Republicans don’t care about budget deficits, and never did. They only pretend to care about deficits when one of two things is true: a Democrat is in the White House, and deficit rhetoric can be used to block his agenda, or they see an opportunity to slash social programs that help needy Americans, and can invoke deficits as an excuse. All of this has been obvious for years to anyone paying attention.
.. And it was also predictable that they would return to deficit posturing as soon as the deed was done, citing the red ink they themselves produced as a reason to cut social spending.
.. Hatch declared his support for the program, but insisted that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore” — just before voting for a trillion-and-a-half-dollar tax cut that will deliver the bulk of its benefits to the richest few percent of the population.
He then went on to say, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”
.. The House version of the big tax cut would eliminate the estate tax entirely; the Senate version would double the level of wealth exempted from the tax, to $22.4 million for a couple. How can this be justified if it’s supposedly hard to find money for children’s health care?
.. The important thing to realize, however, is that the hypocrisy and contempt for the public we’ve seen in the past few days is just the beginning.
.. offsetting those deficits will require going after the true big-ticket programs, namely Medicare and Social Security.
.. Republicans have given their donors what they wanted — and now they’re coming for your benefits.
When you ask Trump supporters what he has accomplished, they invariably reply that he cut regulations (he has no legislative accomplishments). When you further ask which specific regulations, they don’t know. When you ask which regulations were hampering them personally, they have no answer.
Or if you prefer pop culture to polling statistics, think about it this way: God used to look like Charlton Heston, but now He looks like Morgan Freeman, and I think this matters.
.. O.K., I’m sure you can guess where I’m going with this. I’ve had much to be thankful for — but every one of those good things is now very much under assault.
.. Meanwhile, everything this president and this Congress are doing on economic policy seems designed, not just to widen the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, but to lock in plutocrats’ advantages, making it easier to ensure that their heirs remain on top and the rest stay down.
.. according to Pew, 58 percent of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, versus only 36 percent who see a positive effect.
And I don’t believe for a minute that this turn against education is a reaction to political correctness. It’s about the nasty habit scholarship has of telling you things you don’t want to hear, like the fact that climate change is real.
.. In other words, America has given me a lot to be thankful for. But it looks, more and more, as if that was a different country from the one we live in now.
Days of Greed and Desperation
The House tax bill is wildly regressive; the Senate bill actually raises taxes on most families, while including a special tax break for private planes.
.. many Republicans now see themselves and/or their party in such dire straits that they’re no longer even trying to improve their future electoral position; instead, it’s all about grabbing as much for their big donors while they still can.
.. these members will need new jobs in 2019 whatever they do — and the best jobs will be as K Street lobbyists, except for a few who will get gigs as Fox News or “think tank” experts
.. one way or another their future lies in collecting wingnut welfare, which means that their incentives are entirely to be loyal ideologues even if it’s very much at their constituents’ expense.
.. the next few months will be the last chance they have to deliver on their promises to the Kochs and suchlike.
Trump and Ryan Versus the Little People
First is the poster child family Paul Ryan keeps talking about, a family with two children making $59,000 a year. In the first year of the Cut Cut Cut Act, such a family would indeed receive a tax cut. But this cut comes from several special tax credits that are basically loss leaders to help sell the plan; they all either expire in later years or will get eroded by inflation. By 2027, with the plan fully phased in, that exemplary family would actually be facing a significant tax increase relative to current law.
.. it’s not just Wall Street stiffs who would find themselves in that situation: So would doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other well-paid professionals. Overall, the Tax Policy Center estimates that more than a quarter of the population would see taxes go up, not down, under the G.O.P. proposal; for those with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000, that fraction rises to more than 40 percent... Finally, let’s imagine a very lucky individual — let’s arbitrarily call him Eric Trump — who stands to inherit a stake in a business he doesn’t run, plus a bunch of stock. He’ll get his inheritance tax-free, because the estate tax gets phased out in the G.O.P. bill. He’ll get to pay a low tax rate on his business income. And his stocks will pay higher dividends, because the G.O.P. bill also sharply cuts corporate tax rates, and most of the benefit of those cuts will probably flow to shareholders... So when Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, says that the bill’s goalis “to deliver middle-class tax cuts to the hard-working families in this country,” he’s claiming that up is down and black is white. This bill does little or nothing for the middle class, and even among the affluent it’s biased against those who work hard in favor of the idle rich... You might wonder how Republicans imagine that they can get away with this. But anyone who has paid attention to U.S. politics knows the answer.
- First, they will lie, unashamedly, about what their bill actually does.
- Second, they will try to distract working-class voters by stoking racial animosity.