The “Limit, Save, and Grow Act” passed by House Republicans Wednesday is extortion, plain and simple. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is telling President Joe Biden that he has two choices: Destroy the economy with a default on the nation’s debt, or destroy the economy by accepting ruinous cuts to government operations. Then next spring, as the presidential election is heating up, they’d go through it all over again.
The dirty little secret is that the debt ceiling is just the hostage in this scheme. McCarthy had to put it in there as the mechanism to try to force Biden to negotiate with him. It had to be included so McCarthy could claim, “We lifted the debt limit; we’ve sent it to the Senate; we’ve done our job.” The hike was set at $1.5 trillion, a small enough number to ensure that this exercise is repeated again next year, when it can be used again as a cudgel against Biden.
The meat of the bill is those spending cuts the Freedom Caucus demanded, and got. That includes rolling back overall appropriations for all discretionary programs, meaning the ones that Congress has to approve spending for every two years, to 2022 levels. All the programs, that is, except defense. Exempting the huge defense budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young explained in a White House statement, “means that everything else in annual appropriations—from cancer research, to education, to veterans’ health care—would be cut by much more.”
“The math is simple, but unforgiving,” Young wrote. “At their proposed topline funding level—and with defense funding left untouched as Republicans have proposed—everything else is forced to suffer enormous cuts. In fact, their bill would force a cut of 22 percent—cuts that would grow deeper and deeper with each year of their plan.” It would make those cuts grow by capping annual spending growth to just 1% for the next decade.
Young spelled out just some of those impacts:
A 22 percent cut would impact 25 million students in schools that teach low-income students and 7.5 million students with disabilities, which could force a reduction of up to 108,000 teachers, aides or other key staff.
A 22 percent cut would mean 200,000 children lose access to Head Start slots and another 180,000 children lose access to child care—undermining our children’s education and making it more difficult for parents to join the workforce and contribute to our economy.
A 22 percent cut would mean 1.7 million women, infants, and children would lose vital nutrition assistance through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), significantly increasing child poverty and hunger.
A 22 percent cut would take away nutrition services, such as Meals on Wheels, from more than 1 million seniors. For many of these seniors, these programs provide the only healthy meal they receive on any given day.
A 22 percent cut would result in 7,000 fewer rail safety inspection days next year alone, and 30,000 fewer miles of track inspected annually—enough track to cross the United States nearly 10 times.
Those are just a few highlights. Congressional Democrats asked each agency to determine what the cuts would mean for their operations. Layoffs, hiring freezes, furloughs, postponing technology upgrades: all of that and more was included in the agency responses. It could mean losing 11,000 FBI agents, and 2,400 Border Patrol agents. The 4,468 new full-time positions for wildfire fighters would be cut by 1,754 jobs, and pay levels would have to be lowered for those who remain. About 1,000 current firefighters could lose their jobs, and plans to increase their pay and improve working conditions would have to be scrapped.
Beyond all these cuts, Republicans would further punish people on Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by forcing them to prove they meet a work-reporting requirement or qualify for an exemption, and taking those benefits away if they can’t comply.
It would also eliminate Biden’s one-time student debt-relief plan, depriving more than 40 million Americans of student loan forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the Republicans double down on protecting wealthy tax cheaters by including the first bill they passed right after taking the House majority. That bill rescinds the more than $70 billion in IRS funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act to help the agency modernize and more effectively do its job. The Congressional Budget Office determined that this bill actually adds to the deficit, finding it would cost the nation more than $114 billion in the next decade.
All of these cuts, the White House veto statement notes, citing a Moody’s Analytics report, “would lead to 780,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2024 and would meaningfully increase the risk of recession.”
“Altogether, this legislation would not only risk default, recession, widespread job loss, and years of higher interest rates, but also make devastating cuts to programs that hard-working Americans and the middle-class count on,” the statement continues. “The bill would make it easier for wealthy tax cheats to avoid the taxes they owe, even as House Republicans are advancing other proposals that would spend trillions more on tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations, undoing much or all of the deficit reduction in this legislation.”
It’s not about the deficit. It’s not about keeping the nation from going into default. It’s about wrecking Joe Biden’s economy. Oh, and more tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s always about that for Republicans.
Can we have fairer, more representative elections in the U.S.? Absolutely, says Deb Otis on this week’s episode of “The Downballot.” Otis, the director of research at FairVote, tells us about her organization’s efforts to advocate for two major reforms—ranked-choice voting and proportional representation—and the prospects for both. RCV, which is growing in popularity, not only helps ensure candidates win with majorities but can lower the temperature by encouraging cross-endorsements. PR, meanwhile, would give voters a stronger voice, especially when they’re a minority in a dark red or dark blue area.
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