Bob Greenstein

The lead tax GOP is pushing back, saying, “The rich will pay an even higher share of taxes under The One, Big, Beautiful Bill”

But share paid is a terrible metric. If you get rid of all taxes except for a dollar on Elon Musk, he’s now paying 100% of the share, but the system got way more regressive

One more thing: While working on this, I read Bob Greenstein's masterful, sweeping history for the Hamilton Project of anti-poverty programs evolution since the 1970s. Absolute must-read, with important forward guidance as well.
www.hamiltonproject.org/wp-content/u...

The Conservative Argument Against Medicaid Is That It Has Grown With no regard for what it does.

...documenting what the program actually does for people, families, state budgets, and more. Today, we posted a longer version. To us, the Cogan oped is a revealing take on how, if you ignore evidence, you can justify these proposed cuts.
econjared.substack.com/p/the-conser...

Opinion | What if Medicaid Hadn’t Grown in the U.S.? ‘Mr. Cogan seems to think that simply by pointing out that more people are receiving benefits, it’s obvious that they must be cut.’

Yesterday, Hannah Katch and I had this letter to the ed in the WSJ, critiquing an oped by John Cogan arguing that Mcaid must be cut because it has grown. That's it. Zero reference to decades of quality research, much by folks up here...
www.wsj.com/opinion/what...

The Ways & Means proposals also would deny the CTC to 4.5 million children who are US citizens or legal permanent residents if either of their parents lacks a Social Security Number.

As this piece explains, the CTC expansion the House Ways & Means Cmte proposes would provide no CTC increase to millions of kids in low-income working families, with families in the bottom 20% by income getting just 2% of the new CTC benefits and families in top 20% getting nearly 10 times as much

Add to that the steep cuts in Medicaid, SNAP, etc. coming in the reconciliation bill and you have a prescription for triggering the biggest increases in poverty, hardship, and human suffering in the US - and the biggest losses of health coverage - we've seen in our lifetimes

Massive cutbacks in rental assistance for low-income families, elimination of aid with high heating/cooling bills, elimination of programs to spur development of affordable housing and - despite claims of wanting people to work - elimination of Job Corps & big cuts in education.

The Trump budget cuts in program after program for people struggling to get by are unprecedented and far exceed the proposals from his 1st term, seen as Draconian then. Some specifics in the thread below.

Trump’s Budget Plan Continues Agenda of Hurting Those He Pledged to Help | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities The Trump Administration’s partial budget plan released today is just its latest repudiation of the Trump campaign’s promises to help people struggling at the margins of the economy — an economy that ...

We just released a statement from @sharonparrott.bsky.social on the partial details of Pres. Trump's 2026 budget plan released today, which breaks his campaign promises by proposing cuts that would most hurt people struggling at the margins of a weakening economy: www.cbpp.org/press/statem...

People interested in the deep cuts about to emerge as part of the budget reconciliation bill may find this paper of particular interest.