The Honorable Donna F. Edwards
The Impact of the Ryan Budget on America’s Women
April 9, 2014
I thank the gentleman for his remarks.
Madam Speaker, I want to rise this evening to discuss our annual budget. Congress has a number of responsibilities, but a big one is that Congress is tasked annually with developing a budget that lays out our Nation’s priorities in spending and lays out a budget that reflects our values.
Democrats have been working to provide a fair shot for everyone to succeed by creating good-paying jobs and an opportunity for working families. Our country is, in fact, strongest when our economy grows from the middle out, and not from the top down.
Unfortunately the fiscal year 2015 Republican budget introduced by Paul Ryan takes the opposite approach. It benefits the few at the top by showering tax breaks on millionaires and corporate special interests, while shifting the burden of the Federal budget to middle class families.
Once again, Mr. Ryan and Republicans have been convinced that the best way to help working families is to stop helping working families. Unfortunately, the Ryan budget resolution would actually harm families, most especially, women and children.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the Ryan budget would cost jobs and slow our recovery, costing 1.1 million jobs in fiscal year 2015, and rising to about 3 million in the following year.
Republicans are raising taxes on middle class families with children by an average of at least $2,000 a year in order to cut taxes for millionaires.
Now, let’s just take a look at that, Madam Speaker. A recent analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice finds that, under the Ryan plan, taxpayers with income exceeding $1 million in 2015 would receive an average net tax decrease of over $200,000 in that fiscal year.
Now, let’s balance this. Families with children would have to pay an additional $2,000, and millionaires would get the benefit of a decrease in their taxes of $200,000. $2,000 for working families, and $200,000 for millionaires.
Now, of course, the Ryan budget doesn’t touch tax breaks for big oil and gas companies that ship jobs overseas. After all, you have to have priorities, priorities and budgets that are a statement of values.
So it is very clear that the Ryan priorities and the Ryan budget priorities benefit millionaires. It is very clear, unsurprisingly, that the Ryan budget also repeals, yet again, the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that 9.3 million people now have health care as a result of the Affordable Care Act, that according to a Rand Corporation study.
Now, repealing the Affordable Care Act would allow insurance companies, once again, to treat a woman and being a woman as a preexisting condition, would once again enable insurance companies to charge women more than men.
Insurance companies would also be able to deny women coverage because of preexisting conditions, including a history of domestic violence, breast and cervical cancer, and C-sections.
Under this budget, millions of women and their families would be stripped of the private marketplace health plans and expanded Medicaid coverage that they have obtained under the Affordable Care Act.
In fact, more than 47 million women would again have to pay out-of-pocket-costs for lifesaving preventive health services like mammograms and cervical cancer screenings. Up to 4 million women seniors, that is right, 4 million women seniors would fall, once again, into the prescription drug doughnut hole, and they would have to start reaching back into their pockets once again to pay for their prescription drugs because the Ryan budget reopens the doughnut hole.
I want to repeat that for the American people. The Ryan budget reopens the doughnut hole that Democrats closed. As a result, seniors in the doughnut hole will pay an additional $18,000 over 10 years, on average, for their prescription drugs.
Look, women make up about 55 percent of Medicare enrollees, and they would suffer the most, frankly, when the Medicare guarantee is replaced, under the Ryan budget, with a voucher in 2024.
That is right. The Ryan budget wants to change the Medicare system, take away the Medicare guarantee for the 55 percent of the enrollees who are women, for all enrollees, with premiums for traditional Medicare going up about 50 percent on average. Think what that means for America’s women who are seniors.
Indeed, the Republican plan would draw traditional Medicare into a death spiral. It would end it as we know it.
Not just that, but the Ryan budget also slashes Medicaid by $732 billion over 10 years, or nearly 25 percent in 2024, with the largest impact on women.
I will continue, because the Ryan budget does such devastation to America’s women, that it bears repeating. But with that, I will yield some time to my colleague from Nevada (Ms. Titus)…
I thank the gentlewoman from Nevada for pointing out the many ways in which the Ryan budget impacts the women of Nevada and impacts the women of this country.
The gentlewoman mentioned something that I think, again, bears repeating. The Ryan budget cuts food stamps by $137 billion over the next 10 years, which would, in fact, be devastating for millions of America’s women, because 62 percent of adult food stamp recipients, in fact, are women.
And at least 200,000 women and children would be dropped from the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children, if the 15 percent cut in 2016 non-defense appropriations was applied across the board.
The Ryan budget calls for at least $500 billion in cuts to income support programs like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, unemployment insurance, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and child nutrition programs, including school lunches. That is right: taking food right out of the mouths of our youngest children who need that nutrition in order to learn and be 21st century learners.
Sixty-six percent of individuals who depend on senior meals like Meals on Wheels are women. Those senior meals would be cut by 15 percent in 2016, if the GOP cut in non-defense appropriations was applied proportionately.
Up to 5.6 million women students would find college less affordable due to $145 billion in cuts to Pell grants under the Ryan budget.
Up to 170,000 children would lose access to Head Start, and up to 3.4 million disadvantaged children at 8,000 schools would lose vital Title I education programs.
I keep going on, and it seems incredibly devastating to America’s families and, particularly, to America’s women. It is almost as though the Ryan budget were a Mack truck just running right over top of America’s women.
Now, Democrats have an agenda and a budget that, in fact, reflects our values of strengthening the middle class, of closing the opportunity gap, of enabling women and their families to succeed. It is a budget that helps women and families address some of the biggest economic challenges facing them.
It calls for raising the Federal minimum wage, for ensuring equal pay for equal work, for expanding family and medical leave, and for making child care more affordable.
In my home State of Maryland, child care costs for an infant can run to $12,936 a year for child care for one infant. In a lot of cases, that is more than you pay for a 4-year institution, or a community college, just to have your child in child care.
These are devastating for America’s families. In fact, America’s families are spending 35 percent of their income, of their family’s income, in child care. That is more than we are spending on mortgages. It is certainly more than we are saving, Madam Speaker.
As we know, women make on average just 77 cents on a dollar a man makes. For African American women and Latinas, the gap is even larger. African American women earn just 64 cents, and Latinas earn only 54 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men.
Two-thirds of the minimum wage earners in this country are women, and family and leave protections fail to cover nearly half of full-time employees.
The Democrats’ budget, in fact, takes a look at these things and says, you know what, people are working hard, and they are trying to take care of themselves and their families; and, in fact, in this country, with so many women who are either principal breadwinners or, certainly, partner breadwinners in their families, the cuts envisioned by the Ryan budget would be devastating for America’s women.
We know that child care expenses, for example, that are important to men and women are consuming so much of American families’ income, and yet the Ryan budget would take $2,000 away from working families and enable millionaires to get the benefit of $200,000. Think about that – your average family, $2,000; millionaires, $200,000.
According to the Ryan budget, the budget actually fails to call for bills promoting equal pay for equal work for women. It fails to increase the minimum wage. It fails to provide for paid sick days for workers. The Ryan budget fails to help working families afford the cost of child care.
We do have solutions, as Democrats, to these challenges. I mean, after all, it is really true that, when women succeed, America succeeds. Our agenda ensures that women will have the tools they need to fully participate in the 21st century economy.
Madam Speaker, Republican priorities are making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and they are shrinking the size of government, regardless of the damage that it would cause.
As I have detailed, the Ryan budget doubles down on policies that, in fact, hurt working families. I think that it is time, Madam Speaker, for us to pay attention to what is happening to women – to women who are increasingly in the workplace, but are saddled with the burden of incomes that are not keeping pace, needing assistance to help them get by, not because they are not working, not because they are not contributing; and the Ryan budget does more devastation to America’s women.
So I would urge my colleagues to, once again, take a look at this and to say, you know, in a country that has so much and that promises so much and where there really should be more opportunity for all, that we don’t need a budget that just rips apart the lives of women and children and families, and the Ryan budget does just that.
I look today at the Congressional Progressive Caucus alternative budget. I voted for that because it is good for America. I looked at this Congressional Black Caucus budget. I voted for that because it is good for America.
I will look at the Democratic alternative to the devastating Ryan budget because it is good for America. It is good for America’s families. It is good for America’s women.
Madam Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.
