Tax day

Published 12:06 pm Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Editor:

As I write this letter, it’s April 15 or Tax Day. Do you know where your tax refund is? Like a lot of people, mine went missing. According to President Trump, everyone was supposed to have an extra $4,000 because of the recent tax cut. Apparently, it also went missing.

So, who made out? Large corporations for one. Sixty companies such as Amazon, Chevron, Haliburton, IBM, and Dominium Recourses paid zero income taxes in 2018. For Big Pharma it was another windfall. Pfizer saved $2.8B, Johnson & Johnson saved $2.5B and Merck $1.2B in taxes while raising prescription drug prices. Remember these facts when you pay your electric bill or stand in line to pay your outrageous copay to get your meds. Also, the rich got richer. As Trump told his rich country club cronies, “You all just got a lot richer.”

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In a previous letter published in The Farmville Herald on Dec. 12, 2017, I wrote “Even more serious is what is likely to happen if as a result of tax cuts, the deficit shoots up to $1.5 trillion. Does that mean that Republicans will admit they made a mistake and raise taxes on the rich? Guess again. They will use the deficit as an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

So, what has happened? According to the Congressional Budget Office, “In CBO’s projections, the federal budget deficit is about $900 billion in 2019 and exceeds $1 trillion each year beginning in 2022. Over the coming decade, deficits (after adjustments to exclude shifts in the timing of certain payments) fluctuate between 4.1 percent and 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), well above the average over the past 50 years.”

Over the next 10 years, Trump’s 2020 budget proposal aims to spend $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid, $25 billion less on Social Security, and $845 billion less on Medicare. Trump is proposing this despite claiming during his campaign that he wouldn’t touch Social Security or Medicare. So much for “Promises made, promises kept.”

As Dr. Martin Luther King said. “This country has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

James Peca

Farmville