Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Republican Tax Plan To Slash Essential Programs For Working Americans To Give Tax Breaks To The Ultra-Wealthy
Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor ahead of the Senate Budget Committee’s markup of Republicans’ first reconciliation bill, which provides tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy while gutting programs that help working Americans. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Today, Senate Republicans’ scheme to pass tax cuts for the ultra-rich takes the next important step.
Later today, Chairman Graham of the Budget Committee will hold a markup of Republicans’ first reconciliation bill.
Republicans claim that their bill will be fully paid for but that means Republicans are laying the groundwork to gut things like nutrition assistance, funding for nursing homes, student debt support, and to kill clean energy jobs that employ Americans in red and blue states alike.
There’s been so much focus on how Republicans are going to pass their signature bills. Should it be one bill? Should it be two bills?
But at the end of the day, talking about process is a side-show.
This “one bill,” “two bills,” or a hundred bills is meaningless.
What they're trying to do is give further tax cuts to the very wealthy who are doing just fine. And they're hurting average Americans by cutting programs – again, taking a meat axe and slashing across the board to do it.
They could carve up their bill into two bills, five bills. As I said, it doesn't matter.
They could carve it up in their agenda however they want, they could change the order of policies they tackle first, but the endgame doesn’t change: this is all about clearing the path to cutting taxes for billionaires, and making the American people foot the bill.
The whole thing, the whole big enterprise, is aimed with one goal in mind: large tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, who as I said, are doing fine. Not as fine as the average American, who just saw their inflation go up 3%.
Plain and simple.
Again, what is their plan?
Funnel more wealth to the ultra-wealthy while slashing everything else to the bone: gutting Medicare and Medicaid, yanking school lunches from kids, blocking prescription drug reforms which make drugs cheaper for the average American, cutting funding for cancer research – one of the most popular things we do – cutting research for semiconductor manufacturing, letting China get ahead of us.
No matter how they dress it up, no matter what spin they can put on it, Republicans’ agenda boils down to this: tax cuts for the wealthy, deep, deep, painful cuts for everyone else.
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