THE AFL-CIO has warned of ‘13 Ways the Trump Budget hurts working people’.
It says: ‘There are tons of analyses and numbers that could keep economists busy for days, but the bottom line is President Donald Trump’s budget will have negative effects on the lives of every day Americans.
‘Here are some of the more notable examples of a budget that betrays working people:
1. Jobs
It will kill nearly 2 million jobs by 2020 through huge budget cuts.
2. Tax Cuts
It will waste trillions of dollars on tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthiest 1% and increase the tax incentive for global corporations to send jobs overseas.
3. Medicaid
It will cause millions of people to lose Medicaid coverage because of its $1.6 trillion in cuts to the programme.
4. Social Security
It will cut Social Security’s earned benefits by $64 billion, and some workers will be hit with an average of $7,000 in cuts to their initial disability benefits.
5. Medicare
It will cut $59 billion in Medicare and undermine financing of the Medicare programme.
6. Education
It will devastate public schools, eliminate after-school programmes and much-needed training for teachers, and make it harder for young people to go to college by cutting student loan funding by $143 billion over 10 years.
7. Workers’ Rights
It will threaten workers’ freedoms by decimating the National Labour Relations Board while increasing funding for union audits and undermining workers’ pension plans.
8. Safety and Health for Working People
It will eliminate the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s worker safety and health training programme, gut job safety research, wipe out investigations of chemical accidents, and weaken OSHA’s ability to inspect workplaces, leading to more workers being injured and killed on the job.
9. Training for Working People
It will deny training and employment services for nearly 7.7 million adults, displaced workers, seniors, young people and farm workers.
10. Working Women
It will harm working women, especially working mothers, by cutting funding for Medicaid, food stamps, and child care assistance and eliminating the only federal agency mandated to represent the needs of wage-earning women.
11. Federal Employees
It will cut federal employees’ retirement benefits by $117 billion and cut their pay by 6% by forcing them to pay more toward their retirement.
12. Infrastructure
Despite its proposed $200 billion infrastructure initiative, it will continue to neglect crumbling infrastructure by cutting $206 billion in existing federal infrastructure programmes, including Amtrak, rail, transit, superfund clean-up, public housing repair, water and other programmes.
13. Immigrant Working People
Immigrant workers, who are a positive part of our communities, and unions face attacks because of increases in funding for programmes to arrest, detain and deport them.
The SEIU trade union declared ‘Trump’s budget: A disaster for working families’. It warned: ‘The Trump budget would set us back even further in order to pay for tax cuts for greedy corporations and a deportation force that would unfairly target immigrant communities.
‘Just as with the disastrous House healthcare repeal bill, this budget is a direct attack on the jobs and lives of working people and the nearly one-in-five Americans who count on Medicaid. SEIU healthcare workers care for people in their homes, battling mental illness, in hospitals and in nursing homes. This budget would seriously undermine their work by cutting funds for Medicaid and mental health services.
‘It’s not just our healthcare system that’s affected: Trump’s budget cuts Social Security programmes that help seniors and people with disabilities when they fall on hard times. It underfunds early education programmes, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in cuts aimed at children. The budget also takes away food and housing assistance for vulnerable Americans, and undermines our public education system.
‘SEIU members – healthcare workers, immigrants, public servants and many more – will continue to raise our voices at town halls, in the media, with petitions to Congress, and rallies and protests against Trump’s devastating budget. We will bring that resistance in 2018, 2020 and beyond to any member of Congress who does not reject the mean-spirited proposals in Trump’s budget.’
SEIU Virginia 512 member Becky Wang is a single parent with two sons; one of whom is severely autistic. She had to leave her job as an engineer a few years ago to care for him full time and relies on Medicaid for in-home care, medical treatments, and to pay home care workers in Leesburg.
With the Trump budget proposing such deep cuts to Medicaid, she would be unable to care for her son. The Trump budget takes away healthcare from children, seniors and people with disabilities, decimating Medicaid with cuts of $610 billion over ten years, on top of the $1 trillion Medicaid cut in the House Republican healthcare bill.
She said: ‘My son has autism, so affordable healthcare is very important for our family. If our representative is not working to save affordable healthcare and prevent slashes to Medicaid funding the president is proposing, it is going to be a problem for my family.’
SEIU Local 500 member Dee Dee McCaffrey, an administrative secretary at Diamond Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, is struggling with the explosive cost of college tuition. Trump’s budget puts the dream of higher education out of reach for millions, including dedicated public servants, by stealing $3.9 billion from the Pell Grant reserve fund, and freezes the maximum award so inflation will chip away at the programme’s effectiveness.
It eliminates the $700 million low-interest Perkins loans and begins to eliminate in-school subsidised loans for student borrowers while they’re still in college; shifting $27 billion in costs to students. Trump’s budget proposal also cuts federal work-study programmes by almost half ($490 million), and eliminates the Public Service Loan Forgiveness programme for faculty, social workers and others who dedicate their life to public service.
Dee Dee said: ‘I have been a single parent since 2003, working for the Montgomery County Health Department for five years and Montgomery County Public Schools for the past 13 years. After getting all four of my children through college, I have roughly $88,000 in parent loans. My current loan payments are $745 per month.
‘I’ve timed the ten years of required on-time payments to coincide with my retirement in 2027. I love my job and serving my community but without the Public Service Loan Forgiveness programme, I couldn’t afford a career in public education. I would never be able to retire.
‘Our government needs to honour the commitment made to the parents and students who have so diligently worked to benefit the public. Trump’s proposed budget makes it hard for families like mine to afford a college education for our children. We must continue to honour parents and students who have made a commitment to public service.’
Trump’s budget would eliminate the current 23% reimbursement ‘bump’ authorised by the Affordable Care Act; it would also cap eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Programme at 250% of the federal poverty level (FPL). This would result in cuts for state CHIP programmes, particularly in states that cover children with incomes above 250% FPL. Ana Espindola is a wheelchair attendant at Los Angeles International airport and SEIU shop steward.
She says: ‘If the president took MediCal away, it means my 6- and 9-year-old daughters will go without healthcare for the next year. I’ve been working at my company for only two years and they don’t offer family coverage until we have been there for three years.
‘So I still have another 12 months before we could all be covered under a family plan. If my kids get sick in the next 12 months, that means I would have to pay for all of those costs out of pocket and I don’t see how I could afford anything like that. It’s already hard enough as it is.’
The union declared: ‘SEIU members demand that members of Congress reject the president’s budget proposal. We will continue to stand with all working families to make our voices heard until the value of our work is matched by our wages, all working people have a say at work through a union, and every family and community can thrive.’