All but one of New Jersey’s 14 members of Congress – including 4 of the state’s 5 Republican House members – voted against the bill. Congressman Tom MacArthur was the lone “yes” vote.
The fact that nearly all of New Jersey’s members of Congress had the clarity to see this GOP tax bill for what it is – an attack on New Jersey working families – is the tiny silver lining in an incredibly dark cloud for America’s future.
This tax bill is an expensive gift to the wealthy and to corporate America, wrapped up in the guise of “tax reform.” And Congressional Republican leaders are already calling for spending cuts next year that will threaten working families – and they’re using high deficits, which their tax bill will make worse, as the rationale.
The tax bill, once fully phased in, will disproportionately harm middle-class and lower-income New Jerseyans while rewarding the state’s wealthiest households, according to a fact sheet we released yesterday.
- New Jersey households with incomes over $1.4 million (the top 1 percent) would receive an average $8,470 tax cut while the bulk of Garden State families (the bottom 60 percent, or those with incomes under $111,000) would see a tax hike averaging $110.
- Those families in the top 1 percent would receive 63 percent of the state’s share of the tax cut – $384.1 million in total – while the bottom 60 percent would, together, receive less than 0 percent of the tax cut, since they’d pay a total of $331 million more in taxes.
- About 1 in 4 New Jersey taxpayers (26 percent) would see a tax hike.
But these direct impacts from the bill aren’t even the worst of it. In fact, the tax bill is step one of Congressional Republicans’ two-step tax and budget agenda that would rip the American social contract to shreds, undo decades of progress for working Americans and send the country hurtling even faster toward a new gilded age.
This agenda is a one-two punch for working families, children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Calls for spending cuts to balance the budget are nothing more than thinly-veiled efforts to gut programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and disability insurance that help struggling New Jerseyans meet their basic needs.
We all share a responsibility to ensure that struggling families do not go hungry or become homeless. New Jersey’s entire Congressional delegation – but particularly Congressman MacArthur, who failed struggling working families when he voted for the GOP tax bill – should commit now to standing against budget cuts that would further hurt everyday New Jerseyans by taking away health coverage, food assistance, housing, and more from Garden State families.
