The following is a rough transcript of a presentation I did on the July Statewide Call of Put People First! PA

Put your seatbelt on, we’re about to go for a wild ride.

We’re going to try to do something really important and special which is to talk about federal policy from the perspective and the analysis of the working class.

Not what the mainstream media is giving us, not filtered through the lens of one section of the ruling class or another, but based on our own understanding, our own analysis coming out of our study, our history, our experiences and our reading and understanding of what is happening.

We’re going to talk about what we in the Nonviolent Medicaid Army call the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”. It really is a big beautiful bill, if you’re a billionaire – so we want to put that right out there.

This bill is 900 pages, so it’s a bit intimidating to read it closely and understand it. First I want to say that when Put People First! PA introduced our own bill in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 2021-2022 legislative session, to institute a Public Healthcare Advocate, our bill was 18 pages long. We got all this pushback from state legislators who said “This bill is WAY too long, no one’s going to read it. Can you get this bill down to 2-3 pages?” But we notice that’s a bill that’s coming out of the working class struggle. But when there’s a bill that’s coming out of the billionaire class it can be 900 pages and it’s not a problem.

The length of the bill is actually significant here.

We have to first ground ourselves in the fact that this is our money!! The federal revenue, where do we get the money that’s in our budget? Forty-eight point five percent (48.5%) comes from individual income taxes. The taxes that we pay on the money that we make by selling our labor – the exploitation of our labor. Then payroll taxes, which is another form of taxation on our labor. So 83% of the money that the federal government has comes from our taxes. In other words, it’s OUR money. This is our money that they control. We as a class do not control OUR money. The billionaires, the ruling class that is behind our political system, are deciding what to do with OUR money.

What’s in the budget? Here’s a breakdown, this is an overview. Social Security, Medicare, Militarism – I’m not going to say “national defense”. It’s really not defense, it’s militarism, it’s the war economy. Health, including Medicaid and other health programs. Interest on our debt, and “other” things.

The “other” category is a lot of really important stuff. It includes all of SNAP which is our food, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) also known as welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, Housing Assistance. All of that is less than 10%. Veterans benefits and services – less than 5%. When you see that money for militarism, remember that none of that is going to veterans. Education, transportation, all of these are in the “other category” and they’re very small amounts of the total federal budget. 

So now let’s get into the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires. One of the reasons we want to break it down and break it down from the vantage point of the working class is because you’re going to see different things in the media depending on the sources that you’re looking at. Depending if it’s coming from the Democratic Party perspective or the Republican party perspective. So the Republicans are selling this as “working family tax cuts” and then we’ve got Bishop Barber calling it the “Big, Ugly, Destructive, Deadly Bill”. So we’re seeing this polarization where one side is like “this is awesome, this is actually going to help working people” and the other side is “this is evil, this is mean, this is cruel and cruelty is the point”. But I don’t think that either of those perspectives are coming from the lens of really trying to understand what’s going on here, and also let’s put it into a context of “how did we get here?”

It’s not enough to stay in this battle of “oh it’s good, no it’s evil”. I think that’s not really going deep enough. And we really have to go deeper in understanding what’s happening here.

So let’s look at some of the things that are being touted as the positive things in this bill. It would be a lie to say that the bill is just an expression of pure evil. Something that came up from the Eye of Sauron. There’s a lot of stuff that is in the interest of the billionaire class. And we know that those things are not in our interest and that’s where the conflict arises. That’s where the problem actually comes in. It’s not because of EVIL people. It’s because of a system that is structured to prioritize the needs of capital accumulation over human life. Is that evil objectively, is that morally wrong? Sure it is.

But it’s not because those individual people are evil and greedy, it’s because we live in a system that  prioritizes the needs of capital over human life. And that means that we’re going to die. That’s what that literally means. But we have to understand what’s beneath these narratives.

So there’s a few things that you’re going to hear when you see the headlines and you see Congresspeople touring across PA or our state, touting the benefits of the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”

There’s an expanded low income housing tax credit in the bill, which is supposed to increase the affordable housing supply – BUT that’s a tax credit for developers. That is money going to people with money. It is not going to us, it is not giving us money to get access to housing, it’s not making housing a human right, it’s not making housing free for all. It is money going to developers to “incentivize” them to build affordable housing. Similar to the way that the ACA gives money to insurance companies to “incentivize” them to cover people. So again, it’s taking our money to subsidize the developers and the capitalists to “do the right thing”. So it’s a false solution in that way. But it’s there. Will it result in more low income housing? Who knows. It’s not a real solution. But they’ll say that it is something that’s going to benefit the working class. Specifically in the realm of housing, which as we know is impossible to get, it’s impossible to afford.

There are these “Trump accounts” for newborns. So this is a new thing that’s in the bill. Every child born gets a $1000 government funded account and tax deferred contributions. So that’s a little bit of crumbs. There’s something there that they can say that they’re doing.

No taxes on tips, that’s been a big talking point. There is tax relief for service workers, up to $25,000 in tipped income, and $12,500 in overtime pay that can be deducted. But that is phased out for anyone making above $160,000 and it expires in 2028. So one of the things we’re going to see over and over again is that the tax cuts for the wealthy are made permanent and the tax cuts for us are all temporary.

And then there’s this child tax credit increase. They’ve said that they’re boosting the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200 to $2,500 per child. But a lot of low income families won’t actually qualify for the full amount if they’re not already paying $2,500 in federal taxes. So this is another thing, it looks good on paper but it may not actually provide the benefit that it appears to.

They’re also touting no taxes on social security. I got an e-mail from the federal government for some reason about taxes on social security saying that 88% of seniors will pay no taxes on their benefits. But the reality is that 64% of seniors are already exempt. So it’s not going from 0 to 88% it’s going from 64% to 88% and it does not eliminate taxes but it creates a new deduction which will shrink the portion of benefits subject to taxation. It will ALSO expire in 2028.

So once again, there are some things that they are going to be talking about on these tours but we have to know that they are not real solutions, that they are not providing the kind of real benefits that we actually need. They essentially amount to crumbs. And all of the benefits are temporary when it comes to the working class.  

We’re not trying to sit here and be partisan about this. We are politically independent. We do not take our marching orders from either of the two parties of Wall Street. 

Here’s how you will be affected:

So when we think about who this bill is really for, this is why we call it the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires” because they say “Oh we’re going to cut taxes for people making this amount” but it’s basically chump change. Here’s why we always talk in Put People First! PA about both raw numbers and disproportionality. Sometimes people are constantly trumpeting this disproportionality piece, which is important – but they leave out the raw numbers. For example, they leave out the fact that there are 66 million poor white people in the U.S. today. But in this case, I want to draw out the disproportionality. They’re going to be like “Well in raw numbers, the people making between 53k and 93k that’s where most of the tax cut is going” because that’s like 75 million people or something. But it DISPROPORTIONATELY benefits not only the top 1% but the top .1% But I was on a Town Hall with a Congressman the other day who said “No no no, it’s not true that this is a tax cut for the wealthy because ‘most’ of the tax cut is going to middle class people. But the reality is that working class people (because middle class is a false narrative) – working class people are getting crumbs, even if because of our vast numbers they can add it up and say “most of the tax cuts are going to working class people”. But in reality it is disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest people in our society. 

For example, this bill is a big boon for folks who own private jets or who want to buy private jets. If you go out and get a private jet you can now deduct %100 off of your taxes. So the private jet companies are super excited about this bill and they think it’s going to open up a new era of people traveling in private jets. 

So what else are they doing with our money?

ICE funding is going to jump from 10 billion to 27.7 so it’s almost tripling. There’s a 150 billion increase for the war economy or militarism. There’s a billion in new tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry. And the bill adds 3 trillion to the national debt. As we can see when it comes to billionaires, the whole question of the national debt just gets thrown out the window – it’s not an issue anymore. It’s only an issue when it comes to funding for healthcare, and for food, and using OUR money to benefit the masses of people in OUR country. Which is the way that you know that we are not in power, the working class is not in power, and we weren’t in power BEFORE this election either, let’s be real!

Overall, what are our takeaways? How can we generally understand the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaries?

Now let’s talk about Medicaid. As Rica said, we approach our understanding of this from a place of political independence. We have been fighting Medicaid cuts since the great Medicaid purge under the Biden administration. You wouldn’t know it from watching the news, from even seeing the protests and mobilizations that are happening on the ground. You wouldn’t know that 25 million got cut from Medicaid under President Biden, because it’s not really talked about as being a problem. This image is from the Department of Human Services website where they were tracking the cuts that started on April 1, 2023.  Over the course of 1 year, more than 600k people in PA were cut from Medicaid. Over 280,000 because of paperwork issues, and more than 350,000 were cut because of income fluctuations. That’s more than 600k in just ONE year. That’s why we have been conducting our Medicaid cut-offs Organizing Drive. As Frank said in the video that we watched, we have been letting everyone know that when you get cut from Medicaid you have the legal right to file an appeal, and last year PPF-PA had a 93% success rate in winning those appeals and we’re going to keep doing that.

So these are the cuts that actually happened under the last administration. We know about them – they actually happened. The projection of healthcare cuts in PA due to the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires: 270,000 projected to be cut from Pennie. 323,400 projected to be cut from Medicaid. That’s a total of 593,000 over the next 10 years. So let’s think about that for a minute. More than 600k cut from Medicaid in 1 year, under president Biden. Approximately 600k are projected to be cut from healthcare over the next 10 years under Trump. So that’s really interesting. This is still a problem, Medicaid cuts = death. We know that, we lived through it, we have been living through it.

But we need to be aware and understand the context of how we got here, because in the first place, if the last administration had actually enshrined the Medicaid Expansion, maybe we wouldn’t be here now. They’ll tout Medicaid expansion all day long. We need Medicaid expansion. These terrible Red States need Medicaid expansion, they’re so evil. Well guess what, we had Medicaid expansion and then they took it away. They took it away from the entire country. And if they had enshrined Medicaid expansion, instead of just using it as a political football, maybe we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in today, with the administration that we have today, with the 90 million people who didn’t even vote in the last election. Maybe we wouldn’t be in that position now.

Take a breath. 

This is the narrative (the speaker’s comments above) and I think it’s a very powerful narrative. It’s going to be very persuasive for people, so we have to think about not just “this is mean and this is evil” but understanding that when they’re talking about healthcare costs, and they have to do this to preserve Medicaid because healthcare costs are out of control – it is true that healthcare costs are out of control. That’s not a lie, that’s not a fabrication. But why?

Why is that? One third of people in the U.S. don’t have a primary doctor. 40-50% of us delay or don’t get care because of costs. Our working conditions, our housing conditions, our food system, our environment and our overall living conditions are making us sick. And the lack of preventative care in the healthcare system means that by the time we’re forced to get care we’re much sicker. 60% of adults in the U.S. have chronic health conditions and 40% have two or more. So we’re being set up and by the time we get healthcare we’re very sick. Another reason healthcare costs are out of control is because of price gouging by big pharma. I could have included here a photo of 5 cents to manufacture a common pharmaceutical but they charge $1000 a pill for it. At the end of the day the reason healthcare costs are out of control is that Wall Street owns our healthcare system and they are trying to make as much money as possible off of it. That’s the reason why healthcare costs are out of control, not because my neighbor is on Medicaid, or my cousin or my partner is on Medicaid, that’s not the reason. 

Other aspects of the bill: 

So what do we do? Organize, organize, organize. 

We gotta tell the truth. We’re not here to do partisan politicking. We’re not here to lie to the people about Medicaid cuts and how they’ve been happening and when they started and what this real fight is. 

We’re not here to lie to the people and tell them this is just about mean, greedy, evil people doing mean, greedy, evil stuff. 

We’re going to tell the truth about how we got here. 

We’re going to tell the truth about why healthcare costs are out of control. 

We’re going to tell the truth about people on or excluded from Medicaid. 

We’re going to tell the truth about the need for political independence. 

We’re going to tell the truth about how we must build permanently organized communities. 

And we’re going to tell the truth, that Healthcare is a Human Right!

Fight, fight, fight!!

View the full recording of the statewide call here.