Wealthy gain, low-income people lose from GOP megabill, analysis finds
Source: Politico
05/21/2025 12:07 AM EDT
Tax cuts in House Republicans’ megabill would lead to increased assets for the richest Americans, while reducing them for the lowest-income households through cuts to federal spending on Medicaid and food aid, according to a new preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.
The analysis, requested by top Democrats, gives fuel to Democrats’ attacks on the bill that it would lead to gains for wealthy Americans while taking away benefits for lower-income people. “This is what Republicans are fighting for — lining the pockets of their billionaire donors while children go hungry and families get kicked off their health care,” Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement.
Republicans have defended the megabill, arguing it protects Medicaid for those who need it most and makes the program more sustainable, while averting tax hikes for millions of Americans and leading to substantial economic growth. The analysis, which weighed the impact of the legislation’s tax, Medicaid and SNAP food aid policies and how they could influence states’ finances, found that household resources would fall by about 2 percent of income for the lowest-income 10 percent of households by 2027, and 4 percent by 2033.
That’s largely due to changes to Medicaid and SNAP policy that would lead to nearly a trillion dollars less in federal spending on those programs. But the top 10 percent of households would see their household resources rise 4 percent by 2027 and 2 percent in 2033, “mainly because of reductions in the taxes they owe,” CBO said.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/21/cbo-wealthy-gain-low-income-people-lose-from-gop-megabill-00361987
Link to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) REPORT (PDF) - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf
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Because apparently "human nature" means that people primarily "respond" to things that touch them "viscerally" - and in the GOP's case, outright bigotry through emphasis on "wedge issues" used to trigger outrage, and blind people to what we keep yelling about (that gets ignored) - "economic issues".
When you have MAGats who are hurting economically due to the tariffs, get up there and admit in interviews that "'we' should just give him some more time" - THAT means they are more than willing to "suffer" economically in order to "enjoy" the "sugar high" of watching innocent people hauled out of their homes in handcuffs and shoved onto a plane destined for a prison in a foreign country.
If you think about it, the circumstances surrounding the pandemic in 2020 and the later overturning of Roe in 2022, helped Democrats scuttle the prevailing trends of elections when it comes to wins/losses for the party (including the one in power during a midterm).
Bill D. Moyers
WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WAS LIKE
November 12, 1988
WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the bitter paradox of both. I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and feared. We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs.
Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Some years later when Johnson was president, there was a press conference in the East Room. A reporter unexpectedly asked the president how he could explain his sudden passion for civil rights when he had never shown much enthusiasm for the cause. The question hung in the air. I could almost hear his silent cursing of a press secretary who had not anticipated this one.
But then he relaxed, and from an instinct no assistant could brief -- one seasoned in the double life from which he was delivered and hoped to deliver others -- he said in effect: Most of us don't have a second chance to correct the mistakes of our youth. I do and I am. That evening, sitting in the White House, discussing the question with friends and staff, he gestured broadly and said,
"Eisenhower used to tell me that this place was a prison. I never felt freer." For weeks in 1964, the president carried in his pocket the summary of a Census Bureau report showing that the lifetime earnings of an average black college graduate were lower than that of a white man with an eighth-grade education. And when The New York Times in November 1964 reported racial segregation to be increasing instead of disappearing, he took his felt-tip pen and scribbled across it "shame, shame, shame," and sent it to Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate. I have a hard time explaining to our two sons and daughter -- now in their twenties -- that when they were little, America was still deeply segregated.
(snip)
