Trump tries to slash $1.6 trillion from low-income Americans. Biden restores funding
- On This Day In The Trump Administration
- Mar 9, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2024
March 9
On This Day In 2020
Like Robin Hood’s alter ego, Trump proposed robbing the poor to enrich the wealthy. His FY2021 budget called for extending his 2017 tax cuts—which primarily benefited the highest earners—while pruning $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Other elements included:
Cutting food stamp spending by $181 billion over a decade.
Slashing federal housing assistance.
Cutting education spending by 8%.
Cutting funding for the DHSS (the agency responsible for dealing with Covid) by over 20%.
Cutting an additional $360 billion from other programs which help low- and moderate-income people make ends meet.
This revealed Trump’s intense desire to punish the neediest. OTDI 2020, the nonpartisan @CenterOnBudget concluded that nearly 60% of Trump’s cuts were to programs that help low-income families—even though these programs comprised only 25% of mandatory federal spending.
The opposite is true of Joe Biden: As The New York Times describes Biden’s plan: “To Juice the Economy, Biden Bets on the Poor.…Mr. Biden’s bottom-up $1.9 trillion aid package is a sharp reversal from the tax cut bill that was President Donald J. Trump’s first big legislative victory.”
Sources/Links for further reading
Read the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Report
The New York Times also covers the proposal
Summary: Trump's budget slashes 1.6 trillion from programs for low-income Americans