Rep. Velasquez with constituents
With regard to President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2018 Budget.
In sum, this budget constitutes a mean spirited, unconscionable attack on working families, seniors and children.
To shift generous tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires and large corporations, the President would slash programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Meals on Wheels and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.
These are initiatives relied on by seniors and by hard working, low-income New Yorkers. SNAP provides nutritional assistance to 1.8 million families, the elderly and the disabled in New York. Yet this Administration takes aim at this initiative, suggesting slashing it by $193 billion – more than 25 percent – over the next decade. In order to give bigger tax breaks to his billionaire buddies, President Trump is literally willing to take food from the mouths of babies.
This plan would also hollow out the Community Development Block Grant initiative, which funds ‘Meals on Wheels’ and is critical to many of our communities. Everything from education to job training to housing to our environment to school lunches for children would suffer if this budget were implemented. Medicaid would lose over $800 billion over ten years, depriving families of needed healthcare.
It’s a sad irony that many of the Americans who would be most devastated include those living in states and counties that voted overwhelmingly for the President.
Thankfully, these cuts stand little chance of being enacted as put forth, but they make starkly clear the President’s wrongheaded priorities. Democrats stood united, arm-in-arm during negotiations on the last Fiscal Year spending measure. The result was that we protected critical programs for families, kids and seniors.
With this budget, the President has signaled his intent to harm our nation. As Democrats, we’ll simply have to fight harder to resist these immoral proposals. And, that’s exactly what we’ll do.
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez represents the 7th District of New York
