That so-called Big, Beautiful Bill, which is anything but, is now in the hands of the U.S. Senate, and though half the country is focused on the trillions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and the rest of the safety net, Republicans are fighting amongst themselves over whether they can cut even more.
Why?
You know why.
But let’s hear a rich guy tell us.
“To give even more tax cuts to the richest Americans,” our rich Democrat U.S. senator friend, Mark Warner, told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday.
I’m not casting aspersions on Warner – net worth: $240 million – when I call him “rich.”
He knows he’s rich.
“Listen, I’ve been blessed to do very well. I celebrate people’s success, and if you take a risk, I got no problems with folks being compensated, but I do think there’s got to be a sense of fairness,” Warner said, pivoting to how the Big, Beautiful Bill will give people like him a tax cut in the range of $200,000 per year, while people making minimum wage will see their taxes go up, on average, $1,600 a year.
Remember those signs you saw in your MAGA neighbor’s front yard during the election that said “Trump Low Taxes, Trump High Taxes”?
Lie.
The Big, Beautiful Bill will hit people making $25,000 a year with an extra $1,600 on their tax bill, while also knocking 13 million folks on the lower rungs of the income ladder off health insurance.
All so people like Mark Warner can get a big tax break that they won’t even notice.
“Does it really make sense to raise taxes on folks making minimum wage, cut healthcare for literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Virginians, simply to allow the most successful Americans to get, on average, about a $200,000 tax cut? I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s right,” Warner said.
I love how Republicans are making the cuts out to be about somehow doing more with less, and getting lazy people who freeload off the backs of the hardworking to get free stuff.
Reality check on that: 70 percent of the adults on Medicaid have jobs, but too many employers, like, say, Walmart, don’t give their employees enough hours to qualify for employer-provided benefits, which is a feature, not a bug, of late-stage capitalism – big business saves money by letting the government cover its benefits for its employees.
More from the reality check department: 37 percent of the Medicaid rolls are children.
Guess they’ll have to get jobs, too, but of course, we’re seeing Republicans at the state level working on fixing labor laws to get kids back in sweatshops, so, that may be on the way.
And again, the impact here isn’t just on the folks at the very bottom.
“A family making $80,000, a family of four, they will see their health insurance premiums go up $700, $800, $900 a month,” Warner said. “Come November, now, there’s an awful lot of Virginians, and we’re getting the numbers there as well on how many folks will see those huge increases.
“If you’re making $60,000 to $80,000 a year, how many families could stand an $800 a month increase on their healthcare costs? I’m not sure how people will make it,” Warner said.
Another obvious impact will be on the bottom lines for rural hospitals – and this one will be felt by everybody in rural areas, no matter how much money you make.
“Because of healthcare economics, a lot of rural hospitals either have to shut down or stop providing services, particularly OB/GYN and delivery services for babies in wide swaths of the state,” Warner said. “In Southwest, Southside, even parts of the Valley, you’ve got over half the babies that are delivered are on Medicaid, and a lot of those services will simply disappear.”
And just to reinforce the point, Republicans in the Senate aren’t looking at all of this and thinking, what can we do to maybe not rob the working class and middle class to give the elites a tax break they don’t need and won’t notice.
They’re looking for ways to cut even more.
The question here for my MAGA friends: did you vote for that?
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Chris Graham
