Political caricatures don’t come much broader than these. Strange was the establishment incarnate; Moore was the Republican electorate’s id made ruddy flesh, an avatar of the latent nativism and conspiracism that Donald Trump’s detractors inside and outside the Republican Party blamed for his rise.
.. This was a “Jurassic Park” vision of the Republican base, in which party leaders, after fecklessly creating and nurturing a monster, find themselves powerless to stop it once the electric fences go out on the island.
.. Reagan’s 1980 campaign won seven percent more of the labor-union vote than Gerald Ford did in 1976, but he won just 10 percent of the nonwhite vote, significantly less than Ford.
.. Many of the major contenders for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination ran explicitly on the idea of bringing nonwhite constituencies into the party — none more enthusiastically than Representative Jack Kemp of New York.
.. Kemp believed that his vision of racial outreach could bring the party control of Washington.
.. Kemp lost to George Bush — himself a self-identified base-broadener, but one whose candidacy was marred by the race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad
.. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, vowed — and later apologized for vowing — that “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
.. It was a testament to the party’s cynicism, naïveté or both that Atwater, in taking the helm of the Republican National Committee after Bush’s victory, was tasked with improving outreach to black and Hispanic voters.
.. The base had, in Gingrich’s formulation, become something new: not a coalition to be expanded but a force to be propitiated or crossed at Bush’s peril. It was not there to be molded by politicians like Jack Kemp. It was there to give orders to them, through mediums like Gingrich
.. When Bob Dole — who had campaigned for the 1988 nomination on, as his spokeswoman put it, the “need to broaden the base of the Republican Party” — said he had no “litmus test” for the abortion views of his running mate in 1996, he drew harsh words from James Dobson
.. It implies that the Republican Party is not a coalition of interests but the tribune of an essentially unified tribe.
.. Conservatives often point out, correctly, that today’s Democratic base is, if anything, more monolithic in its policy views than its Republican counterpart, with more uniform positions on issues like abortion, immigration and taxes.
.. Republican voters, meanwhile, passed over candidates with actual fiscal-conservative and evangelical bona fides, like Ted Cruz, in favor of one whose only sustained and consistent point of contact with past Republican practice was the winking subtext of the party’s white identity politics, delivered without the wink. One party’s base knew what it believed; the other’s knew who it was.
Four Rules for the Coming Tax Reform Debate
True reform will require a bipartisan consensus around closing loopholes to pay for the lowering of statutory tax rates paid by businesses, and reducing burdens on working families. Changing tax law must be done in a fiscally responsible way, without cutting taxes for the very wealthy.
First, changes in the tax rates for individuals must at least maintain the current levels of progressivity
- Cutting tax rates for the very wealthy would deepen the income inequality that underlies the anxiety and anger among American voters. If Congress doesn’t preserve or increase progressivity, we won’t have the resources to pay for investments like infrastructure and child care.
- .. Congress must also maintain the estate tax, which is levied only on estates worth more than $5.49 million ($10.98 million for a couple), affects only the wealthiest 0.2 percent and protects small businesses, including family farmers.
- .. Many of the estates that are taxed have assets that have increased in value but have never been subject to capital gains tax, and never will be. The idea that the estate tax imposes double taxation is largely a myth.
- Second, tax cuts must be offset by revenue-raising measures. With the country in the ninth year of an economic recovery, the case for pure stimulus is weak, and digging a deep hole of debt by cutting taxes will make it harder to pay for other priorities.
- Tax cuts need to be revenue neutral, paid for by reducing tax subsidies, ending loopholes or generating new revenue.
- Third, Congress should rely on its Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office to estimate what a tax bill will cost.
- Claims that tax cuts pay for themselves must be treated with great skepticism.
- Such a reckless move would almost surely produce an explosion of debt. In 1981, 2001 and 2003, tax cuts based on projections that they would largely pay for themselves did not, and when deficits soared, future presidents had to make hard choices to restore fiscal stability.
- Fourth, business tax reform must not open up new loopholes for top earners to evade taxes. Proposals to lower the tax rate on “pass-through” income (income that partnerships, sole proprietorships, S corporations and limited-liability companies “pass through” to owners) would create a costly, unpoliceable loophole. Wealthy individuals and businesses could easily reorganize on paper to take advantage of low pass-through rates.
- most pass-through income goes to wealthy individuals and big businesses like hedge funds and large oil and gas pipeline companies organized as limited partnerships.
- Kansas instituted a similar policy in 2012 and repealed it this year after 100,000 new pass-throughs emerged — among them the coach of the University of Kansas basketball team, who had his salary paid to a pass-through entity to escape state income tax. Yet job and economic growth in Kansas lagged that of most neighboring states, evidence that the policy did not produce the growth that supporters promised
Trump has a plan to change the tax code to make himself much, much richer
The plan creates a massive loophole with which ordinary people can evade taxes. Instead of just working for Vox.com, I could form DylanCorp LLC, contract with Vox to provide writing services, and pay a 15 percent rate on DylanCorp’s earnings rather than my current 25 percent rate. For rich people paying a top rate of 39.6 percent (or the top individual rate of 33 percent that Trump proposed during the campaign)
.. A new study finds that when Kansas exempted pass-through income, the result wasn’t more investment or growth but a surge in this kind of tax avoidance.
.. the Trump Organization, and the entire Trump family. The Trump Organization isn’t a “C corporation.” It doesn’t pay corporate income tax. Instead, it’s structured as a collection of pass-through enterprises, so the vast majority of income accruing to Trump and his family is taxed through this system. Trump almost certainly pays the 39.6 percent rate on his earnings, so he’s cutting his own top tax rate by more than half. It’s the most transparently self-interested policy he’s proposed since taking office, and it will likely save him tens of millions of dollars.
.. That return also implied that without the alternative minimum tax, which Trump wants to repeal, he would have paid less than 3.5 percent of his income in federal income taxes. Cutting the pass-through rate while repealing the AMT would probably reduce his tax burden to roughly half that level. Instead of paying $38 million, he could’ve paid less than $3 million.
.. A paper by Berkeley economist Stefano DellaVigna and co-authors found that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s TV network, Mediaset, saw profits grow by at least €1 billion during his time as premier, not necessarily due to graft but because businesses shifted advertising to Mediaset as a way to lobby Berlusconi.
Obama calls President Trump’s decision to end DACA ‘wrong,’ ‘self-defeating’ and ‘cruel’
“Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. … Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.”
.. “[For] years while I was president, I asked Congress to send me such a bill. That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country,” Obama said in his statement. “We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm. Deportations of criminals went up.
.. “To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating — because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid’s science teacher, or our friendly neighbor turns out to be a ‘dreamer?’ Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn’t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak?”