(Photo credit, PinalCentral.com. Comments by Unseat Ciscomani Team)
Frequently Asked Questions (which need to be asked all the time) about the Big Lie in Casa Grande on August 5
Q. What was the Big Lie?
A. The Big Lie, resorted to constantly by Republicans running for reelection these days (like Juan Ciscomani for Congress), is to talk about the “Working Families Tax Cuts Act”.
Q. What’s so bad about that?
A. The use of the phrase is a (typical) GOP perversion of the truth. It changes the name of the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by both houses of Congress last year. The OBBB Act (given its ridiculous name to please President Trump, who likes simple shiny things), spends most of its effort on pleasing the wealthy at the expense of the needy. Juan Ciscomani voted for this bill, which could be called the “One Big Billionaires’ Bill”. The bill, in fact, passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, which could have been his.
Q. Didn’t the act help workers?
A. Not nearly as much as it helped the upper class. The Beautiful(?) bill “will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year,” according to the Congressional Budget Office and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.
Meanwhile the act imposed new work and reporting requirements on people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as “food stamps”). Federal funds for SNAP benefits, which help people at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, were slashed by $187 billion over the next 10 years. The savings are supposed to come from eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” in the system (a phrase recklessly thrown around so much by Republicans it should be tattooed on the back of their hands to help them remember it).
Q. But that doesn’t hurt Arizonans, does it?
A. Four hundred forty thousand of our residents have been dropped from the SNAP rolls, mostly due to their inability to prove family size and income, which were easy to do before the OBBB. Yes, there is pain.
Q. What’s next?
A. Medicaid medical insurance recipients will have many of the same hurdles next year when these requirements hit them. By the way, keep your eye on your local hospital, particularly if it’s a small one. Medicaid payments for hospital treatment are often crucial to these institutions’ survival.
Q. But there were working family tax cuts, weren’t there?
A. The bill gave temporary tax cuts on overtime pay and tips. However. a study by the well-respected Tax Foundation found that amounted to $307 in tax savings for the average Pinal County resident. Older residents fared better, but the Tax Foundation doesn’t show us anything like the supposed $7,400 to $10,600 more in take-home pay touted by Ciscomani in his Casa Grande appearance last week with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the Tax Foundation, the average tax cut in Pinal was $2,508. Economists calculating inflation usually don’t look at candidate’s inflated utterances, but maybe they ought to.
Q. What were Ciscomani, Bessent, and Johnson doing in Casa Grande, anyway?
A. Bessent and Johnson were in town for an event to help rescue Ciscomani from a likely defeat in November to opposing candidate JoAnna Mendoza. When the Speaker and the Secretary take time from their national schedules to prop up one of their fellow Republicans, you know he’s in trouble. That’s why we call them “desperate rescuers.” Incidentally, they presented their rescue effort as a recognition of industrial growth in a city that had just suffered 700 manufacturing layoffs, likely in part caused by the repeal of tax credits for electric vehicle buyers that was part of—you guessed it—Ciscomani’s OBBB.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.