On MSNBC, Steve Rattner highlights Project 2025's potentially devastating economic consequences
Rattner: Project 2025 pushes “an extraordinary shift in the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward the less wealthy”
Published
Citation
From the July 23, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe
STEVE RATTNER (MSNBC ECONOMIC ANALYST): Look, taxes are obviously perhaps issue number one on the minds of many Americans, and Project '25 is very clear about what it wants to do. It essentially wants to restructure our tax system into only two tax brackets, 15% for lowest earning, less than the Social Security maximum, which is, I think, about $166,000 a year, and 30% for those earning above. But that would radically change how much different Americans pay.
It would actually increase the amount that people making less than $150,000, less than that cutoff, pay, $1,000, $2,000, $2,500. They would pay more taxes, but people above, the wealthy, would pay dramatically less taxes. If you earn $400,000 a year, you would get a tax cut of about $14,000. So an extraordinary shift in the tax burden away from the wealthy and toward the less wealthy.
...
JOE SCARBOROUGH: (CO-HOST): This Project 2025 thing actually is going to increase the burden on people with student loans, right?
RATTNER: Yeah, so Joe Biden did make a bunch of proposals. Some of them got litigated and overturned. But then he found other ways, which I'm going to talk about in a second, to address the student loan burden. But what Project 2025 would do essentially would be to eliminate all of what the Biden administration did to cut the burden of student loans. And you can see here, this is broken down by education, all the way from some college but no degree to master's program.
And so in terms of the monthly student loan payments, for the people at the bottom, their monthly average student payments would go from $78 to $308. So a huge increase for those with very little college, people who don't probably have great jobs and for whom this is a big burden. And then smaller increases but still substantial all the way up to people who have master's degrees. So completely wiping out everything the Biden administration has done for the last three and a half years.
...
SCARBOROUGH: And Donald Trump, I mean, if he really does embrace 2025 like he said in the past, he's going to support more massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
RATTNER: You're right Joe. Medicaid, I think there's something like 90,000,000 people on Medicaid in America, 38,000,000 children. So you're right. It is not just some urban program for a few poor people. And what Project 2025 wants to do is put limits on how long you can stay on Medicaid, effectively kick people off Medicaid, put in work requirements, put in a whole number of restrictions that would dramatically change the number of people who are on Medicaid.
...
But it's also a question politically of whether this is really a great idea for the Republicans to embrace, because Medicaid is actually extraordinarily popular. Not surprisingly, it's supported by 90% of Democrats versus only 8% who have an unfavorable view of it. But even among Republicans, 65% of Republicans think favorably about Medicaid, and only 32% think unfavorably about Medicaid. So it's terrible policy. It also may be terrible politics for the Republicans to embrace proposals like this.