New York, NY – The tax and spending bill recently signed into law by President Trump has been rightly described by author Astra Taylor as the Debt, Deportation, and Death bill. It makes significant cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, climate investments, and other programs that are critical to our state, including costs to the healthcare system outside of the state budget. And it does so all the while driving up the national debt by a whopping $3 trillion dollars, making the rich richer, and investing an unprecedented amount of money – $75 billion over the next four years – in I.C.E., the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, effectively turning our country into a police state with little regard for due process.

As such, Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha is hosting an emergency Zoom call on July 22, Tuesday, at 6:00 PM where attendees can learn more about the bill, its impact on New York, and how the state should respond. RSVP can be made at: https://bit.ly/ddd-103 

Below is the statement Shrestha released in response on July 3rd in response to the bill:

““Congress has just passed what author Astra Taylor describes accurately as the debt, deportation, and death bill. It is a bill that is so overcome with hatred, and so blinded by a lust for war and a loathing towards a shared humanity that its authors do not realize its self-destruction. The irony is almost too blatant to be real. After a prolonged critique of big government spending, the bill drives up the country’s debt by a whopping $3 trillion dollars, and after making people believe for years that they can’t have nice things because immigrants are using up all the resources, it puts more than $100 billion towards detaining and deporting immigrants, a hefty price tag that doesn’t even include the disastrous impact anti-immigrant policies will have on our economy or the incalculable tear in the fabric of our communities.

But one thing is clear. We should have never arrived at this moment to begin with, and we have arrived at it because of the establishment’s failure to break from the neoliberal status quo that plunders our public goods, everything from labor to soil, to enrich the few. If we are serious about having a functional democracy and defeating fascism, it’s not enough to vote the current administration out next time. The break from the billionaires, corporations, and big donors must be real. We cannot respond to these Medicaid cuts with the same old system of private insurers and corporations that mint money from our healthcare system – if we want to win, we must answer with nothing less than universal healthcare. We cannot just say workers have a right to organize and unions have a right to exist – we must empower workers and design our economy around the needs of people who make it run.

As we recently saw in New York City’s mayoral primary, where voters aged 25-34 outnumbered every other age bracket to pick a democratic socialist to beat Governor Cuomo, people are tired of hearing that the very things they need are politically impossible. What people want is to be inspired to fight together for what we can win together if we work together. I urge everyone horrified by this administration to embrace what’s obvious, that to beat the right we must build the left.”