Early Saturday morning the Senate voted to rearrange the American economy with a bill they’d introduced less than 24 hours before and without a searchable PDF document. They hadn’t even had time to print it, much let allow independent analysts to review it, before it was voted upon.
It’s not law yet. Either the House of Representatives would have to vote to accept the Senate version in full or, more probably, a conference committee between the House and Senate would try and make a bill acceptable to both. At that point, it should theoretically be released to the public, analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, and then voted on. But given how past events have worked out, it’s unlikely they give the public much time between the end of the conference committee and the votes.
It is very important that the public (including you) call any Republican representative they have and tell them to vote against the bill, and call Democrats and thank them for supporting it.
So why exactly is the bill so bad? Here are a couple reasons that can be found in the House and Senate bills heading to conference:
Both add over one trillion dollars to the debt. House Republicans have already started talking about slashing Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the poor.
The Senate bill ends the Obamacare individual mandate, which requires healthy people to buy insurance to balance the premiums of the sick. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that this would cause 13 million people to lose health insurance.
After millions lose health insurance from the individual mandate repeal and more lose it from Medicaid cuts, the House bill abolishes the medical expenses deduction. This means that the taxes of people having to use GoFundMe to save their lives would go up.
Under the House bill, graduate student tuition waivers are counted as taxable income. That means money grad students never physically receive is going to get taxed, forcing many students from less wealthy backgrounds to drop out and leave graduate-level degrees to the rich.
They also remove the state and local tax deductions. Currently these allow smaller governments to make more local solutions to their problems, such as funding schools or public transportation, without their citizens having a large increase in their total taxes. These high state areas are typically in the Democratic voting and Democrat-represented areas on the West Coast and in the Northeast. In effect, after voter backlash, these areas would have to cut their social services to make up for the promised reductions in federal coverage.
The House bill, on average, actually increases the taxes of people earning less than $75 thousand a year.
The Senate bill also sets the stage for banning abortion and drilling for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. No, seriously. That’s in a tax bill.
On top of all of that, both versions find the money to keep the tax deduction for private jets.
These are terrible bills that fleece the poor and middle class for the benefit of the rich. People will die. If you would like the millennial generation to have a real future, please call every federal government official who represents you before they subvert the democratic process again.