Missouri congressman praises work on the “one big beautiful bill”
West-central Missouri Congressman Mark Alford told Newstalk KZRG that he is proud of the work that the House of Representatives made on President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”.
Read more or hear directly from Alford below:
“Our goal was to get this reconciliation package over the finish line out of the House by Memorial Day. We did that. I was up 36 hours,” said Alford. “We came up with about $1.6 trillion worth of cuts, some of that out of the Medicaid program. Basically, if you’re an illegal alien, you’re not going to get Medicaid. If you’re an able bodied adult with no dependents, you should at least be looking for a job, doing job training or volunteering out in the community. Otherwise you don’t get Medicaid.”
That bill is now in the U.S. Senate for further consideration but many Republicans have already said it’s a ‘no’ from them, claiming it does not cut enough.
“You’ve heard a lot about the salt. What is salt? It is the state and local taxes, the amount that you can deduct,” added Alford. “We have income tax here in Missouri, about 6%. We have other taxes that can be deducted off your federal taxes in New York, California and Illinois. It’s much higher than that. They in turn pay a lot more into the federal coffers through their taxes in general. And so what they’re asking for is under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs act, the unlimited deduction was brought down to $10,000 under our agreement in the House, it went up to $40,000 that you could deduct from your federal taxes. If we didn’t redo this, it would go back to unlimited.”
Alford says it comes down to getting more Republicans in office and less members from California, New York or Illinois. “A lot of these states are poorly run by Democrat governors and progressive governments and they have bad tax policy. I know we’re trying to get rid of our income tax here in Missouri, but we’ve got to make sure that these representatives get back to Congress. We need to keep our majority. We need to keep our gavel on these committees and we need to keep the gavel in the hand of Mike Johnson.”