Washington, D.C. – Last week, Michael Linden, Director of the Families Over Billionaires campaign and former Executive Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget, joined Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast to discuss how Republican’s Billionaire Tax Scam has become the most unpopular law in history, and next steps to ensure accountability.
LISTEN >> Linden’s full interview is available [here]
KEY MOMENTS:
- Linden on the Overwhelming Unpopularity of Republicans’ Toxic Law
“Cutting Medicaid is overwhelmingly unpopular, including among Republican voters. Cutting taxes for rich people is overwhelmingly unpopular, including among Republican voters. So obviously they can’t talk about that. So they have to pretend that these cuts are to some scary immigrants or to the people who are undeserving. But the fundamental problem is exactly what you said. There are $1 trillion of cuts to Medicaid. There’s $500 billion of cuts to food assistance. There’s cuts to clean energy. There’s cuts to education. You don’t get those kinds of magnitudes of cuts and you’re only limiting it to the vanishingly small number of illegal immigrants, who maybe in one or two states got once a reimbursement from Medicaid. You get those “savings” by kicking people off Medicaid. That’s where it comes from.”
- Linden on the Message Discipline Against the GOP’s Tax Scam:
“[D]emocrats will point to every failure of the health care system that we are about to see over the next year and attribute it, correctly in my view, to this bill. […] And so if the American people are unhappy with the cost of health care over the next year, if they lose their coverage, if their hospital closes, if a clinic shuts down or has fewer hours, all of that is attributable to the Republican tax scam. Plus, we have an incredibly unpopular set of tax policies that overwhelmingly help the rich when everybody else is feeling really strapped. So you put those two things together, and that’s got to be the core argument over the next year.
And look, that has been the core argument over the last eight months. And it’s why the bill is so unpopular. As you said, Republicans wanted this to be about undocumented immigrants or waste, fraud, and abuse and a middle-class tax cut. But it wasn’t about that. The American people saw through that. They saw through to the core of it, which was that it’s higher costs for everyday people to pay for tax cuts for rich people. That’s going to become real over the next year: higher health care premiums this fall; hospitals and clinics closing; food banks overstretched over the course of the next year. […]
They have a huge vulnerability. So Democrats do need to keep talking about it. The biggest challenge that we have – we know this – is that most Americans have busy lives and they’re just trying to make it one day at a time. And they need to hear about this bill. The dots need to be connected.”
- Linden Pushing Back Against JD Vance’s Lies:
“It’s important to understand that what the Vice President said was completely false, just straight up false. The bill cuts, as you said, $1 trillion from Medicaid. It does so in a couple of very specific ways. The most important ones are it imposes new requirements for existing recipients on how to make themselves eligible every six months based on a whole set of new requirements, new paperwork. That’s going to kick millions of eligible Americans off the bill. It also limits the ways that states can finance Medicaid. Medicaid is a federal and state partnership. Both the states and federal government put money into Medicaid. This bill actually makes it harder for states to do that and shifts more of the costs onto states at the same time.
So the overall impact of those things is about 10 million people will lose their Medicaid coverage. And that’s to say nothing of the 5 million people who are going to get priced out of Affordable Care Act coverage because the benefits for them are going to be dramatically reduced. So 15 million people total. And to be very, very clear, none of that has anything to do with illegal immigrants.”
- Linden on Who Really Benefits From the GOP’s Tax Scam:
“Very simply, people in the bottom will pay more, people at the very top will pay less. That’s what this bill does. It’s exactly for the reasons you said. There are tax cuts mostly for people at the top, very small tax cuts for people in the middle, almost no tax cuts for people at the bottom. And then on top of that, you have increases in costs like health care, food, energy, and education for the vast majority of low- and middle-income people. You put it all together, most Americans are going to actually end up paying more or be no better off, and people at the very top will pay a lot less in taxes.”
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