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Pennsylvania Organizations Opposed to Medicaid and SNAP Cuts, and Tax Cuts for the Ultra-Rich

By Blog Post

January 29, 2025

This letter from Pennsylvania organizations was sent to all members of the PA congressional delegation today.

As you know, the incoming Trump administration and the Republican congressional leaders plan to extend and potentially expand the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which is set to expire at the end of 2025.

We urge you to use the expiration of these provisions as an opportunity to address long-standing inequities in our tax code and to raise more revenue to meet our country’s current obligations and address critical unmet needs.  We also urge you not to reduce federal funding for the Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP programs.

No matter what we look like or where we’re from, all Pennsylvanians believe in caring for their families and community. People in our state work hard, giving our all as teachers, delivery drivers, and nurses, volunteering at the local food bank or for a neighborhood cleanup. And while we believe in first relying on ourselves and our families whenever possible, we know that our success as individuals, families, and communities also depends on a vibrant public sector that educates our young people; provides vital public goods such as transportation infrastructure, protection from pollution and climate change, and basic medical and other research; and creates a safety net, protecting those of us who suffer from unemployment, disability, poverty or illness.

Regardless of who we voted for in November, the vast majority of Pennsylvanians believe in a government that accomplishes these goals and is paid for by a tax system that asks everyone to pay their fair share. They oppose—and did not vote in 2024 for—giving tax cuts to the wealthiest households and corporations.

Our recent poll powerfully shows that voters of all parties believe that taxes are unfair in the United States today. A majority of voters believe that our tax system takes too much from working people, while allowing ultra-rich Americans and wealthy corporations to pay too little.

We found that

  • 76% of Pennsylvanians support raising taxes on wealthy corporations.
  • 76% support increasing taxes on the wealthiest households.
  • 77% support raising taxes on households earning more than $400,000 a year.
  • 57% support raising the federal corporate tax rate from the 21% level set in the TCJA.

(Poll results for each congressional district can be found in the addendum to this letter. A strong majority in support of each of these ideas can be found in every congressional district.)

The TCJA was unpopular in 2017. And it remains so today, for good reason. The claims made on behalf of the TCJA have turned out to be false.

  • The proponents of these tax cuts said big corporate tax cuts would trickle down to big increases in wages for workers — but the typical worker got nothing from it.
  • They said the bill would pay for itself — it actually increased the deficit by $2 trillion.
  • They said the tax cuts would create jobs, but the evidence doesn’t show that.

An extension of the TCJA would have even worse results. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says it would increase deficits by about $7.5 trillion over 10 years. And the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that President Trump’s tax plans would lead “to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for the other 95 percent of Americans.”

Republican members of Congress have floated the idea of paying for an extension of the TCJA by reducing federal expenditures for Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP. Pennsylvania voters, like voters in other states, strongly support these programs, again with good reason. Medicaid provides critical support for millions of Pennsylvanians.

Medicaid provides health care to

  • over 2 million adults.
  • over 1.4 million children (including 200,000 served by CHIP).
  • over 1.4 million people who need mental or behavioral health care.
  • over 400,000 seniors, who receive care in nursing homes, assisted living facilities or, in some cases, at home.
  • over 300,000 Pennsylvanians with a substance use disorder.
  • over 2 million people, who rely on SNAP to pay for their groceries.

Reductions in Medicaid and CHIP spending of the kind being talked about recently in Washington, DC, threaten to cost the state of Pennsylvania between 2 and 5 billion dollars each year. That would leave our state government with the difficult choice of trying to replace some federal dollars with money from Pennsylvania taxpayers or drastically reducing eligibility for Medicaid or coverage for medical problems. While we would hope the state would provide some funding to replace that which is lost, it simply does not have the resources to make up for the kinds of Medicaid reductions being bandied about now.

Nor should it. No candidate for office, in either party, campaigned on a plan to devastate health care for millions of people in our state or any other state.

So, we urge you to oppose extending, let alone expanding, tax giveaways to billionaires and wealthy corporations and, even more, the attempt to pay for some of them by taking health care away from millions of Pennsylvanians and tens of millions of people across the country.

Signed,

Action Together NEPA

AFSCME Council 13
Community Legal Services
Cumberland County Food System Alliance (CCFSA)
Cumberland Valley Rising
Food Dignity
Hershey Indivisible Team
Just Harvest
Keystone Progress Education Fund
Make the Road Pennsylvania
National Council of Jewish Women–Greater Philadelphia
NEPA Green Coalition
PA 10th District Network
PA Council of Children, Youth & Family Services
Pennsylvania Policy Center
Philly Neighborhood Networks
Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates
Protect Our Care PA
Reclaim Philadelphia
SEIU PA State Council
SeniorLAW Center
The Partnership for Better Health PA
UUJusticePA

The Barbarians Are at the Gate

By Blog Post

Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are about to seek major cuts in Medicaid to pay for deep cuts to the taxes of the ultra-rich and wealthy corporations.

We often talk, with pride, about our American civilization as a high mark of the West. Yet what makes for civilization?

Human history is full of great and powerful kingdoms and empires led by, and mostly serving the good of, kings, emperors, and monarchs. They weren’t civilized by our standards. The aim of most of those grandees was not to help those they ruled but to take from them to enrich and elevate themselves.

What makes the United States different and truly civilized is that we have attempted to create a government by and for the people, one in which the powerful are constrained by the people to serve the people. And that means everyone, including those who are, in the words of Matthew 25:40, “the least of these brothers and sisters.”

By that standard, one of our most important achievements as a civilization was the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Ensuring everyone could afford health care meant little when doctors and hospitals couldn’t do much. But once the development of greater medical knowledge, techniques, and pharmaceuticals—much of it paid for by the federal government—gave medical care the power to save and extend lives, we recognized that it must be provided to all, not just those who could afford it. Health care is a right—not a privilege.

Medicaid was initially a small program designed to take a small share of our national income to serve those with very low incomes. It was expanded over time to cover a broad spectrum of the American public. And then it was expanded dramatically by the Affordable Care Act, which doubled the number of adults covered by the program by raising the eligibility level from 100% to 138% of the federal poverty level.

Now, more than any other government program, Medicaid helps people who are in trouble, who are suffering, who are in despair, and who desperately need the support of their fellow citizens. Few people receive Medicaid benefits for more than a few years of their lives. But almost two-thirds of Americans will, at one time or another, benefit from it.

In Pennsylvania, Medicaid provides health care for more than two million adults each year. It covers nearly half of all children in our state (1.4 million) and is not only the leading funder of birth control but also pays for more than 40 percent of births.

It is the largest funder of long-term care services for seniors in assisted living residences and nursing homes, covering more than 400,000 people.

It’s the largest funder of mental health services, serving 1.4 million, including 307,000 who need treatment for substance use disorder.

And Medicaid helps everyone indirectly. Few community hospitals in both rural and urban areas could survive without it. And in many states, including Pennsylvania, it partly funds school nurses for all.

While doing all this is costly—the total federal and state cost is $607 billion—it is still only a 2.2% share of our $27 trillion dollar economy. The federal government pays the largest share. In Pennsylvania, Medicaid costs $48 billion of which $31 billion comes from the federal government.

Yet despite the immense benefit of Medicaid, President-Elect Trump and the Republicans in Congress plan major reductions in the program. How much we don’t yet know. But even modest reductions could cost the state $4-$5 billion per year. We hope Pennsylvania and other states would make up for some cutbacks. But no state is capable of making up the whole difference. The result would be a sharp reduction in eligibility and coverage of the program.

Why do Trump and the Republicans want to cut Medicaid? Not because it is inefficient—Medicaid is beyond question the most efficient health insurance in America.

The reason is to pay for an extension and expansion of the Trump tax cuts of 2017, which went disproportionately to ultra-rich Americans and wealthy corporations.

The bottom 20% of families received a tax cut of $70 on average. The middle 20%, $910. But the top 1% received $61,090, on average, and the top .1% received an average cut of $252,300.

And our economy did not benefit much from the 2017 tax cuts. Investment barely increased. Economic and job growth did not grow faster. On average, workers’ wages went up less than $100. The tax cuts most certainly did not pay for themselves but instead led to a loss of revenues on the order of $250 billion per year.

The Trump / GOP tax plan is designed to take a big chunk of that small share of national income that goes to Medicaid and use it to reward the richest and most powerful people in our society. Doing that would undermine the federal program that relieves the most suffering, that helps the most people, and that is our boldest step in creating a civilized society.

The barbarians are at the gates. Medicaid is under attack by wealthy marauders who, if we let them, will enrich themselves by taking from the least among us and undermine our civilization in the process.