Source: American Progress
Project 2025 is a plan to take away America’s system of checks and balances to enact an extreme agenda that would hurt all Americans and the country’s democratic traditions.
The plan, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, gives a guideline for the next Republican president on how to take away power from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over our way of life.
While Project 2025 will roll back checks and balances, crucial rights and laws on the federal level, here are specific ways that Project 2025 would harm North Carolinians, according to American Progress:
■ When it comes to taxes, Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the far-right agenda, the typical family of four in North Carolina would see a tax increase of $2,713 per year, while wealthy households in America reporting more than $10 million in income would each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.
■ For social security, Project 2025 would cut the program by raising the retirement age for roughly 73 percent of North Carolina residents—7,847,980 people. Their ideas are reflected in the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which proposed increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69.
Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years.
■ When it comes to health care, Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits”, putting 911,500 Medicaid enrollees at risk of losing coverage because they are low-income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage.
■ In addition, the far-right plan would raise the cost of prescription drugs for up to 662,600 North Carolinians by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.
■ Project 2025 would eliminate some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements, meaning 1,560,000 women in North Carolina would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.
■ The plan instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the Comstock Act, a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion – resulting in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.
■ The plan instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans, such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban.
■ Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care—among other services—for 19,641 low-income children in North Carolina. Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already face a lack of child care slots.
■ Project 2025 would eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and funding that ensures schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue.
To read more about the ways Project 2025 would devastate North Carolinians, click here.
