On Tax Day, Michigan Residents Demand Barrett, Huizenga, and James Stop Making Working Families Pay the Price for Their Bad Policies
On Tax Day, Michigan Families for Fair Care hosted a virtual press conference featuring residents from Michigan's 4th, 7th, and 10th Congressional Districts who shared firsthand how the policies backed by Congressmen Tom Barrett, Bill Huizenga, and John James have made it harder to afford daily life. As working families across Michigan file their taxes this year, they are facing rising costs on groceries, health care, and utilities while their representatives have delivered one tax break after another for the wealthy and well-connected.
This Tax Day looks different for working families in Michigan. The Republican Tax Law championed by Barrett, Huizenga, and James handed billions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy while enacting the largest cuts to food assistance in the program's history, upending the access to food for over 50,000 people in the state, and setting the stage for hundreds of billions in Medicaid reductions that threaten coverage over 350,000 Michiganders alone. At the same time, the tariffs these congressmen supported, which a federal court ruled were illegally imposed, have cost families nearly $2000 a year. Prices haven't come down, and the money taken from working families through those illegal tariffs has yet to be returned.
“Billionaires are getting tax breaks and [small businesses are] paying the taxes. We as small business owners in the working middle class are paying our fair share. This might be controversial, but I don't mind paying taxes.” said MI-10 resident Michael “I like paying taxes, but what I do like is getting something back for the taxes that I do pay, and unfortunately, as I am paying my fair share, Congressmember James is allowing billionaires and millionaires not to pay theirs.”
“I'm on Social Security. I worked for over 40 years as a hairdresser, and that meant I was always on a tight budget. I didn't have a lot of “play” room and now all I have is my Social Security, and I earned this. It's not some sort of gift.” said Sheila, MI-07 constituent. “And [Congressman Barrett], you know, voting for Trump's tariffs and upping the price on just about everything that I deal with has made it extremely difficult to make ends meet.”
“I left the VA to be doing what I'm doing now, and that is directly advocating for veterans, their families, their caregivers, the spouses of these veterans, are devastated, and think of what it is for a spouse or a child of a veteran, when the veteran now has all of these economic pressures on them, they're trying to deal with the mental health, the physical health issues that they came out of the service with. And what we're doing is saying, yeah, good luck. What we're going to do is we're just going to throw this care that you had, and just let it scatter all over the place, and you figure out how to get the care that you need. There is very solid evidence that the VA is the best at providing the care that they provide, especially for veterans,” said Steve, another MI-07 constituent.
Michigan Families for Fair Care continues to hold Barrett, Huizenga, and James accountable for their votes and their silence as constituents struggle. Working families are not asking for a handout, they are asking for representatives who fight for them instead of against them. This Tax Day, that message is clear: give Michigan families their money back, protect the programs they depend on, and stop making working people pay for tax breaks they will never see.
