Tax plan overlooks rural residents
The Trump administration’s “tax reform” proposal, which is now moving forward in Congress, will give away massive tax breaks to wealthy individuals and special interests at the expense of working families and rural communities across America. This plan fails to offer rural communities like Silver City and Deming the solutions they need and is a missed opportunity at a time when our nation faces significant economic challenges.
Many communities in New Mexico still have not recovered from the Great Recession. Wage growth remains stalled while costs of health care, college, and child care continue to climb. We should be focusing on improving our communities, growing the economy, and driving up wages for working families. Unfortunately, the Republican tax plan does nothing to address these goals.
In the Republican legislation that passed the Senate, more than 60 percent of tax cuts will go to the wealthiest 1 percent by 2027. These folks don’t need the extra help.
The Republican plan has its priorities backwards. It focuses on the top and assures everyone else that benefits will trickle down to them. But the reality is that nearly 28 million working families across the country will face a tax increase within 10 years. And in New Mexico, more than 200,000 families with earnings under $74,000 will see their taxes go up. It would take the typical household in New Mexico nearly four years of work just to match the giveaway being provided to a single wealthy person under this tax plan.
Their plan also leads to much higher deficits, increasing the national debt by $1.4 trillion over 10 years. This leaves fewer dollars for vital investments in schools, roads, and research that we need to prepare our country to compete.
To pay for some of the proposed tax breaks, Republicans propose to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and more than $470 billion from Medicare. How do we know this? Because Republicans spelled it out in the budget they passed this fall. Rural communities, whose populations are older with higher rates of chronic disease, would be hit especially hard. Cutting Medicaid could lead to hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans losing their health coverage, jeopardize the progress we have made fighting the opioid epidemic, and even force many rural hospitals to close.
Instead of giving tax breaks to special interests, we should be investing in what we know actually increases wages and accelerates economic growth. Rural communities need targeted actions to address specific challenges. We need to connect rural New Mexicans to high-speed internet, help small business owners get the loans they need to launch and expand their businesses, and ensure families can afford a college education and access quality health care coverage no matter where they live. We also need to focus on programs that are proven to reduce poverty and incentivize hard work, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which effectively raise incomes for working families.
I’m all for simplifying the tax code, but we can’t do it at the expense of New Mexico’s rural communities. We shouldn’t deliver tax breaks to special interest groups when working families are struggling to make ends meet, don’t have high-speed internet and, in many cases, haven’t gotten a raise in years. I will continue to do everything in my power to stop this reckless plan and fight for bipartisan, pragmatic solutions to build a bright future for New Mexico and our nation.
