Share your bread with the hungry.
Isaiah 58:7
The Women of Reform Judaism Board of Directors, concerned about the impact of the administration’s tax and budget policies, calls for their rejection and for support of an equitable tax policy that will provide sufficient funding for pressing federal, state, and local public needs and strengthen the economy. Recent federal tax policy has provided for massive tax cuts that will primarily benefit the most affluent in our society at the expense of essential government programs for poor families, such as major cuts in the Medicaid program and in the budget for Head Start, education, housing, and nutrition programs. The tax cuts also pave the way for an exploding national debt and have created enormous deficits, indebting our children and grandchildren.
WRJ stands in opposition to making the tax cuts permanent and to passing new cuts that would further increase the deficit and require additional severe cuts in social programs. In light of WRJ’s long-standing commitment to federal investment in health care, affordable quality child care, excellent public education, youth programming, sufficient safe housing, elimination of poverty, and protection of the environment, the WRJ Board of Directors:
- Endorses and urges congressional efforts to protect vital social programs for the poor, such as child nutrition programs, Medicaid, education and adult literacy programs, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, Head Start, and housing programs;
- Opposes any tax policies that inequitably bestow benefits on the wealthy while requiring cuts in social programming and causing increases in the deficit; and
- Calls on U.S. sisterhoods to follow tax and budget issues in the press and media and to call on Congress to protect the vital social programs that respond to fundamental needs of all Americans, particularly the poor.