House Republicans’ Budget Plan Gets Poverty All Wrong

House Republicans released a budget proposal that effectively calls fora $4.5 trillion tax cut funded by $1.5 trillion in reduced spending and borrowing the remaining $3 trillion. It should be a challenge to sell a bill that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the least affluent on the heels of a pandemic-era economy that generated unfathomable riches for the former and job losses and steep inflation for the latter.

Yet proponents of the bill say it’s not about spending “cuts” but making programs less vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse — in particular wasting benefits on people not worthy of them. As House Speaker Mike Johnson put it, “You know, work is good for you. You find dignity in work. And the people that are not doing that, we’re going to try to get their attention.”