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Tom Berry is a retired public school special educator living in Kennebunk.
I think it’s time GOP leadership in Congress stopped pretending that it’s fiscally responsible and that it believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
U.S. House Republicans passed what has been dubbed “The Big Beautiful Bill” and now the Senate is working on its own version. Unless stopped in its tracks, the bill will go to the president who’ll triumphantly sign it into law.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that this bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt. This is in addition to the $2.3 trillion already added by Trump’s tax cuts of 2017.
(With the increase in interest payments required to service that debt, that figure could rise to over $3 trillion over a decade.)
Let’s look at the primary impetus for this particular budget proposal. President Donald Trump wants to make the tax cuts he engineered in his first term permanent and also add new ones. He knew that getting the votes in Congress for this further slashing of federal revenue would be difficult unless there were ways to offset some of the fiscal damage that this bill would cause. Hence, the massive cuts in social safety net programs like Medicaid, SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.)
The bill’s proponents like to emphasize the addition of a “work requirement” that applicants for Medicaid benefits would need to meet, in order to prevent “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Currently, without having such a provision written into law, 64 percent of adult Medicaid recipients are already working (44 percent full time, 20 percent, part-time). Nearly all of the remaining 36 percent fall into categories that are exempt from the work requirement for a variety of reasons. (such as retirement, disability, school attendance, or caregiving responsibilities.)
Question: If current Medicaid recipients already “check all the boxes,” why insist on having an official work requirement in this bill?
Answer: It’s clear to me that the goal of adding unnecessary — and red tape-laden — paperwork hurdles to the application process is to cause many people to lose these benefits, thereby reducing costs. Problems navigating this additional bureaucratic obstacle would result in having 10 million or more people lose their healthcare insurance. Note that more than half of Maine’s children depend on Medicaid (MaineCare.)
Under this bill, breastfeeding mothers receiving WIC assistance would see their monthly benefits plummet from $54 to just $13, while support for children would drop from $27 to $10, according to the National WIC Association.
This plan would also bump 3.2 million people from the food stamp rolls in an average month over the next decade, including 800,000 people living with children 7 and older, according to CBO estimates.
Regarding the second point I raised above: Most people — even those who are not religious — know that, when He was here on Earth, Jesus Christ unfailingly aligned himself with the poor, the outsider, and the oppressed. (See Matthew 25:40.)
This budget proposal is clearly antithetical to that position. A better name for it would be “The Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill” since it’s that class that would be its primary beneficiary, not the majority of Americans, and especially not those in the lower income brackets.
I applaud Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden for voting against this travesty when it was presented in the House and Sen. Angus King for his outspoken denunciation of this “heartless” effort. It is my hope that Sen. Susan Collins will vociferously join with them and present a united front, demonstrating for the nation that the delegation from Maine stands solidly for the ordinary people of America and not for the very privileged few.