Cornyn Looks To Put Medicare and Social Security On The Chopping Block As His Corporate Tax Giveaway Sends Deficit Surging

Amid news that the federal deficit last month surged 42 percent since last year, due in part to Senator John Cornyn’s tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, Senator Cornyn said this week that “the place to save money … [is] in the entitlement programs,” like Medicare and Social Security.

Undermining Americans’ earned benefits has long been a top priority for Cornyn. He’s voted twice to turn Medicare into a voucher system, which would end the program as we know it, and pushed to privatize Social Security. And while new reports show that thanks to Cornyn’s reckless tax handout, “wealthy people and corporations have so much money they literally don’t know what to do with it,” the law also “trimmed a year of solvency from the primary Medicare trust fund and had a negative effect on the Social Security trust fund.”

Read more about Cornyn’s plan to target earned benefits as his toxic tax law balloons the deficit:

POLITICO: Trump budget negotiators get Republican brushback

By Burgess Everett, Nancy Cook, and John Bresnahan

Key Points:

• “I don’t see the leader as negotiating with OMB or the chief of staff. The leader doesn’t negotiate with staff,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of McConnell’s closest allies, said dismissively.

• As to Mulvaney and Vought’s approach: “We do need to cut spending. But cutting discretionary spending, especially defense spending, is not the place to save money … it’s in the entitlement programs.”

Washington Post: GOP leader concedes tax cuts may not pay for themselves as 2019 deficit grows

By Heather Long

Key Points:

• Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), a lead architect of the GOP tax bill, suggested Tuesday the tax cuts may not fully pay for themselves, contradicting a promise Republicans made repeatedly while pushing the law in late 2017.

• The federal government’s deficit typically shrinks during strong economic times, but the deficit is up nearly 40 percent so far this fiscal year, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office report released Friday.

• “Revenue fell, it didn’t rise, after the tax cuts,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Hill: May deficit surges to $208 billion, 42% higher than last year

By Niv Elis

Key Points:

• Treasury estimates that the full deficit will exceed $1 trillion by the time the fiscal year wraps up at the end of September.

• The deficit’s precipitous rise follows the 2017 GOP tax act, which the Congressional Budget Office projected would add some $1.9 trillion to the debt over a decade, as well as bipartisan plans to increase spending on both the defense and domestic sides of the ledger.

Axios: Too much money (and too few places to invest it)

By Dion Rabouin

Key Points:

• …the top 1% of earners and big companies are holding record levels of unused cash.

• The IMF notes large companies around the world are overwhelmingly and uniformly choosing not to reinvest much of it into their businesses. They’re hoarding it in cash and buying back stock.

• ….the Trump tax cut…slash[ed] the share of U.S. taxes that companies paid to its lowest level in at least half a century and provided companies even more capital for buybacks, dividends and executive compensation.

• The end result is money that would previously have been split between businesses, workers and the government for projects like schools, health care and infrastructure is instead sitting in corporate accounts earning little to no return.

Yahoo Finance: American taxpayers paid over $90 billion more under Trump tax law

By Kristin Myers

Key Points:

• More than halfway through 2018, after the law took effect, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned that more Americans would owe money to the IRS under the new law while those receiving refunds would decrease.

• …as people filed, many bemoaned getting smaller-than-anticipated refunds or even being hit with a “surprise” tax bill.

• Last year, big businesses paid $91 billion less in taxes than they had in 2017, prior to the new law’s passage.

• The center noted: “The lowest income households (those making less than about $25,000) got an average tax cut of about $40…Those in the top 1%, who made $733,000 or more, got an average tax cut of about $33,000.”

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