The recently released House Republican budget is a dishonest and destructive document.

The non-partisan policy experts at Taxpayers for Common Sense reacted to the Republican budget by stating: “This isn’t budgeting, it’s gimmickry.” The equally non-partisan experts at Fiscal Times delineated some of the major gimmicks:

• The budget calls for the elimination of the Affordable Care Act, including the tax revenues that help to fund this program. At the same time, the budget counts these revenues, which it proposes to eliminate, as adding $1 trillion of income over nine years.

• The Republicans use the unfounded principle of “dynamic scoring” (also known as “voodoo economics”) to predict that their economic policies will lead to the creation of billions of dollars of revenue. Given the dismal past performance of Republican economic predictions, it is extremely unlikely that this revenue will ever materialize

• The budget makes the highly questionable assumption that a large number of “temporary” tax breaks will be allowed to expire, thus adding billions of dollars of tax increases in coming years. The likelihood that a Republican-controlled congress will allow these tax breaks to expire is zero to none.

These gimmicks are used to promote the claim that this proposed budget “balances” within 10 years. By any honest accounting this is a totally false claim.

In addition to being dishonest, the Republican budget is an assault on the health and economic well-being of the American people. The budget mandates the complete elimination of the Affordable Care Act, which would take away affordable health insurance from millions of Americans and greatly increase the cost of prescription medications for senior citizens. The budget also mandates privatization of Medicare, which would damage seniors’ health and financial security, and it reduces funding for Medicaid, thus putting the health of low-income individuals and families at great risk.

While the Republican budget would do great harm to middle and lower income individuals and families, it would continue to maintain unfair tax breaks for the wealthy. Income inequality would continue to increase — the rich would get richer and richer and everyone else would suffer.

Representative Fred Upton is an enthusiastic supporter of the dishonest and destructive Republican budget. In the next election we need to vote for a candidate who will support honest budgeting and be responsive to the needs of all Southwest Michigan individuals and families, not just the wealthiest among us.

 

Larry Feldman

Lakeside