To the editor:
The House budget reconciliation bill, also known as “One Big Beautiful Bill,” recently passed by one vote. It is a disturbing and morally reprehensible bill which transfers wealth to billionaires at the expense of the most needy. While millionaires will get an average tax cut of $100,000 a year under this plan, families earning under $200,000 will, over time, pay more in taxes or get no tax cut at all. At a time of already increasing costs, this bill will decrease the availability of social safety nets, making them more limited and more difficult to access, causing millions of people to suffer the consequences, whether it be increased food insecurity, inability to afford rent, or decreased access to health insurance and healthcare.
Under the bill, the average family earning less than $50,000 would get less than $300 in tax cuts in 2027, less than $1 a day, while the average tax filer earning $1 million or more a year would receive about $90,000 in tax breaks. And this bill will take away the Child Tax Credit (CTC) from millions of U.S. citizen children in immigrant families. According to Children’s Health Watch, nearly 20 million of the poorest kids will be prevented from receiving full benefits of the CTC. Currently, 17 million—one in four—kids are excluded from the full $2,000 CTC because their family income is too low. The poorest children receive the very least. And 650,000 children of working veterans will receive no increased credit from this bill.
House Republicans have falsely asserted that they were restricting access to the safety net programs from undocumented immigrants—a group that did not qualify for these benefits anyway. Instead, immigrants who are lawfully here will now see their food assistance, Medicare benefits they have paid into, and affordable health marketplace coverage terminated. Additionally, the new proposal for the CTC strips the credit’s eligibility for 4.5 million American children who currently are eligible for the credit, just because their parents are immigrants. The poverty rate among U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families is 31.5 percent—more than three times that of citizen children in households where all members are citizens according to Children’s Health Watch.
Nearly 9 million people will lose their health coverage, and this number will increase to 15 million by 2034. Millions will see their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits cut or disappear altogether, as the bill will slash over $300 billion from SNAP while shifting costs to already overburdened state and local governments. But the harshest cuts will be those directed at immigrants and their families.
SNAP and WIC programs would be more difficult to access due to increased work requirements along with increasingly frequent recertifications—every six months rather than annually. Enough barriers and challenges will be created such that many who might otherwise qualify might lose coverage for failure to meet deadlines. These changes will have severe repercussions not only for families but for retailers and farmers as well.
In the Bay State, this bill will cause intense pain for hundreds of thousands of residents. You can peruse the numbers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities here.
This “beautiful” bill has built in many restrictions to our already limited social safety net. It is unnecessarily cruel and amoral. And it will cause so very many to suffer. It needs to be prevented from passing in the Senate.
I thank U.S. Rep. Richard Neal (D – Massachusetts 1st Congressional District) and Sens. Ed Markey (D – Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D – Mass.) for their efforts to stop this bill. I encourage you to speak out. Please ask friends with Republican senators to call and write those senators now, urging them to oppose this cruel legislation.
Leslye Heilig, M.D.
Great Barrington
Click here to read The Berkshire Edge’s policy for submitting Letters to the Editor.
