Americans deserve better than the GOP tax bill

Last month, Republicans in Congress cheered as they passed the least popular bill in recent history that will devastate the finances of middle class families. It’s time that we set the record straight about just how damaging this bill will be for Rhode Islanders.

Under the GOP tax scam, Republicans threw working Americans the crumbs of meager, temporary tax breaks – that is, the ones lucky enough not to face an immediate tax hike. On the other hand, corporate America, and the richest among us, got vast, permanent cuts that the next generation will be paying for their entire lives.

Within just a few years, 86 million middle class families will see their taxes go up, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. The same analysis finds that a staggering 83 percent of the benefits will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. Further, corporations will have even more incentives to ship American jobs overseas.

Republicans claim that all these benefits that go to rich people and corporations will eventually “trickledown” to the rest of America. But we know that’s not true. Trickle-down economics have never accomplished anything other than making rich people richer while everyone else falls further and further behind.

The bill double-taxes Rhode Islanders by capping the state and local tax deduction, drives down home values and endangers key funding for public employees like firefighters, law enforcement officers and teachers.

And thanks to a GOP provision tucked into the bill at the last minute to unravel the Affordable Care Act, health care premiums will spike, and 13 million Americans will lose health coverage, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

The GOP tax scam adds a massive burden to the debt, and Republicans are already sharpening their knives to come after the pillars of health and retirement security in America. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and countless other initiatives that Americans rely on are now on Republicans’ chopping block to fill the hole left by their tax giveaways to the wealthiest one percent.

Our current tax code is complicated and unfair. It doesn’t promote economic growth and the creation of good-paying jobs. We need real tax reform, done in a bipartisan way with full transparency and openness. Real reform of the tax code should be done with three goals in mind – making it simpler, increasing its fairness, and providing a real tax cut for the middle class.

Americans deserve better than the GOP tax bill – and they know it. Americans across the country saw through this con job and opposed this tax scam by a two-to-one margin.

The American people deserve a tax code that puts their priorities first, not one that tilts the playing field against working people even further. That's why we are fighting to give the American people A Better Deal, with Better Jobs, Better Wages, and A Better Future.

This is our commitment: raising incomes and creating good-paying, full-time jobs for 10 million American workers in the next five years; lowering the soaring cost of living by cracking down on monopolies that raise prices and hurt competition; and giving every American the tools to succeed in the 21st Century economy with a new nationwide commitment to apprenticeships, lifetime learning, and paid-onthe-job training.

We believe that the federal government should be helping working families get ahead, not catering to the wealthy and corporate special interests. This tax scam fails to do that. Rhode Islanders deserve a better deal.