Tax Cuts Push Deficit As Trump Admin Attacks Medicare, Single Payer

FEATURING JOSH HOXIE – Seema Verma, the Trump Administration’s Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in a speech in California on Wednesday warned of problems facing the government’s popular Medicare and Medicaid programs. Medicare turns 53 years old later this month. Verma also took aim at the Affordable Care Act, and, when asked about the increasingly popular notion of expanding Medicare to all Americans, slammed the idea. She later followed up her speech with a Tweet claiming that Medicare-for-All would result in Medicare-for-None.

Meanwhile, new data has found that the federal deficit has increased dramatically, far faster than economists were predicting. The increase is clearly linked to the reduction in corporate taxes into the treasury as a result of the Trump and GOP-tax reform bill passed last year.

Trump had asserted that the tax cut would pay for itself but the numbers from the Office of Management and Budget show that the tax cut will result in an additional trillion dollars in debt over the next decade. Republicans are chomping at the bit to use the deficit to claim cuts to services like Medicare.

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Josh Hoxie, heads the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies.