Golden votes against reckless, deficit-funded GOP budget resolution

WASHINGTON — Congressman Jared Golden (ME-02) voted today against the Senate Amendment to H. Con. Res. 14 — a compromise budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2025. 

“You can’t build a good house with rotten wood. This compromise combines the House GOP’s plan to cut health care to pay for millionaires’ tax cuts with a Senate GOP plan to explode the deficit and enshrine accounting gimmicks that set a new low for fiscal instability. I see no way that combining these two bad plans will somehow yield a good one through the reconciliation process,” Golden said. 

“There’s a better way forward: Congress could target tax cuts to working families, paid for by allowing the expiration of tax cuts for the very wealthy. We don’t need to take away anyone’s health care or pass trillions in new deficit spending to pass a budget that puts the middle class first,” Golden said.

The proposal on the floor today was a Senate amendment to the GOP budget resolution adopted by the House in February. As amended, the plan:

• allows for roughly $5.3 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts, including $3.8 trillion to extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which disproportionately benefitted the wealthy;
• uses an accounting gimmick known as the “current policy baseline” to artificially reduce the legislation’s price tag;
• instructions for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in spending — a target that will be impossible to reach without hundreds of billions in Medicaid cuts, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
• a $5 trillion debt limit increase; and
• more than $7 trillion in new debt, in total, over the next decade. 

The elements of the House-Senate compromise budget resolution are stacked against working families: Roughly half the benefit of extending the full 2017 tax package would go to households with annual income over $450,000. The Treasury Department found that the plan would give an average annual tax break of more than $32,000 for those in the top 1 percent, while working families will only get a few hundred dollars in tax cuts per year.

Cuts to Medicaid would hurt families in the 2nd Congressional District. Medicaid provides health coverage to 236,000 people in CD2 — more than one-third of the population — according to KFF.

The national debt is currently roughly $29 trillion. Interest on the debt costs the federal government more every year than on national defense or Medicare. It is second only to Social Security as an annual line item in the federal budget.

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