Big Money Politicians Trump & Clinton

In 2016, Trump ran on raising taxes on the rich “so much my friends will hate me.”  Once he got in power, he did the exact opposite.

In 2017 Trump and the Republicans spent $1.9 TRILLION to give mostly billionaires and corporations tax cuts and tried to SCREW sick and disabled children at the SAME TIME.

  • Republicans claimed there was just no money and refused to continue funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for 9 million disabled and sick children’s health care, including kids with cancer!
  • In this tax cut, Republicans spent $5 BILLION MORE than the cost of CHIP ending all inheritance taxes for far more wealthy estates.
  • Previously, estates worth 11 million paid no inheritance tax. Now estates worth $23.4 million pay no inheritance tax.
  • Democrats had to use a government shutdown to force CHIP funding for 6 more years.

Trump’s 2017 tax cuts did nothing for our economy.  If we had put the $1.9 trillion to better use, we could have done all these things and more:

  • eliminated child poverty
  • given everyone affordable child care and pre-K
  • given every teacher in high-poverty schools a $10,000 per year raise
  • given everyone free college

During Trump’s first term as president, he:

 

  • cut health, kicking 3 million people off of their health insurance.
  • cut regulations, so after years of steady decline, 22,000 more people died from environmental and workplace hazards each year.
  • imposed tariffs costing over 300,000 jobs and $316 billion in higher prices.
  • eliminated overtime pay for 8 million workers.
  • made it easier for companies steal worker’s wages and still get federal contracts.
  • made it easier for companies to hide workers’ injuries.
  • made it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors and deny benefits and overtime.
  • made it easier for companies to steal as much as $640 billion in employee’s tips.
  • made it easier for companies to prevent workers from joining unions.

 

In Trump’s first term, he:

 

  • put superrich financial predators and illegal “Foreclosure Kings” Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross in charge of the Treasury and Commerce Departments.
  • filled his administration with corporate executives and 281 lobbyists. Many of them hated and wanted to destroy the federal agencies they ran.

 

Trump’s second presidency is even worse.  Now his Cabinet and administration has:

 

  • 12 billionaires
  • 4 multimillionaires
  • 47 lobbyists or businessmen with major conflicts of interest
  • 23 Fox News hosts and contributors

 

Trump’s 2025 Big Beautiful Bill should be called his Big Evil Bill:

 

  • It adds even more massive tax cuts for the superrich.
  • It will kill over 51,000 people every year.
  • It will kick 16 million people off of health insurance.
  • If you have health insurance from work, it will bring the biggest increase in costs in 15 years.
  • If you buy health insurance from the government marketplace, premiums and out-of-pocket costs will double.
  • It brings the biggest cuts to Medicaid ever, 4 times as big as the previous biggest.
  • It delivers the biggest cuts ever to food aid.
  • It will cause hundreds of rural hospitals to close.  Some already have in Virginia, Georgia and Nebraska.
  • It will force the layoffs of health care workers.
  • It will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to.2034.
  • It delays new rules for minimum staffing at nursing homes for 10 years, which will cause 13,000 deaths each year.
  • It will eliminate jobs, cut state budgets, and make electricity, gasoline, mortgages, student loan payments, and small business loans more expensive.

 

In his second term, Trump has also already

 

  • shut down the federal database for abusive police.
  • eliminated 245 toxic chemical, water, air, health, food, transportation, and worker safety regulations.
  • destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau protecting people from financial predators cheating them.

 

And Trump has already made massive cuts to:

 

  • hospitals and nursing homes
  • Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster assistance
  • housing aid
  • elementary and high school education
  • health, including doctors and researchers for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, birth mothers dying, brain tumors, mental health, etc.
  • food, water, and worker safety
  • daycare, counseling, and disability services for children
  • school meals and safety
  • healthy foods in schools
  • child support payment enforcement
  • investigation of child sexual abuse and missing children
  • child protective services
  • Head Start
  • aviation traffic control and safety
  • electric grid workers
  • making electricity cheaper
  • domestic terrorism and school shooting prevention
  • cybersecurity for our power grid, pipelines, telecommunications, and voting
  • nuclear safety
  • preventing youth violence
  • disability services for children

 

Now hunger is increasing in America.  Food banks are seeing growing lines.  Over half of people nationwide report running out of food in the last year.  Nearly 1/3 ran out of food in the last month.  Half said they had to delay rent, utility bills, or health expenses to afford food.  Trump’s response is to stop measuring hunger in America!

 

Meanwhile, because of Trump’s tax cuts in his first term, now extended again by Republicans, massive health care companies like CVS Healthcare, Aetna, Centene, Cigna, and Humana have seen their profits rise 75%and dodged over $34 billion in taxes, so their executive pay and stockholders’ dividends have skyrocketed.

 

Bill Clinton was the first major Big Money Democrat to copy Republicans and use policies hurting regular Americans to hop on the gravy train of massive campaign contributions from greedy billionaires.

 

  • He vowed to “end welfare as we know it” and declared “the era of big government is over.”
  • He cut welfare by $55 billion, set a lifetime limit of 5 years on benefits, required everyone receiving benefits to start working after 2 years, and changed it from a federal program to state-controlled block grants.
  • This was a disaster. States diverted much of the money to other purposes.
  • With no adjustment for inflation, the block grants have lost 40% of their value.
  • Before Clinton’s reform, welfare covered 68% of families in poverty. Now it only covers 21% of them.
  • Before Clinton’s reform, from the Great Depression in the 1930s until the 1990s, welfare spent almost all its money on poor people.
  • Now 15 states spend less than 10% of the money on basic assistance to poor families with children.

 

Now only 22% of welfare money goes to basic assistance for poor families with children.  States often use the money for:

 

  • promoting work or marriage
  • preventing pregnancy
  • abstinence-only sex education
  • pre-K and Head Start
  • after-school programs
  • mental health
  • domestic violence
  • tax credits
  • college financial aid or scholarships
  • childcare subsidies.
  • some states use it for Christian summer camps!

 

Now welfare money often doesn’t even help the poor!

 

  • Some states spend the federal welfare money on college financial aid or scholarships for families making 3 or 3 ½ times the poverty cutoff.
  • Nearly 1/3 of states spend welfare money on childcare subsidies for families making over twice the poverty cutoff.
  • Giving states control led to the scandal when Mississippi paid over $1 million of welfare funds to quarterback Brett Favre for speeches he never gave.

 

At least 10 states divert tens of millions of dollars of welfare funds to dubious anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers that:

 

  • pressure and deceive desperate women
  • often lie to make abortion sound dangerous
  • rarely provide any prenatal or medical care besides unnecessary ultrasounds and perhaps testing for sexually transmitted diseases
  • may pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries to their CEOs
  • may even move the welfare money to their centers in other states
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