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Dear Fellow Vermonter,
On July 4th, while Americans should have been celebrating 249 years of our democracy, President Trump signed into law the most dangerous piece of legislation in modern U.S. history. Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” — passed by just one vote in the Senate — is a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the top 1% and a death sentence for tens of thousands of low-income Americans. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, this bill gives $1 trillion in tax breaks to the very rich paid for by slashing health care, nutrition and education for the working class.
Instead of addressing our broken health care system, this deeply immoral legislation throws 17 million Americans off of the health insurance they have and threatens to devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes by making massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The result of these cuts is that many Americans won’t see the doctor when they should and, it is estimated, more than 50,000 will die unnecessarily each year as a result according to researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
But it’s not just health care. At a time when the United States, shamefully, has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth, Republicans who wrote this bill chose to take food out of the mouths of children by wiping out nutrition assistance for over 1 million kids.
As many young people in our country struggle with student debt and others wonder how they will ever be able to afford to go to college, this bill cuts education funding by more than $300 billion, raises student loan payments and makes it much harder for working class kids to get the higher education they need to succeed in life.
Vermont is no stranger to the effects of climate change. Just last week, communities throughout our state felt the devastating effects of more frequent and damaging severe weather on their homes, crops and local infrastructure for the third year in a row. As Vermonters continue to work together to rebuild from these floods and to reverse the effects of climate change, this bill decimates investments in sustainable energy like wind and solar while providing billions in corporate welfare to Big Oil.
The bottom line: at a time when our country faces many serious problems, this bill makes bad situations even worse. This is not what the American people want or need.
During the coming weeks and months there will be a lot of discussion in the Senate as to how we can best address the crises this bill creates. I will keep you informed as to the progress I hope we will be making.
Sincerely,
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