Analysis - How Trump's budget helps the rich at the expense of the poor
By Max Ehrenfreund May 23 at 11:40 AM
For President Obama, the gap separating rich and poor Americans was, as he put it in a speech in 2013, the defining challenge of our time. He and his administration labored against Republican opposition and tough economic realities to shrink that disparity for eight years, making reducing inequality a central goal of national policymaking.
Despite those efforts, the United States remains among the most unequal developed countries, and on Tuesday, President Trump decisively abandoned his predecessors attempts to narrow inequality. To the contrary, the policies described in his first comprehensive federal budget would add to the incomes of the rich, while taking away from the poor.
Its just the complete obverse of what Obama was doing, said Jared Bernstein, who was chief economist to former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. These folks seem to look at the economy and conclude that the wealthy dont have enough and the poor have too much, and theyre going to fix that.
Trump announced a tax overhaul that would reduce or eliminate trillions of dollars in taxes that are paid primarily by the wealthy, including the estate tax and the marginal rate on ordinary income paid by the richest taxpayers. He would lessen spending on Medicaid, the federal program that provides health insurance to the poor, by $1.4 trillion over a decade, and he would allow states to impose strict limits on other major anti-poverty benefits such as food stamps.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/23/how-trumps-budget-helps-the-rich-at-the-expense-of-the-poor/