Bangor Daily News: After initial relief, paying for GOP tax cuts could hit Mainers hard

But U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree said she won’t. She and policy analyst Sarah Austin of the left-leaning Maine Center for Economic Policy said in a roundtable discussion in Portland on Monday that the bill will be paid for by forthcoming cuts to Medicare and Medicaid benefits used by many elderly and low-income residents and the Pell student-loan program for low- to middle-class Mainers.

“The premise to this [House bill] is trickle-down economics, where the corporations will hire more and the rich people will spend more,” Pingree said in an interview with the BDN.

Pingree and Austin said the tax plan’s real intent is the corporate tax cut, which would decrease to 20 percent from the current 35 percent.

“Everything else is window dressing,” Austin said. “Across the board foreign investors will receive more in tax breaks than the bottom 60 percent of Americans,” or those who make less than $65,000 per year. “This is not for the middle class. In a big picture sense this is a huge missed opportunity for the middle class in Maine.”