Source:   PRESS RELEASE, 4/26/11

The budget passed in the House is based on crackpot economics and represents priorities and values that are all wrong. The Tax Policy Center has found that the budget would raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans while reducing the taxes of the richest Americans by almost a third. Taxes for the richest one percent would be the lowest since 1931, hardly a prosperous time in our history. To pay for those tax cuts for the richest Americans, the budget would slash funding for every program that middle-class families count on.

The budget would end Medicare, giving seniors a coupon to buy insurance from private insurers with no guarantee that the private insurance would cover what Medicare covers. It would open back up the ridiculous “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage that I voted last year to close. It would make seniors pay for preventative care, which will obviously cost much more than it saves.

And by any realistic analysis, the budget still doesn’t balance. The budget assumes that tax cuts for the richest one percent will result in explosive economic growth. That didn’t work in 1931 and it didn’t work with the Bush tax cuts a decade ago, which turned the biggest surpluses in our history into the biggest deficits.

Sincerely,
Brad Miller