Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal comments on the budget passed this week by House Republicans during an interview Sunday morning with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi:

ALI VELSHI, MSNBC: These numbers that I just mentioned about the tax cuts-how much they could cost and how much funding is going to be cut-these are initial estimates. But in order to get passed by the narrowest margins in the House, they had to do a lot of last-minute deals. They had to make changes, so the estimates could change. But in the end, the thing most people need to take away is there’s a big tax cut that’s being paid for by big cuts to people who can really use that money. REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: That’s exactly right, Ali. And you described it perfectly. It is the largest transfer of wealth from working people and poor people in this country to the tiniest number of millionaires and billionaires. If you are in the top 0.1 of 1% of billionaires in this country, you get almost a $ 400,000 tax break. Whereas if you’re in the bottom 20%, you get 90 bucks. If you’re in the second 20% at the bottom, you get something, you know, a couple hundred dollars more. And why? How did they get to this? They got to it by saying that those tax cuts for the wealthiest are going to be paid for by cutting essential programs like health care. I mean, you and I have had this conversation about health care many times. We already have a broken system in this country where you’ve got too many people-80 million people-who are either uninsured or underinsured. They’re stripping away health care for 14 million Americans. If you add Medicaid and you add what they’re doing to the Affordable Care Act, they are stripping away health care from 14 million Americans. That’s a minimum. We’ll see what the final changes have done to this bill. But on top of that, they’re also taking away nutrition assistance. Now, a lot of people, you know, think about nutrition assistance and don’t understand how little we provide to people, Ali. It’s two bucks a meal. It’s called SNAP-Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. That’s food for the hungry. And it’s all in service to these giant tax breaks. $ 100 billion of tax breaks for a very tiny group of people that are millionaires. Just that alone. So it is just a crazy thing that we’re going to essentially increase the national debt by $ 4 trillion and affect the largest transfer of wealth we’ve ever seen. VELSHI: There are legitimate concerns some people may have about the level of debt or deficit that we’re in. But I just want to be clear on why we’re increasing it by this much money. So when you talk about $ 2 a meal in SNAP-if you gave everybody $ 3 more a month, anybody who’s food insecure-100% of that money will be spent in your economy. If you give somebody at the top end here the $ 400,000 benefit-we’re just not built that way. The people who are that wealthy, their money does not have to be spent on extra milk, extra eggs, extra things that happen in your community. So this is part of the problem: that food assistance or assistance through health care systems that you give to people in need has a multiplier effect in the economy. When you give it to the top group, it’s supposed to trickle down-but we’ve seen countless examples where it simply doesn’t. JAYAPAL: No, it doesn’t. Because they don’t have to spend it. Right? I mean, that’s the basic thing. If you’re a billionaire or a millionaire, you get extra money, you put it back into the market-maybe. You don’t spend it in the economy, you don’t spend it on small businesses. That’s why SNAP, the Child Tax Credit, education, early education-all of those things are big investments that deliver many times over. And it’s why you’re exactly right to point out about the deficit itself not being an issue. The issue is: what do you spend the money on? If you spend the money on things that are going to lift people up, that are going to strengthen the economy, that’s one thing. If you channel it to the wealthiest, it actually-it kind of has a double whammy. Because you’re taking away stuff from the working people to give it to the wealthy. And those people are not going to spend again. So there’s no multiplier effect.
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