RE: The jobs extreme MAGA House Republicans’ are holding hostage in every state
Date: 5/10/2013
From: Deputy Press Secretary and Senior Communications Adviser Andrew Bates
A new report from Moody’s Analytics shows how many jobs would be killed in every state if House Republicans follow through on their threat to single-handedly trigger the only debt default in American history.
That is, unless they are allowed to force a radical agenda that the American people reject into law.
That radical agenda includes the most draconian cuts to veterans services in American history, shipping the manufacturing jobs we are bringing back from overseas to China, firing thousands of Border Patrol agents, taking health care from millions, and laying off teachers across the country. Keep in mind that they still intend to follow those cuts with enormous, wasteful tax giveaways to billionaires and multinational corporations.
In Speaker McCarthy’s home state of California, even a short-term default would kill over 300,000 jobs. And that a prolonged default would kill nearly a million.
President Biden is in New York today, which would lose almost half a million jobs, calling on Republicans to stop their economic hostage-taking.
In addition to threatening to sabotage the American economy and subject countless innocent Americans to financial pain, House Republicans have manufactured a political and credibility crisis for themselves.
House Republicans are more and more isolated in their willingness to trigger a default. As President Biden mentioned last night, Senate Republican leader underlined that the United States cannot ever default.
Last night even Speaker McCarthy himself acknowledged, “A budget is different than a debt ceiling.”
That’s true and consistent with the Speaker’s voting record. He voted, without conditions and on a bipartisan basis, to avoid default for the entire Trump Administration AND for the majority of the Obama presidency.
House Republicans are effectively holding a gun to the head of millions of jobs, small businesses, and retirement savings, while simultaneously shouting at everyone else, ‘don’t pull this trigger.’ Meanwhile, all their constituents look on and see how much it would cost every state. No one’s making you do it. Put the gun down.
State
Job Loss in Prolonged Default Scenario (thousands, peak to trough)
The MAGA Republicans’ extreme bill would cut veterans’ health care, jeopardize public safety, and raise costs for families—even as House Republicans separately push for trillions in tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations. Essentially the Republicans are holding the economy, and millions of families hostage. It comes down to:“Pretty nice economy you got here. Terrible if something bad would happen to it.” This fact sheet is supplied by the White House:
Congressional Republicans are holding the nation’s full faith and credit hostage in an effort to impose devastating cuts that would hurt veterans, raise costs for hardworking families, and hinder economic growth. The Default on America Act would cut veterans’ health care, education, Meals on Wheels, and public safety, take away health care from millions of Americans, and send manufacturing jobs overseas. Outside economists say that if enacted, the Default on America Act would “increase the likelihood” of a recession and result in 780,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2024. And House Republicans are demanding these cuts while separately advancing proposals to add over $3 trillion to deficits through tax cuts and giveaways skewed to the wealthy and big corporations.
Today, the White House released 51 fact sheets highlighting the devastating impacts of the Default on America Act on states and the District of Columbia. Nationally, the Default on America Act would have devastating impacts on the American people. It would:
Jeopardize Transportation Safety and Infrastructure
Cut Nearly 7,500 Rail Safety Inspections. At a time when train derailments are wreaking havoc on community safety, The Default on America Act would lead to nearly 7,500 fewer rail safety inspection days and over 30,000 fewer miles of track inspected annually—enough track to cross the United States nearly 10 times. Since the Norfolk Southern train derailment, bipartisan Senators have called for more rail inspections, not fewer.
Jeopardize Air Safety by Shutting Down at Least 375 Air Traffic Control Towers. The Default on America Act would shut down services at 375 federally-staffed and contract Air Traffic Control Towers across the country—undermining safety at two thirds of all U.S. airports—and increase wait times at TSA security check points by over 2 hours at large airports across the country.
Withhold Vital Transportation Infrastructure Funding. Under the Default on America Act, the United States would stand to lose nearly $5.2 billion in funding for transit and highway infrastructure projects all across the country.
Raise Costs for Families
Eliminate Preschool and Child Care Slots. The Default on America Act would mean 200,000 children lose access to Head Start slots and 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.
Strip Nutrition Assistance from Women and Children. The Default on America Act would also 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), increasing child poverty and hunger.
Raise Housing Costs for Americans. Under the Default on America Act, more than 600,000 families would lose access to rental assistance, including older adults, persons with disabilities, and families with children, who without rental assistance would be at risk of homelessness.
Harm Seniors, Older People, and Veterans
Threaten Medical Care for Veterans. The House Republicans’ Default on America Act would mean 30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits, and 81,000 jobs lost across the Veterans Health Administration, leaving veterans unable to get appointments for care including wellness visits, cancer screenings, mental health services, and substance use disorder treatment.
Worsen Social Security and Medicare Assistance Wait Times for Seniors. Under the House Republicans’ Default on America Act, people applying for disability benefits would have to wait at least two months longer for a decision. With fewer staff available, seniors would also be forced to endure longer wait times when they call for assistance for both Social Security and Medicare, and as many as 240 Social Security field offices could be forced to close or shorten the hours they are open to the public.
Jeopardize Food Assistance for Older Adults. House Republicans are threatening food assistance for up to 900,000 older adults with the Default on America Act’s harsh new eligibility restrictions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Jeopardize Health Coverage and Access to Care
Jeopardize Health Coverage and Access to Care for Americans. The Default on America Act would put health insurance coverage—and health—at risk for 21 million Americans. Only one state has ever fully implemented similar policies, and nearly 1 in 4 adults subject to the policy lost their health coverage—including working people and people with serious health conditions—with no evidence of increased employment.
Deny Americans Access to Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder. The Default on America Act would deny access to opioid use disorder treatment for more than 28,000 people through the State Opioid Response grant program—denying them a potentially life-saving path to recovery.
Hurt Children and Students and Undermine Education and Job Training
Gut Funding for Low-Income Students. The Default on America Act would cut approximately $4 billion in funding for schools serving low-income children—equivalent to removing more than 60,000 teachers and specialized instructional support personnel from classrooms, impacting an estimated 26 million students.
Reduce Support for Students with Disabilities. Under the Default on America Act, as many as 7.5 million children with disabilities would face reduced supports—a cut equivalent to removing more than 48,000 teachers and related services providers from the classroom.
Slash Mental Health Support for Students. The Default on America Act would limit educators’ abilities to address student mental health issues and prevent suicide and drug use by cutting funding dedicated to creating healthy learning environments in schools by about $300 million.
Eliminate Student Debt Relief. The Default on America Act would eliminate the President’s one-time student debt relief plan, denying much needed emergency student loan relief of up to $20,000 for more than 40 million Americans recovering from the effects of the pandemic. It would also block the creation of new, more affordable student loan repayment plans such as the President’s proposal to cut undergraduate loans payments in half.
Make College More Expensive. The Default on America Act would reduce the maximum award for Pell Grants by nearly $1,000, likely eliminating it altogether for 80,000 students while making it harder for the remaining 6.6 million recipients to attend and afford college.
Cut Off Access to Workforce Development Services. The Default on America Act would result in nearly 700,000 fewer workers receiving job training and employment services provided through the Department of Labor’s workforce development funding. These harmful cuts would deprive businesses of the skilled workforce they need to thrive, and would cut off worker pathways to good jobs.
This analysis assumes an across-the-board reduction of roughly 22% compared to currently enacted FY 2023 levels for non-defense discretionary accounts. That aligns with Congressional Republicans’ Default on America Act, which would return discretionary spending to FY 2022 levels on an ongoing basis while exempting defense spending.
Think about why Republicans would have as their singular policy to destroy the United States economy – threaten, even actually refuse to raise the debt ceiling which will destroy the nation’s “full faith and credit”, unleash higher interest rates (cost), inflict untold pain and suffering on working people and derail the American Dream for countless millions, while coddling the richest 1% by going after the IRS and law enforcement. It’s not just to secure campaign funding and show their obeisance to their masters: they think that if they destroy the economy, unleash suffering, and, if more than two decades of history are the example, that the masses will blame Joe Biden and the Democrats (after all, they control the White house and Senate), so they will win the 2024 elections.
Republicans used fraud to win the midterms and take over the House, pretending they cared about inflation and crime, when in just these first days of their rule, their first acts have been to further erode civil rights, especially women’s reproductive rights, raise costs, worsen the national debt, harm public safety. After all, you don’t hear any Republican crow about how gas prices have fallen to pre-Putin levels and inflation rates have fallen to lowest level since March 2020, meanwhile, Speaker McCarthy put insurrectionists including Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Homeland Security Committee and fraudster George Santos on the Small Business Committee and Space, Science, and Technology, and kicked Adam Schiff off Intelligence And so much worse is to come. Just how destructive is the Republican economic agenda? If the debt ceiling is not raised and the nation’s credit rating falls, interest rates will rise, the cost of everything will go up, people will lose jobs, houses, and there will be less tax revenue flowing into the government, more money flowing out, and the national debt will only get worse. The White House issued this memo:–Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
House Republican MAGA Economic Plan: Raise Taxes and Increase Costs for the Middle Class, Protect Rich Tax Cheats, and Cut Social Security & Medicare
House Republicans had a busy first week in the majority. Under President Biden’s leadership and economic plan, we just finished the best two years of job growth on record, inflation has been coming down for six straight months, gas prices are down around $1.70 from their summer peak, and President Biden’s plan to lower prescription drug costs and energy costs is going into effect.
House Republicans have a very different economic plan: make inflation worse, protect rich tax cheats, increase the deficit, raise taxes on middle-class families, and cut Social Security and Medicare. In their first week, they wasted no time in moving forward on these priorities:
Increasing Gas Prices: The new House Republican majority has proposed and will soon consider a bill that would raise gas prices and deprive Americans of relief at the pump when supply is most needed by restricting the ability to release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. After global oil prices skyrocketed because of Putin’s invasion, the President successfully used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022 to expand supply that helped lower gas prices for families here at home – while laying the groundwork to refill at a profit to taxpayers in the future. But House Republicans want to tie Presidents’ hands and hamstring one of the best supply tools we have to protect Americans from disruptions that spike gas prices.
Protecting Rich Tax Cheats:: Working people pay 99% of the taxes they owe, while the top 1 percent hides about 20% of their income from tax, including by funneling it through offshore accounts in tax havens that don’t report earnings. The President and Congressional Democrats passed legislation to make the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, including by preventing them from cheating on the taxes they already owe.
For their very first bill, House Republicans voted last week to repeal that provision and let some super-wealthy people pay less in taxes than many hard-working Americans – including through outright tax fraud.
In addition to protecting rich tax cheats, the bill adds to the deficit. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it increases the deficit by nearly $115 billion by enabling wealthy tax cheats to engage in additional tax fraud and avoidance. And for ordinary middle-class people who follow the law, it would mean longer waits for tax refunds. Lose-lose for working families.
Raising Taxes on the Middle-Class and Cutting Taxes on the Richest Americans with a New National Sales Tax: According to public reporting, Speaker McCarthy has agreed to bring to the floor a bill that would repeal most existing taxes and impose a new 23% national sales tax on American families. The bill would cover almost all goods and services purchases – from groceries and gas to food and medicine.
Non-partisanexperts across the ideologicalspectrum agree this proposal would raise taxes for middle-class Americans and slash them for the wealthy, while President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department analyzed a similar proposal and found it would raise taxes by thousands of dollars each year for typical middle-class families; the burden would likely be especially great for seniors and families with children. Meanwhile, people earning millions of dollars a year would see tax cuts of $100,000 or more.
Cutting Social Security and Medicare: President Biden has made clear that Congress must deal with the debt limit and they must do so without conditions. But Congressional Republicans continue to threaten to hold the nation’s full faith and credit hostage to their demands for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cuts, and cuts to the part of the budget that funds scientific and medical research, education, consumer protection, and other basic services – even as business leaders, economists, and other experts continue to warn about the costs of their brinksmanship for the U.S. economy.
Meanwhile, militant Republicans like Rep. Andy Biggs are calling for the U.S. to default on its debt obligations (spending that has already been approved by Congress and spent), by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. But rather than cut spending, it would mean chaos, collapse, and catastrophe for the U.S. and a windfall for China, and at the same time RAISE costs and the national debt because interest rates would skyrocket, 6 million would lose their jobs, requiring more unemployment and social services.
Rep. Andy Biggs says outright, “We cannot raise the debt ceiling. Democrats have carelessly spent our taxpayer money and devalued our currency. They’ve made their bed, so they must lie in it.”
This is a stunning and unacceptable position that would lead to economic chaos, collapse, and catastrophe. And in so doing it would give our competitors, like China, an historic leg up in overtaking the American economy.
In line with every major outlet, CNN warned yesterday that failing to lift the debt ceiling would “tank the financial markets, suspend Social Security payments to senior citizens, hurt the economy and cause other chaos.”
Leading congressional Republicans have themselves admitted in the past that default would trigger an economic collapse, killing millions of jobs and decimating 401k plans. That’s why they voted to raise the debt ceiling without brinkmanship 3 times during the Trump Administration – with strong bipartisan support from their Democratic colleagues.
But hardline MAGA Republicans are now advocating for this outcome. This is despite President Biden having achieved unprecedented deficit reduction and despite House Republicans’ supports for tax giveaways to the rich that put trillions on the nation’s credit card.
Other congressional Republicans intend to use the debt limit to force an economic meltdown unless they can cut Medicare and Social Security, directly against the will of a bipartisan majority of the country.
“Rep. Biggs is dead wrong to actively support the ruin of millions of American livelihoods, 401k plans, and small businesses, all in the name of scorched earth partisanship,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates. “Default would needlessly plunge the country into economic chaos, collapse, and catastrophe while giving our competitors like China an historic boost against us. That’s why congressional Republicans – with strong bipartisan support from Democrats – avoided default 3 times under Donald Trump, without conditions or playing chicken with our credit rating. This president and the American people will not stand for unprecedented economic vandalism. Full stop.”
Be reminded: Trump added $7.4 TRILLION to the national debt in just 4 years – that 25% (one-fourth) of the total debt of nearly 250 years. Much of that was before pandemic, largely caused by the $2 trillion giveaway to the wealthiest and to the biggest corporations. 50 corporations, with a combined $50 billion in profit paid zero tax. It’s estimated that the wealthiest hide 20 percent of their taxable wealth.
