Category: Americas

US Senate News:

Source: United States Senator for Connecticut – Chris Murphy
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WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Friday spoke on the U.S. Senate floor to oppose Republicans’ budget proposal, which will hand billionaires and corporations a massive tax cut paid for by slashing Medicaid, SNAP and other programs that millions of working American families rely on.
“The budget we’re debating really comes down to one simple idea: the massive transfer of wealth and resources from the poor and the middle class to the ultra wealthy,” Murphy said. “What is being proposed in the Senate right now is stunning in its scope. This is the program that insures 24% of American families. One-quarter of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid. You don’t know it as Medicaid because it’s called something different in each state. In Connecticut, it’s called HUSKY. In Wisconsin, it’s called BadgerCare. But in every state, about a quarter of the population gets their insurance through a Medicaid-funded program. Most of those folks are working full-time, but for one reason or another, that’s where they get their insurance. You’re talking about kicking millions of people off of that program, and for what? For what? To rack up the biggest bill ever on the credit card of the middle class – an explosion in debt – but also to fund a tax cut for the fabulously wealthy.”
Murphy shared how Linda, a cancer survivor from Sherman, Connecticut, relies on Medicaid to maintain her health and keep working after losing her job and health insurance: “Linda lives in Sherman, Connecticut, a small town in western Connecticut. Following the economic downturn in 2008, Linda had trouble finding work. And that was tough for her, because she’s a cancer survivor. She had high health care expenses, and she needed work. She was underemployed. She worked in plant nurseries and agriculture. Her husband, at the same time, lost his job as an auto mechanic. They lost their health care insurance. But then, when the Affordable Care Act passed, Medicaid was expanded. More people were made eligible for Medicaid. And in 2010, she was able to sign up for Medicaid. She said, ‘I had so much anxiety all the time about how to pay for health care. We were going through all of our money, and we just thought, ‘this isn’t right. People shouldn’t have to worry about just being basically healthy.’ But once she got health care, she was able to restart her life. Linda went back to school, because now she had health care. She got a new degree. She found a job teaching agriculture at a local high school. But that program didn’t provide health care, so she still needed that Medicaid. Medicaid, she says, ‘just provides such a baseline for society. It allowed me to maintain my health so that I was able to continue working.’”
He continued: “The Medicaid cuts that they are talking about will destroy Medicaid expansion. In fact, some states will automatically cancel the Medicaid expansion program when these cuts are made, meaning that people like Linda all across the country are going to lose their health care. For what? For a massive tax cut for the wealthy.”
Murphy concluded: “What are we doing? Why are my colleagues choosing to destroy health care for millions of Americans in order to pass a tax cut that basically helps corporations and billionaires and millionaires? It is fundamentally immoral. And I have to believe – like in 2017, when Republicans were trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which insured 20 million Americans – that there are a handful of Republicans who know that this isn’t right. Who maybe aren’t ready to stop it today – tonight’s vote isn’t the final vote – but might be willing to stand up to this thievery before it’s too late. The people of this country–who are getting killed by higher prices that are coming because of the tariffs, and are going to be hurt by these Medicaid cuts, and are going to be furious when the rich become richer at their expense – they are counting on just a small handful of my Republican colleagues to realize right from wrong.”
A full transcript of his remarks can be found below:
MURPHY: “Thank you, Mr. President. The budget that we’re debating really comes down to one simple idea: the massive transfer of wealth and resources from the poor and the middle class to the ultra wealthy. 
“What is being proposed in the Senate right now is stunning in its scope. You are talking about a piece of legislation that has such deep cuts to Medicaid – this is the program that insures 24% of American families. One-quarter of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid. You don’t know it as Medicaid because it’s called something different in each state. In Connecticut, it’s called HUSKY. In Wisconsin, it’s called BadgerCare. But in every state, about a quarter of the population gets their insurance through a Medicaid-funded program. Most of those folks are working full-time, but for one reason or another, that’s where they get their insurance. 
“You’re talking about kicking millions of people off of that program, and for what? For what? To rack up the biggest bill ever on the credit card of the middle class – an explosion in debt – but also to fund a tax cut for the fabulously wealthy. 
“This is the 2017 tax cut, which is essentially going to be mirrored, we believe, by this tax cut. The top 1% of earners got tax cuttings 852 times bigger than working families in America. We don’t know the final shape of this tax cut, but it won’t look fundamentally different from that. 
“This is a really bad time to be a working mom or dad in America. This week we are passing, apparently, a massive cut in health care benefits for working families in order to pad the pockets of the wealthy. But we are also dealing with the Trump tariff plan, which has been a keystone cop-like rollout that will ultimately raise prices for every single American. Tariffs can work as part of a coordinated, thoughtful approach to trying to rebuild American industry, but they only work when you partner those tariffs together with industrial policy, incentives to help promote the industry that you are trying to punish when the products come from abroad. 
“I’m not reflexively opposed to the use of tariffs, but this use of tariffs is bananas. Because it is not paired with any domestic industrial policy, meaning that you’re just going to get the downside – the massive increase in costs for consumers – without the upside – job creation in the United States of America. 
“And so before I get to the insult to middle-class families that will come through the budget, let’s just talk about what’s going to happen with these tariffs. We know how it’s going to work because we saw how tariffs worked in Trump’s first term. Let me just take one specific example.  
“In Trump’s first term he imposed a 20% escalating tariff on washing machines and the idea was that we want washing machines to be made in the United States instead of outside the United States. But because he didn’t pair that together with any more comprehensive help for the washing machine industry in the United States, it was only downside. And it was only downside, not just because of the lack of a comprehensive policy but also because there were no checks on the corporations that saw the tariffs as a means to gouge consumers. You have to also partner tariffs together with some accountability for corporations, for the greedy corporations that get wide-eyed when they see the tariffs and realize that this is an opportunity to not just pass the tariff along but to jack up the price a little bit more and say that it was all because of the tariffs.
“Here’s what happened on washing machines: You got a 20% escalating tariff. We have the data. We saw what happened. The economic data tells us that the washing machine companies passed along the 20% tariff and then padded the price increase, sometimes by 15%, sometimes by 50%. But it’s worse than that. The price increase was not just for imported washing machines. They also increased the price of the domestic washing machines that weren’t subject to the tariff. Why not? Why not? The Trump administration won’t hold us accountable for that. No one really looks to see whether the washing machine was made in America or not. We’ll just raise the price on everything. 
“What do you buy when you buy a washing machine as well? A dryer. So guess what happened? Even though dryers weren’t subject to the tariff, the price got jacked up on the dryers as well. Dryers went up by fifteen percent sometimes in cost. Fifteen percent, twenty percent. 
“All of a sudden, prices went up for everything. Now, Trump collected a bunch of money in tariffs. He made $80 billion. But that was literally just middle-class people paying the additional amount to the company and the company passing it along to the government. So it was just a tax. It was just a tax. 
“Okay, maybe you could live with that if it revitalized the domestic washing machine industry. If there were tens of thousands of people going back to jobs in that industry. But that didn’t happen. I think there were one or two domestic washing machine factories that opened up and Trump, of course, made a big deal. You know how many jobs it was in total? Less than 2,000 jobs. Less than 2,000 jobs were created for a tariff that jacked up costs for every American and resulted in $80 billion of middle class taxes being collected by the government. That works out to about $800,000 per job. 
“So that’s what’s coming, at scale. Not just on washing machines but on virtually every consumer product. A big price increase, little to no domestic job creation, all the pain on the middle class. Tariffs can work, but this is not the way that they work. 
“And so this week, Senate Republicans, instead of trying to help consumers deal with the impact of these tariffs – I mean, we’re talking about huge price increases coming for American families. And this week we could be sitting here voting for bills that cancel the tariffs, or trying to help middle class families in another way. We’re doing exactly the opposite. Instead of helping families deal with the impact of the tariffs, instead of holding the greedy corporations in check as they ready to gouge consumers, we are debating a bill that would cut almost a trillion dollars out of Medicaid – the program that provides insurance for a quarter of Americans – that will result in raising health care costs for tens of millions of Americans, and we’re talking about giving a massive tax break to the billionaire CEOs of the companies that are going to be doing the price gouging, and to the companies themselves. 
“That’s outrageous! That’s outrageous. If you are a regular, ordinary American, what you are being told is that you’re going to have to pay huge new price increases on everything you buy. You are going to have your health care disappear, and corporate profits and take-home pay for CEOs are going to skyrocket. 
“Who’s asking for that? What American is asking for prices to go up, my health care to be cut and billionaires to get a big tax break? 
“Let’s start talking about these tax cuts, okay? They’re the center of this bill. Everything in the Trump administration is about a simple story: how do I help my Mar-A-Lago billionaire friends? So this is the old tax cut, because we don’t know all the details of the new one. If you look at the poorest Americans versus the richest Americans, the tax cut is 852 times bigger. 
“But here’s a back-of-the-napkin analysis of what this new tax cut is likely to look like if it’s basically formed like the old one. And instead of taking the poorest Americans versus the richest Americans, instead let’s just look at sort of the bottom 60% of income earners in this country. That’s roughly about everybody who makes $90,000 or less. So that’s a lot of your neighbors, right? I mean, $90,000 is an income that is familiar to a lot of Americans. 
“So under this new tax cut, if it looks like the old one, and that’s the signal that we get, households in the top one percent are going to get an average tax cut that’s 120 times bigger than the tax cut given to people who are making $90,000 or less. So that’s 152 times bigger than the very poor. But let’s take somebody who’s making $60,000. The richest 1% are going to get a tax cut that is 120 times bigger. How is that fair? 
“Okay, now you’d say, that’s because they make a lot more money. So of course they’re going to get a bigger tax cut. But let’s do the math in a different way. As a share of after-tax income, the tax cuts at the top are still more than triple the total value of the tax cut received for people with incomes in the bottom 60%. So even when you adjust for the fact that they are making more money, they are still getting a tax cut whose value is three times bigger than folks who are making a middle income in this country. And why? I mean, does anybody believe in trickle-down economics anymore? It has been completely discredited. 
“And, again, we have the 2017 tax cuts as evidence. Donald Trump trotted out a big promise. He said these tax cuts for corporations and billionaires and millionaires, they’ll trickle down to everybody else, and I’ll tell you the number: the average worker will get a $4,000 salary increase.That was the promise. The money will trickle down. The corporations will be so generous. So generous. They’ll take their giant tax cut – bigger than they even asked for. Senator Whitehouse just showed you the chart where corporations have gone from providing 30% of American tax revenue down to 10% of American tax revenue. What a great deal for corporations. Okay! That’s a nice chart, that makes sense if the corporations are taking their lower tax liability and turning it around to wages.
But instead, they’re not. They’re keeping it for themselves. For their executives, for their top shareholders. The analysis shows that that promised $4,000 salary increase as a result of the tax cuts wasn’t $4,000. It wasn’t $2000, it wasn’t $1000, it wasn’t $100. It was zero. Because all of that money – virtually all of that money – ended up getting gobbled up by the corporations, mainly for stock buybacks. It didn’t go to increase compensation for their employees.
“So it’s not to raise wages. I guess it’s just to make rich people richer. From 2017, when that tax cut passed, that first Trump tax cut passed, until 2023, Elon Musk’s wealth grew by 1,222%. I don’t even know what that looks like. Jeff Bezos’s grew by 96%, Zuckerberg’s by 50%, Rupert Murdoch’s by 50%. I use those names because those were the billionaires that were at Trump’s inauguration cheerleading him into office because they know that another big tax cut for their company and for them personally is coming. 
“Now, I will admit to you, median income overall grew from 2017 to 2023. So everybody in the country was making more in 2023 than they were making in 2017. But median income was not growing by 50%, 96%, or 1,222%. 
“So this is a massive tax cut, the vast majority of it going to the very, very wealthiest. But what makes this even harder to understand is what Senator Whitehouse laid out for you. 
“Most of this is just going on your credit card. Most of this is just being borrowed, and that has a consequence: the national debt potentially doubling as a result of this massive tax cut for the very, very wealthy. And it’s just so heartbreaking, the hypocrisy. I mean I could string together a 24-hour long video of my Republican colleagues talking ad nauseam about ‘the danger of debt,’ ‘the rising deficit.’ ‘We can’t spend money on kids.’ ‘We can’t spend money on climate.’ ‘We can’t spend money on schools.’ ‘We can’t help people go to college.’ ‘No, no, no, we can’t do any of that, we can’t do anything of that, because the debt– the deficit.’ 
“And yet when it comes to a billionaire tax cut, a corporate tax cut, we’re going to potentially double the debt? Nobody is caring about the debt. In fact, they’re rigging the rules of the Senate–they’re breaking the rules of the Senate–just so they can get away with a massive increase in debt and deficit. 
“But somewhere along the line they said, well, you know what? We can’t borrow the whole thing. We’ve got to make it look like we’re cutting some spending. So let’s cut some spending to make it at least look like it’s not all borrowed. But let’s make sure that the spending we’re cutting only hurts poor people and the middle class, because God forbid we can cut spending that helps the rich or the affluent. God forbid we take away some of the tax breaks that help them. 
“And so where are the cuts coming? Medicaid. 80% of the cuts are Medicaid. $880 billion in a House bill, similar amount, cutting Medicaid. Medicaid, as I said, is the program that insures 24% of Americans. At least two-thirds of those are working, working full time. They just don’t have health insurance through their employer, so they have to get it through Medicaid. 
“And so when Republicans decided that they couldn’t borrow the whole thing, like we’ll double the national debt but we’re not going to triple the national debt, they targeted the cuts to hurt the middle class and poor people. 
“And so I just want to end by telling you what this means in real time. I don’t actually know what it means to give billionaires another $50,000 in tax breaks. I really don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that life is like. I don’t know what it’s like to have seven houses and four yachts. I don’t know what a billionaire does with an extra $50,000. I can’t actually explain that to you. I don’t understand that kind of rapacious greed. 
“What I do know is what happens to poor people–the people who live in my neighborhood, in the south end of Hartford–when they lose their Medicaid. Linda lives in Sherman, Connecticut, a small town in western Connecticut. Following the economic downturn in 2008, Linda had trouble finding work. And that was tough for her, because she’s a cancer survivor. She had high health care expenses, and she needed work. She was underemployed. She worked in plant nurseries and agriculture. Her husband, at the same time, lost his job as an auto mechanic. They lost their health care insurance. But then, when the Affordable Care Act passed, Medicaid was expanded. More people were made eligible for Medicaid. And in 2010, she was able to sign up for Medicaid. She said, ‘I had so much anxiety all the time about how to pay for health care. We were going through all of our money, and we just thought, “this isn’t right. People shouldn’t have to worry about just being basically healthy.”’ But once she got health care, she was able to restart her life. Linda went back to school, because now she had health care. She got a new degree. She found a job teaching agriculture at a local high school. But that program didn’t provide health care, so she still needed that Medicaid. Medicaid, she says, ‘just provides such a baseline for society. It allowed me to maintain my health so that I was able to continue working.’ 
“The Medicaid cuts that they are talking about will destroy Medicaid expansion. In fact, some states will automatically cancel the Medicaid expansion program when these cuts are made, meaning that people like Linda all across the country are going to lose their health care. For what? For a massive tax cut for the wealthy. 
“Emily Grenelli is a worker at one of Connecticut’s biggest behavioral health and substance abuse providers. So every day, she’s talking to people who rely on Medicaid so that they can get help for their mental health disorder or their substance abuse disorder. Let’s be honest: we all have somebody in our life who has a serious mental illness or has struggled with substance abuse. So you know these people. She wrote me a letter talking about the fact that the conversations in their therapy groups in the last month have fundamentally changed. They’re actually not doing therapy any longer for mental illness or for substance abuse. They are now doing therapy for the anxiety all these people have, knowing they’re about to lose their health insurance. 
“One case manager told me, she writes, that she was working with a client to find housing and the client now just wants to stop looking, because she feels like there is no point, because she’s going to lose her Medicaid. Republicans are going to strip her Medicaid from her. She won’t be able to get her medication and services. She feels hopeless. The clinician told me about an hour-long session she had the day before. 75% of it was focused on the client’s fear of losing her benefits and what that would mean for her and all the other clients. She shared with me that if there was a way for her to leave the country right now, she would. At this provider, 35% of their clients would likely lose access to mental illness and substance abuse services if these cuts go through.
“What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Why are we choosing, why are my colleagues choosing to destroy health care for millions of Americans in order to pass a tax cut that basically helps corporations and billionaires and millionaires? It is fundamentally immoral. And I have to believe – like in 2017, when Republicans were trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which insured 20 million Americans – that there are a handful of Republicans who know that this isn’t right. Who maybe aren’t ready to stop it today – tonight’s vote isn’t the final vote – but might be willing to stand up to this thievery before it’s too late. 
“The people of this country–who are getting killed by higher prices that are coming because of the tariffs, and are going to be hurt by these Medicaid cuts, and are going to be furious when the rich become richer at their expense – they are counting on just a small handful of my Republican colleagues to realize right from wrong. 
“I yield the floor.”

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