Latest news with #socialprograms
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Absolute Disaster:' Senate Dems Take Aim At Trump's Tax Bill
Senate Democrats laid into President Donald Trump's sweeping tax bill on Sunday, emphasizing the impact it is poised to make on millions of Americans on Medicaid. 'This Republican budget bill is an absolute disaster for the country, in particular for middle-class and poor people,' Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in an interview on CNN's State of the Union, noting that it seeks to pay for tax cuts by curbing spending on social programs. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) echoed these concerns in an interview on NBC News's Meet the Press, stressing that 'Republicans are trying to push forward this big ugly bill that's going to literally cut as many as seven million Americans off of their healthcare.' Murphy and Warnock's statements come as Republicans' massive tax and spending bill heads to the Senate, where it's likely to face staunch Democratic opposition as well as GOP dissent. The bill slashes spending on social programs like SNAP and Medicaid, while proposing trillions in tax cuts and billions in investments to strengthen border security. According to an initial analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it would push 7.6 million people off Medicaid, in part by making it more difficult to qualify for the program. One way it does so is by imposing a new work requirement, which would force many able-bodied recipients to prove that they've worked, volunteered or attended a training program to obtain Medicaid coverage. Warnock stressed that a similar policy in Georgia has added new barriers for people in need of healthcare. This 'work reporting requirement is very good at kicking people off of their health care,' he said. 'It's not very good at incentivizing work at all.' Earlier this May, House Republicans narrowly passed the bill by just one vote. It'll take a simple majority – which Republicans have – to advance again in the Senate, though some GOP lawmakers have said they'd like to make changes of their own to tax and Medicaid provisions. GOP Senators like Rick Scott (R-FL) have also raised concerns about how the bill could add to the federal debt, an issue Murphy alluded to as well on Sunday. 'It's just unreal the amount of gaslighting this administration is doing,' Murphy said, while referring to the White House's claims that the legislation won't alter the deficit at all.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Absolute Disaster:' Senate Dems Take Aim At Trump's Tax Bill
Senate Democrats laid into President Donald Trump's sweeping tax bill on Sunday, emphasizing the impact it is poised to make on millions of Americans on Medicaid. 'This Republican budget bill is an absolute disaster for the country, in particular for middle-class and poor people,' Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in an interview on CNN's State of the Union, noting that it seeks to pay for tax cuts by curbing spending on social programs. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) echoed these concerns in an interview on NBC News's Meet the Press, stressing that 'Republicans are trying to push forward this big ugly bill that's going to literally cut as many as seven million Americans off of their healthcare.' Murphy and Warnock's statements come as Republicans' massive tax and spending bill heads to the Senate, where it's likely to face staunch Democratic opposition as well as GOP dissent. The bill slashes spending on social programs like SNAP and Medicaid, while proposing trillions in tax cuts and billions in investments to strengthen border security. According to an initial analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it would push 7.6 million people off Medicaid, in part by making it more difficult to qualify for the program. One way it does so is by imposing a new work requirement, which would force many able-bodied recipients to prove that they've worked, volunteered or attended a training program to obtain Medicaid coverage. Warnock stressed that a similar policy in Georgia has added new barriers for people in need of healthcare. This 'work reporting requirement is very good at kicking people off of their health care,' he said. 'It's not very good at incentivizing work at all.' Earlier this May, House Republicans narrowly passed the bill by just one vote. It'll take a simple majority – which Republicans have – to advance again in the Senate, though some GOP lawmakers have said they'd like to make changes of their own to tax and Medicaid provisions. GOP Senators like Rick Scott (R-FL) have also raised concerns about how the bill could add to the federal debt, an issue Murphy alluded to as well on Sunday. 'It's just unreal the amount of gaslighting this administration is doing,' Murphy said, while referring to the White House's claims that the legislation won't alter the deficit at all.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Zinke says GOP budget won't harm the needy: ‘People who deserve benefits are going to get the benefits'
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) said Sunday that he's not worried about threats to social programs under the spending plan Republicans are trying to craft while advancing President Trump's agenda. 'People who deserve benefits are going to get the benefits,' Zinke said in an interview on NewsNation's 'The Hill Sunday.' 'For people that are riding the system, we gotta clamp in.' Zinke defended proposed Medicaid work requirements some Republicans are pushing in order to save money in the health care program that covers nearly 80 million people across the country. He argued that states should shoulder the burden of federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to help rein in waste. 'You can't have free money because there's no incentive to save, you know?' Zinke said. 'Hey, as long as the music plays, don't worry about it. But you know what? You should worry about it, because it's our children's future.' Zinke, who served as Interior secretary in Trump's first term, said that congressional leaders have to 'be courageous and find the savings' to rein in the country's debt and also allow lawmakers to cement 2017 tax cuts that cost the country trillions. 'Whatever we have in savings — that will roll over, and most of us believe to the tax provision so that Americans don't get caught with the biggest tax increase in the history of this country,' he said. 'But it is a balance sheet, and you got to be very, very careful about digging more in debt.' He noted that Moody's recently downgraded the U.S.'s credit rating in part because of debt management. 'The bond market doesn't lie,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Al Jazeera
16-05-2025
- Business
- Al Jazeera
Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill' at a crucial juncture
United States House Republicans' 'big, beautiful bill', a wide-ranging tax and spending legislation, is at a crucial moment. The nearly 400-page legislation proposes sweeping changes which include extending the 2017 tax cuts, slashing taxes for businesses and individuals, and enacting deep cuts to social programmes like Medicaid and SNAP. While Republicans tout the bill as a boon for economic growth and middle-class relief, nonpartisan analysts warn it could add trillions to the national debt and strip millions of Americans of medical and food assistance. The bill will be voted on by the House Budget Committee today and, if passed, will be voted on the floor next week. The most substantive part of the bill is an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. The tax bill would add at least an additional $2.5 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years and decrease federal tax revenue by roughly $4 trillion by 2034. Passing the legislation will also raise the debt ceiling, which sets the amount of money the government can borrow to pay for existing expenditures, by $4 trillion, a sticking point for hardline Republicans who want deeper cuts. Here are some of the key measures in the proposed bill in its current form. The bill increases standard deductions for all Americans. Individual deductions will increase by $1,000, $1,500 for heads of households, and $2,000 for married couples. The bill extends the child tax credit of $2,000, which would otherwise have ended with the expiration of the 2017 tax cuts at year's end. It bumps up the child tax credit by $500 per child for this tax year and runs through the end of 2028. It also includes a $1,000 savings account for children born between December 31, 2024 and January 1, 2029. The legislation would also allow families to annually contribute $5,000 tax-free. There is a new tax deduction for Americans 65 and older. The new bill would give a $4,000 annual deduction starting this year for people making a gross income of $75,000 for a single person and $150,000 for a married couple. If passed, the rule would take effect for the current tax year and run until the end of 2028. 'It will just make tax paying more complicated and more uncertain when a lot of these things ultimately expire,' Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the right-leaning Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera. Another provision in the bill modifies state and local tax (SALT) deductions. It allows filers to be able to write off some of what they paid in local and state taxes from their federal filings. Under the 2017 tax act, that was capped at $10,000, but the new legislation would raise that to $30,000. Some Republicans, particularly those in states with higher taxes like New York and California, have been pushing to raise the cap or abolish it altogether. However, they have faced fiscal hawks and those who see the increases as relief for those already wealthy. The bill includes an increased benefit for small businesses that allows them to deduct 23 percent of their qualified business income from their taxes, up from the current 20 percent. There is also a call for no taxes on overtime pay for select individuals. It would not apply to people who are non-citizens, those who are considered 'highly compensated employees,' and those who earn a tipped wage. The bill, however, also eliminates taxes on tips, a critical campaign promise by both Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris. The bill would allow people who work in sectors like food service, as well as hair care, nail care, aesthetics, and body and spa treatments, to specifically deduct the amount of tipped income they receive. At the federal level, employers will still not be required to pay tipped workers more than the subminimum wage of $2.13 hourly. The intention is that workers will be able to make up the difference in tipping the receipt from customers. The legislation calls to make $880bn in cuts to key government programmes with a focus mostly on Medicaid and food stamps. The CBO found that more than 10 million people could lose Medicaid access and 7.6 million could lose access to health insurance completely by 2034 under the current plan. Even far-right Republicans have called out the Medicaid cuts. In an op-ed in The New York Times this week, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said the cuts are 'morally wrong and politically suicidal'. According to a new report from One Fair Wage shared with Al Jazeera, tipped workers could be hit especially hard, as 1.2 million restaurant and tipped workers could lose access to Medicaid. 'A no tax on tips proposal, which is like a minuscule percentage of their income and doesn't affect two-thirds of tips workers because they don't earn enough to pay federal income tax, is just nowhere near enough to compensate for the fact that we're going to have millions of these workers lose the ability to take care of themselves, in some cases go into medical debt, in many cases just not take care of themselves,' Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, an advocacy group for restaurant workers, told Al Jazeera. The bill also introduces work requirements to receive benefits, saying that recipients must prove they work, volunteer or are enrolled in school for at least 80 hours each month. At the same time, the bill also shortens the open enrolment period by a month for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. This means people who have employer-funded healthcare and lose their job might lose eligibility to buy a private plan on the healthcare exchange. 'It's taking folks like 11 to 12 weeks to find a new job. The worse the labour market gets, that number will tick up. If you're unemployed for three months, you get kicked off Medicaid,' Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collective, told Al Jazeera. 'Then, if you try to go buy a plan on the ACA marketplace, you are no longer eligible for subsidies … which I think is really cruel.' Other major proposed cuts will hit programmes like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme or SNAP, which helps 42 million low-income individuals afford groceries and comes at a time when food costs are still 2 percent higher than a year ago. The CBO found that 3 million people could lose SNAP access under the new plan. The bill would also force states to take up more responsibility in funding the programmes. States would be required to cover 75 percent of the administrative costs, and all states would have to pay at least 5 percent of the benefits — 28 states would need to pay 25 percent. 'States are now going to be on the hook for billions of dollars in funding for these two vital programmes. They have a tough choice. One is, do they cut funding from others like K-12 education, roads, veteran services, etc, to cover this gap, or do they raise taxes so that they can raise more revenue to cover this gap,' Pancotti added. Under the current law, the federal government is solely responsible for shouldering the cost of benefits. The proposed cuts would save $300bn for the federal government but hit state budgets hard. The bill would also cut the $7,500 tax credit for new electric vehicle purchases and $4,000 for a used EV, a move which could hurt several major US automakers that are already reeling from the administration's tariffs on automobiles. General Motors pumped billions into domestic EV production in the last year, which has included a $900m investment to retrofit an existing plant to build electric vehicles in Michigan and alongside Samsung, the carmaker invested $3.5bn in EV battery manufacturing in the US. In February, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that revoking the EV tax credit could put factory jobs on the chopping block. The carmaker invested in three EV battery plants in Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. The federal government under the administration of former President Joe Biden paid out more than $2bn in EV tax credits in 2024. The proposed legislation would also give the Trump administration authority to revoke the tax exempt status of nonprofit organisations that it deems as a 'terrorist supporting organisation'. It would give the secretary of the treasury the ability to accuse any nonprofit of supporting 'terrorism', revoke their tax exempt status without allowing them due process to prove otherwise, which has raised serious concerns amongst critics. 'This measure's real intent lurks behind its hyperbolic and unsubstantiated anti-terrorist rhetoric: It would allow the Treasury Department to explicitly target, harass and investigate thousands of U.S. organizations that make up civil society, including nonprofit newsrooms,' Jenna Ruddock, advocacy director of Free Press Action, said in a statement. 'The bill's language lacks any meaningful safeguards against abuse. Instead it puts the burden of proof on organizations rather than on the government. It's not hard to imagine how the Trump administration would use it to exact revenge on groups that have raised questions about or simply angered the president and other officials in his orbit.' The bill would introduce new taxes on colleges, including a varying tax rate based on the size of a university's endowment per student with the highest at 14 percent for universities with a per student endowment of more than $1.25m but less than $2m and 21 percent for those of $2m or more. This comes amid the Trump administration's increased tensions with higher education. In the last week, the Trump administration pulled $450m in grants to Harvard on top of the $2.2bn it pulled in April — a move which will hinder research into cancer and heart disease, among other areas. Harvard has an endowment of $53.2bn, making it one of the richest schools in the country. The legislation would also increase funding for a border wall between the US and Mexico, which the administration has argued will help curb undocumented immigration. However, there is no evidence that such a wall has deterred border crossings. A 2018 analysis from Stanford University found that a border wall would only curb migration by 0.6 percent, yet the bill would give more than $50bn to finish the border wall and maritime crossings. The bill would also provide $45bn for building and maintaining detention facilities and another $14bn for transport.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why I Was Wrong About Head Start
One should always be open to reevaluating long-held beliefs—and an especially good time to reevaluate them is when a guy with a Nobel Prize in the relevant subject tells you that you've got it wrong. In at least a half a dozen articles and speeches, probably more, I have repeated something that I've understood to be a well-established fact for so long that I do not even remember when or where I first learned it: that Head Start does not work, that it provides no meaningful lasting results. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, inconveniently enough for my longstanding belief, not only was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as Jay Nordlinger taught me) but was so honored specifically for his work on developing rigorous methods for the evaluation of social programs. I do not immediately knuckle under to appeals to authority, but I am inclined to listen to guys who have equations named after them. Speaking at the Old Parkland Conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington this week, Heckman insisted—and not for the first time—that the mostly conservative critics of Head Start have it wrong, and that conclusions about the program's ineffectiveness are based on bad information. (The Old Parkland Conference is a recurring symposium on black socioeconomic mobility and related subjects, inspired by Thomas Sowell's 1980 Fairmont Conference. Old Parkland, where the first meeting was held, is the Dallas office campus owned by Harlan Crow, a longtime AEI trustee and financial supporter of the conference who is, I should note in the interest of full disclosure, an investor in The Dispatch and, more important, my friend.) Heckman, who does not want for confidence in his convictions, rejects the notion that randomized trials should be understood as the 'gold standard' and mocks those who believe otherwise as a 'cult.' But, as he tells the story, even if we were to accept the primacy of randomized trials here, we'd want them to be good randomized trials. 'This all really comes from one experiment,' he says, referring to the 2005 Head Start Impact Study. 'Students were randomized out of Head Start, and the ones randomized out were the control group. But what were they randomized out into?' Head Start, and pre-K education more generally, is a varied and decentralized enterprise, and many of the students randomized out of Head Start in the experiment in question ended up attending other Head Start programs or other kinds of preschool. 'Some of them went to Head Start elsewhere. Some of them went to something better.' Better data from a better sample produces different results—results that point to a different outcome about Head Start's efficacy. 'I don't love Head Start,' Heckman says. 'There are better ways to do it. But the notion that it just doesn't work at all isn't supported by the evidence.' I asked Heckman if the focus on randomized experimental data was another example of the hard-science envy among economists noted by F.A. Hayek in his Nobel Prize lecture on 'the pretense of knowledge,' as he put it. 'That's it, yes,' he said. Heckman's work has focused in part on the Perry Preschool Project, which was (ahem!) a randomized study of children 'treated' with preschool in the 1960s—long ago enough that we have a great deal of information not only about their life outcomes but also those of their children. Heckman's research summary reports: Children treated with early childhood education have significantly better life outcomes than the untreated children. Treatment in Perry significantly increased the participants' employment, health, cognitive and socioemotional skills and reduced the male participants' criminal activity, especially violent crime. Improvements in childhood home environments and parental attachment are seen as an important source of the long-term benefits of the program. . . . The children of participants were less likely to be suspended from school, and more likely to complete regular or any other form of high school and to be employed full-time with some college experience. While present for both male and female children of participants, the wide range of beneficial effects are particularly strong for the male children of participants, especially those of male participants. Good preschool programs, in Heckman's telling, give students some of the same things they get from good parenting: attention, examples to learn from, mental stimulation, etc. It is these things that matter, not whether the benefits are transmitted through a federally supported program. I thought of an observation from Yale psychologist Paul Bloom made on a recent episode of The Remnant podcast: On average, people with psychological problems do better with therapy than without therapy—so, in that sense, therapy works. But there does not seem to be much difference in terms of patient outcomes between different therapeutic methods and techniques—rather, outcomes seem to vary most strongly by therapist. In that sense, it would be less accurate to say that this or that form of therapy works than that this or that therapist produces good results. We might expect to see something similar when it comes to preschool education. And that would fit in with the evidence we have from K-12 education, which suggests that of all the in-school factors that shape educational outcomes, teacher quality matters most: 'When it comes to student performance on reading and math tests, teachers are estimated to have two to three times the effect of any other school factor, including services, facilities, and even leadership,' as one RAND report put it. The Trump administration has been making desultory war on Head Start even as the lunatic who runs the Department of Health and Human Services, conspiracy quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., assures Congress that funding for the program will not be cut, and that the recent financial chaos in the program was not the work of the Trump administration (which, in reality, has suggested eliminating the program entirely) but rather that of disgruntled employees 'who wanted to make the Trump administration look bad.' The question of whether early-childhood education works is separate from the question of whether a federal program is the best way to go about providing it, which is again separate from the question of whether this federal program is the best way to go about providing it. My best guesses right now would be: yes, no, and no—and if I were a policymaker looking for advice on the question, I'd be more interested in James Heckman's views than in those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and those in his wobbly, messy orbit. And as for my earlier views on the subject of early-childhood education: I think I stand corrected—but I may be wrong about that.
