Tax cuts don’t magically pay for themselves
The Senate “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” is class warfare in sheep’s clothing. It would create an enormous transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent — this when financial inequality is already greater in our country than it has been since the Gilded Age.
It’s also a sneak attack on the Affordable Care Act — it eliminates the individual mandate, a move which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will eventually leave 13 million Americans without health insurance. Eliminating the mandate will also cause broad increases in health insurance premiums by removing healthy people from risk pools
These tax cuts don’t magically pay for themselves. The theory of trickle down has been tested repeatedly and disproved. These cuts will either lead to huge deficits or will be paid for by sacrificing the social safety net programs that struggling Americans need for a decent quality of life. The CBO says it would trigger $25 billion in automatic spending cuts next year to Medicare, plus another $111 billion in reductions to other programs because of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, or Paygo. And Republicans defeated an amendment that would have ruled out cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Myhusband and I are seniors, and we would like to know why Sen. Pat Toomey seems to be supporting a bill that would hurt seniors as well as a majority of his constituents. MARY BARR Highland Park in his hand.
I have proposed a conference for next September — “Vietnam: A Working Class War.” It will provide an opportunity for veterans and resisters to teach our young people about a major turning point in American history — to learn from a tragic history we seem all too willing to repeat. At the end of the conference, we will march to the Vietnam memorial and remember an old soldier who will never die in the hearts of those who knew him.
CHARLES McCOLLESTER Mount Washington
Recently I heard of a woman in Norway who was fined $30,000 for drunken driving. At first I thought maybe those Norwegians are a little too tough. However, I learned that in Norway (as in some other Scandinavian countries) fines are based on income of the person being fined. The DUI offender was one of the country’s richest and the huge fine was indeed just.
But it doesn’t work that way in the United States. For the same violation, a penalty that would cost a lower-income earner weeks of pay would be
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only pocket change to the most wealthy.
With the Trump/Republican tax cut proposal benefiting the affluent the most, can’t we at least legislate that the rich are punished fairly? If a punishment cost a poor person a week’s income it should cost a millionaire or billionaire a week’s income. TERRY MARIER
Bethel Park