A leaked GOP document reveals plans to cut $479 billion from Medicare, $2.3 trillion from Medicaid (the health care program for America’s low-income and poor), $347 billion from nutrition programs (including food stamps); and $55 billion of federal support from the Affordable Care Act and $15 billion from public health prevention programs.
Non-citizens would become ineligible for ACA health coverage. They’re already ineligible for Social Security and Medicare, even though they pay taxes for them.
The scheme also eliminates student loan forgiveness, axes $468 billion of spending on green energy and climate change mitigation, and takes $77 billion away from federal employee benefits.
What is this leaked document? Politico says it’s an “early list” of spending cuts originating in the GOP-controlled House Budget Committee that Republicans are passing around and could use to “bankroll” Trump’s top priorities including tax cuts and border security.
Huffington Post says (here) it’s a wishlist and whether Republicans will try to pass it is “an open question.”
The dollar figures represent spending cuts over a 10 year period, so you can get an annual average by dividing by 10 (e.g., reducing annual Medicare spending of roughly $850 billion a year by about $48 billion, amounting to about 5.6% a year, see article here).
As big as these numbers are, even if all the cuts envisioned in the document were made, they wouldn’t come close to reining in deficits, because Trump’s tax cuts and spending on border security would vastly exceed those spending cuts.
What it amounts to is robbing federally-paid health care and social welfare programs supported by Democrats to pay for mass deportations and giving huge tax breaks to people like Elon Musk and Wall Street billionaires.
Read the Politico story here and view the document here.
