(Bloomberg) — Wisconsin Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin pitched her support for tax cuts for the middle class instead of the wealthy and corporations as a defining difference in her key reelection fight against a Republican banker.
Baldwin blasted GOP challenger Eric Hovde’s support for extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law in a Bloomberg Television interview on Wednesday.
“He supports a $4 trillion tax cut that would disproportionately impact and benefit multimillionaires like himself and big corporations,” she said. “I’m trying to get working people tax cuts,” she said, citing her support for increasing the child tax credit and deductions for buying a home or starting a business.
The race could determine which party controls the Senate ahead of the expiration of Trump’s tax cuts for individuals, small businesses and large estates. More than $200 million is projected to be spent on advertising in the Wisconsin race, according to AdImpact data.
Baldwin said Hovde, who has put $20 million of his own funds into the campaign, would end up cutting programs like Social Security to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. Hovde has said he wants to cut the budget to pre-pandemic levels and raise the Social Security retirement age for younger workers.
Baldwin is one of a handful of Democrats defending Senate seats in states Trump won in 2016.
Baldwin blamed corporate profiteering for the inflation surge after the pandemic and promoted her push to give the Federal Trade Commission new powers to crack down on price gouging.
Baldwin also pointed to “buy America” provisions she attached to government spending bills, crediting that with bringing 200 jobs to a company in Kenosha County to make circuits for the broadband buildout funded in the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“That is bringing jobs back to Wisconsin right now,” she said.
Hovde’s push to gut much of the Affordable Care Act has also come under fire from Baldwin, who helped write the law when she served in the US House and protect it in the Senate from numerous Republican efforts to repeal it.
“We have to strengthen and build upon the Affordable Care Act,” Baldwin said. “We cannot go through another period of time where Republicans are threatening to repeal it and people are feeling the lack of certainty about their future.”
Hovde has argued the law failed to control health care costs and said the law’s cap on profit margins for insurance companies hurt incentives to control spending.
He says you could get rid of nearly all of the law and still require private insurance companies not to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions. Most insurance companies previously excluded many people with pre-existing conditions, arguing that otherwise, too many of their customers would have high medical costs.
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