Fri. Nov 1st, 2024

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Project 2025 has been mentioned a lot on the campaign trail, but we need to recognize that it’s more than a talking point. It’s a very real, very extreme agenda that, if placed in the hands of those in power, would do harm to someone you care about, regardless of your ZIP code, your income or your political leanings. 

The 920 pages of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” from the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project at the Heritage Foundation outline a clear plan to systematically disinvest in people and communities across our country and state, resulting in devastating impacts, including increased poverty, decreased opportunities and attacks on individual rights. 

For one, Project 2025 puts food assistance for children and families with low incomes in its targets, calling for significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which 1.4 million Michiganders rely upon. It would limit states’ freedom to set income eligibility criteria and would strip benefits from people due to rigid work requirements and associated red tape.

Hunger is on the rise and SNAP benefits are already too low to cover the full cost of a meal, but Project 2025 also sharply criticizes science-based updates to SNAP benefit levels, which are required to happen every five years. If these updates were “re-evaluated,” as Project 2025 proposes, future SNAP benefits for Michigan families could be slashed by $970 million over the next decade

To make matters worse, Project 2025 would keep children from receiving nutritious meals at school and during the summer, as it proposes to reject universal free school meal programs and roll back summer food assistance. This could include the program that provided nearly 900,000 Michigan children with access to healthy meals this past summer.

Beyond reducing access to food and other basic needs, Project 2025’s tax proposals are particularly unsettling. We would see harmful tax increases for low- to moderate-income households and major tax breaks for the wealthiest households and corporations.

For example, the plan proposes to reduce the federal government’s seven personal income tax rates—10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37% — down to just two — a 15% beginning rate and a 30% rate that would start near the Social Security wage base, currently $168,000. 

This means an increase in taxes for the majority of Michigan households. According to the Center for American Progress, a Michigan family of four earning the state’s median income of $106,979 would see a tax increase of $2,797, while a single-person household making the state median income of $35,533 would see a tax increase of $860 under the proposed system. Meanwhile, the wealthiest households would pay less in taxes.

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Project 2025 also targets immigrants who are valuable — and vital — members of our communities. Here in Michigan, immigrants play an important role in our population growth and bolster the state economy by participating in the workforce and creating businesses and jobs. Additionally, according to recent research from the American Immigration Council, the approximately 687,000 immigrants living in Michigan in 2022 held $23.1 billion in spending power, paid $5.5 billion in federal taxes and paid $2.6 billion in state and local taxes. 

They are also our neighbors.

But Project 2025 seeks to intimidate immigrants from taking part in the Census, paying taxes and obtaining benefits they are eligible to receive. The plan would even strip lawful immigration statuses away from some victims of crimes, including trafficking victims. These harsh immigration policies would only add to the damage caused by the hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric and fear-mongering that have permeated the national conversation.  

What about health care? If the architects of Project 2025 are able to implement their plan, tens of millions of Americans would lose Medicaid coverage, while others would face significantly higher premiums. The plan proposes huge cuts to this long-standing health care program, which provides comprehensive health care services to adults and children who are struggling to make ends meet. These proposed cuts would have a significant impact on the household budgets and health outcomes of the more than 2.6 million Michiganders enrolled in Medicaid as of June 2024.

This only touches the surface of all that is included in Project 2025 — an extreme agenda for our federal government that also contains blatant attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, guts protections against sex discrimination, and dismantles access to reproductive rights, workplace justice, housing programs and more.

Michiganders must fully understand what Project 2025 would mean for our communities and democracy. It would drastically overhaul our federal government and worsen the existing inequities in economic security, health and overall well-being for children and families across our state and country. 

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