By Karen Showalter

Families in Central Pennsylvania have a lot on their minds: will our jobs remain secure? Are our kids doing well in school? Is my family safe?

Will Penn State win this Saturday? With all that is going on in the world it is easy to tune out on what is happening in Washington, D.C. But with the President's visit this week, we should be adding one important question to our list: Is his tax plan for us?

Chances are the tax plan President Donald Trump is coming to Harrisburg to talk about and is being touted by his Republican cronies in Congress isn't for me and it isn't for you. It's for a group of people that many of us can't even really relate to: Wall Street executives and people who appear on Top Ten Wealthiest Families lists.

According to the well-respected Institute on Tax and Economic Policy, under Trump's tax proposal, in Pennsylvania, households that earn more than $1 million dollars (0.5 percent of Pennsylvania's population) would receive 53.6 percent of the tax cuts if the plan was in effect next year.

Fifteen percent of Pennsylvania's population would actually experience a tax hike as the plan eliminates most itemized deductions, including the deduction for state and local taxes.

And families who are lifted by federal programs like Medicaid, WIC, SNAP, and HeadStart, would experience the pain of sharp cuts to these critical programs necessitated by these tax cuts for the top 1 percent.

The writing's on the wall: Pennsylvania families lose out under this tax plan.

The winners: millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations. It's for real estate moguls...and golf course owners.

And how are they going to pay for the trillions of dollars in tax cuts? By cutting vital programs that boost our families like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and disaster relief. We should call these efforts what they really are: a scheme that will pad the pockets of the wealthy, including Trump, at the expense of working families.

Moms and dads in Central Pennsylvania know that in order for our families and our economy to thrive, tax policies must close the tax loopholes that allow the wealthy and large, profitable corporations to dodge and delay paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes every year.

It should provide much more revenue to invest in the American people and create jobs through education, health care, public infrastructure, retirement security, and more. Real tax reform should narrow America's ever-widening and dangerously destabilizing income and wealth gaps.

Real tax reform also should raise revenues to improve the federal government's long-term fiscal health for our children and grandchildren and fund federal programs that are critical to the ability of families to care for children and the elderly like Medicaid, school lunches, child care assistance, and Social Security.

It is these types of policies that boost families, local businesses, and our economy.

People use these programs to immediately buy goods and services that fuel our consumer-driven economy, like food and shoes for their kids.

But when those with the most (like millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations) don't have to pay their fair share of taxes, then there's less money to draw from for all of those programs that benefit the greater good and lift our economy.

That's why, at the same time as proposing this tax plan that will raise our national deficit, Trump and his Republican friends in Congress are proposing slashing the programs that boost our families' nutrition, health care, and education and assist our economy.

Pennsylvanians believe that government should stand up for working families and small businesses. They're fed up with politicians who go to Washington and lose sight of that, putting the wellbeing of millions of people on the back burner

The American middle-class is what drives our economy. We must invest in working people, and not undermine the protections they've earned. Yet each and every dollar in new tax giveaways for the rich is another dollar taken away from our children's education, our loved ones' health care, and our families' financial security.

That's why moms, dads, and concerned voters are mobilizing across the state to demand that elected officials not slash funding for our families' health care, nutrition, and education in order to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and mega-corporations.

Working families in Pennsylvania and across the nation simply cannot afford anything less.

Karen Showalter is the Pennsylvania state director for MomsRising, a nationwide advocacy organization powered by more than 1 million people. She writes from Carlisle.