Republicans hope to avert ballooning deficits that may result from president-elect’s low-tax, big-ticket agenda
This suggests the GOP will be willing to tolerate higher deficits in the short-run under Mr. Trump because the party is largely united on overhauling corporate and individual income taxes.
.. And reduced revenues, they worry, could be used to justify big cuts to safety-net programs like food stamps and Medicaid.
.. Under current policy, the Congressional Budget Office sees the budget deficit of 3.2% of gross domestic product holding around those levels for the next four years. By the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, deficits would rise to 5.3% of GDP under the House Republicans’ tax plan, and to 6.8% under Mr. Trump’s proposal, according to an analysis by Cornerstone Macro, a research firm.
.. The last two times Republicans reclaimed the White House from Democrats—in 1981 and 2001—they also successfully pushed for large tax cuts. Deficits nonetheless rose during their administrations.
.. Deficits have also fallen below projections in recent years due to a surprising decline in the growth rate of health care spending and because interest rates have been lower than projected.
.. Already, Mr. Trump has forsworn any changes to the largest future drivers of spending, Social Security and Medicare.
.. Other advisers say they are open to recycling a proposal made by President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to pay for infrastructure with one-time revenues from taxing multinationals’ profits stashed abroad.
.. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has echoed arguments made in recent years by left-leaning economists who supported more spending to boost growth.
“With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything,” Mr. Bannon said
A Look at Steve Bannon
A discussion of Trump’s pick for chief strategist, Steve Bannon, with journalists Ken Stern, Joshua Green, Philip Rucker, and Michael Shear.
The Man Who Would Not be President
He is deeply ambivalent about becoming president. He’d rather stay in his lavish New York penthouse. Policy is a headache. It requires concentration. There are annoying laws against nepotism.
.. The proposed restoration went beyond that. It was of the Judeo-Christian West against what Trump’s chief strategist — read propaganda minister — Steve Bannon calls “the new barbarity.” That barbarity has many components. One is the crony capitalism of the “party of Davos” — the elites who have the system rigged. Another is the dilution of Judeo-Christian values through rampant secularization, migration and miscegenation
.. Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, got it about right when he said of Trump: “I’m a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one.” He might have said a gifted charlatan.
.. Bannon, as set out in remarks reported by BuzzFeed to a conference held at the Vatican in 2014, believes that, “We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict” that will, absent a firm stand by “the church militant,” “completely eradicate everything we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”
.. Putin has set himself up as the guardian of an absolutist culture against what Russia sees as the predatory and relativist culture of the West. The Putin entourage is convinced the decadence of the West is revealed in its irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, euthanasia, homosexuality and choose-your-gender bathrooms. Enter Bannon.
Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House
“I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told a writer for The Daily Beast, in late 2013. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”*
.. Barack Obama made just one personnel announcement: that Congressman Rahm Emanuel would be his chief of staff. Every staff member in the Obama White House reported to Emanuel, including political advisers such as David Axelrod. Even in the George W. Bush White House, which at first had a weak chief of staff, Andy Card, and a powerful political adviser, Karl Rove, everyone, including Rove, formally reported to Card.
.. The key to influence in any White House is simply to establish oneself as the President’s most important adviser. This seems to be the role that Bannon has created for himself.
.. In 2008, he became fascinated by Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, and the crowds she attracted. He spent the next eight years making hagiographic films about Palin and other right-wing political figures
.. “When Sarah Palin was on the rise, he had found a way to become a part of that circle. When the Tea Party was on the rise, he seemed to be right there in that circle. When it was going to be Ted Cruz, he was there. When it was going to be Ben Carson for a hot second, he was there. He’s been someone who’s been in pursuit of that pipeline to power for a long time now.”
.. The turning point for Bannon, Breitbart, and the movement that would eventually coalesce around Trump was the 2013 debate over immigration reform. After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, in 2012, the Republican leadership, encouraged by the business wing of the G.O.P. and the Party’s consultant class, made comprehensive immigration reform a legislative priority. Fox News became sympathetic to the effort and Priebus, then the chairman of the R.N.C., issued a report declaring that passing immigration reform was necessary for the survival of the Party.
.. This was the opening that Bannon had been looking for.
.. He believed that Clinton was weaker with Hispanics, African-Americans, and white millennials than Obama was in 2012. And he believed that, with a surge of white working-class support, Trump could win Wisconsin and Michigan, which had voted Democratic since the nineteen-eighties. He was right about all of this.
.. Bannon sees those European movements as allies, and has cultivated ties with far-right parties in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy.
.. How will Bannon continue his crusade to defeat Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Priebus when he now needs them to pass Trump’s agenda? Despite Bannon’s hatred for Priebus, they worked closely together to elect Trump. Bannon believed it was an alliance of convenience, similar to Stalin and Churchill working together to defeat Hitler. I doubt Bannon will be as focussed on knocking off Republican leaders as he was when he was throwing rocks from the sidelines. You don’t actually have to destroy the establishment if you can force it to bend to your will.