slashing the daily benefit is heartless but straightforward. Limiting periods of participation eligibility is less obvious, but similar to the Medicaid tactic. If they can’t comply with administrative proof burden, lots of people can be moved out the SNAP program. The goal seems to be limiting a beneficiary's nutrition benefits to only three months out of every three years.

On Tax Inequities:

• Extending these cuts will cost about about $1.5 trillion and will give people in the top 1 percent (i.e. those making about $743,000 per year and up) a tax cut averaging $62,000. Official Treasury estimates found, on average the top 0.1% of highest earners would get a $314,000 annual tax cut, while the bottom 50% of taxpayers would receive less than $1 per day. That analysis found maintaining Trump’s 2017 tax law would cost $5.5 trillion over the next decade. Most estimates put the full cost between $4.6 and $5.5 trillion.

• The Congressional Budget Office found, real GDP growth would be 0.1% lower if Trump’s 2017 tax law continues. In addition, inflation would be expected to increase, interest rates on treasury bonds would likely be raised, and private investment would probably be reduced.

• Trump’s 2017 tax law lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Afterward corporations began paying a lower effective income-tax rate than the average American family for the first time in nearly a century. At the time legislators passed the law, they promised companies would use that difference of 14% to boost workers' wages and create jobs, corporations instead launched a massive stock-buyback campaign, awarded their executives huge bonuses, and kept worker wages stagnant.

• It is estimated that for every $100 Congress spends on corporate tax cuts, only $10 trickles down to the bottom 80% of American households, while $40 goes to foreign investors, and $17 goes to the top 1% of highest-income households. This showcases the inefficiency of corporate tax cuts as a means to grow the our economy. We get a better return on taxpayer investment from direct allocations in worker productivity it’s Ȼ.20 as compared to $1.25—yes, investing in people gives a $1.05 better yield. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that on average the increased economic output generated from $1.00 of corporate tax cuts is just Ȼ.20. Conversely, $1.00 of direct payments to working families—such as a refundable monthly child tax credit—yields $1.25 of increased economic output on average.

• The stark disparities are disturbing. Billionaires—who are almost exclusively white—can go years without paying taxes because the U.S. system isn’t set up to properly tax huge wealth, or the income that flows from it. That difference–we suspect willful failure– in our tax reveune system means poor and working class people pay a higher rate of payroll taxes than those with income of a million dollars and more. It one of the factors contributing to escalating economic inequity.

UU Grounding:

As of General Assembly 2024, as Unitarian Universalists, we have agreed to “adopt new language on core religious values.” We agree love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. The values we share include all the following, which we hold as inseparable and deeply interconnected: Interdependence, Pluralism, Justice, Transformation, Generosity, and Equity. (Read more on the Article II revision process.) With these agreed core religious values in mind, we also ground our call to action related to hunger and poverty issues, in the following Unitarian Universalist Statements:

1. Undoing Systemic White Supremacy: A Call to Prophetic Action, 2021 Statement of Conscience

2. The COVID-19 Pandemic: Justice. Healing. Courage, 2021 Action of Immediate Witness

3. Escalating Economic Inequity, 2017 Statement of Conscience

4. Ending Hunger, 1987 General Resolution

5. Hunger,1980 General Resolution

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