With the GOP’s safety net-shredding budget blueprint headed for a crucial vote in the Senate this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) blasted his Republican colleagues’ proposals in a Guardian op-ed Monday as little more than a “gift to billionaires” made possible by doing “incalculable harm to tens of millions of working families, our kids, the sick, the elderly, and the poor.”

“We have a corrupt campaign finance system that enables multi-billionaires, along with some of the most powerful CEOs in America, to contribute many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Republican candidates to represent their views.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders”The Republican budget, which will likely be debated on the floor of the Senate this week, is the Robin Hood principle in reverse,” Sanders writes. “It takes from those in need and gives to those who are already living in incredible opulence.”

As Common Dreams has reported, despite the GOP’s and the Trump administration’s best efforts to portray their budget and tax plan as pro-middle class, non-partisan analyses have laid bare the fact that their proposals amount to an enormous boon to the wealthiest Americans.

The independent Tax Policy Center found last month that by 2027, 80 percent of the Trump-GOP tax cuts will be enjoyed by the top one percent.

To clear up budget space for this reward to the rich, Republicans are preparing to inflict “massive cuts [to] programs that working class Americans desperately need,” Sanders notes.

“This budget cuts Medicaid by more than $1 trillion over 10 years—which would throw some 15 million Americans off of the health insurance they currently have,” Sanders adds. “Further, this budget does what the Republicans have not yet attempted to do in their previous healthcare legislation and that is to make a $473 billion cut to Medicare, despite Trump’s campaign promises not to cut these programs.”