Looted
The Times editorial board on last night’s theft:
With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.
Starve the beast. Government is the enemy. Yadda yadda.
Because the Senate was rewriting its bill till the last minute, only the dealmakers themselves knew what the chamber voted on. There will, no doubt, be many unpleasant surprises as both houses work to pass final legislation for President Trump to sign.
The votes for the bill by Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona were particularly disheartening. Ms. Collins, who helped sink an effort to effectively repeal the A.C.A. in September, blithely voted for a tax bill that will leave a gaping hole in that law by repealing its requirement that most people have insurance or pay a penalty. She traded away her vote for an inadequate deduction for property taxes and empty promises from Mr. Trump and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that they would help shore up the A.C.A., which they have repeatedly tried to sabotage. Mr. McCain, who previously voted against tax cuts in the Bush era because they were heavily tilted in favor of the rich rather than the middle class, seemed unconcerned that this bill was even worse in that regard. Then there is Mr. Flake, who has spoken powerfully against Mr. Trump and who is not seeking re-election. He folded on the basis of vague assurances about protecting the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.
Because there’s just no resisting a chance to make corporations and rich people even richer, and poor and middling people even poorer.
Republicans offered one fantasy after another to make the case for their budget-busting tax cuts. For example, the White House has said that cutting the corporate tax to 20 percent from 35 percent will lead to a boom in investment and wages — an argument disputed by most credible economists.
And by CEOs, who to a person say nah, they’re going to give it all to executives and shareholders.
You can expect the lies to become even more brazen as Republicans seek to defend this terrible bill. But no amount of prevarication can change the fact that Congress and Mr. Trump are giving a giant gift to their donors and sticking the rest of the country with the tab.
It’s what Republicans do.
But by all means tell us more about the forgotten white working class in Appalachia and why it was natural for them to vote for Trump.
This is a discussion I had with a young liberal friend of mine recently. He buys into this. Government can’t do anything right, it is too expensive, we need to reduce the size, blah blah blah. He is, by the way, a professor in a government college, so either he tacitly admitted that he can’t do his job right, or he doesn’t think the process through (I think the second, since when I challenged him with a number of things the government does do right, he acknowledged that, followed by a but…then some vague statement about government not doing anything right).
This was the conviction of another young liberal friend of mine. He kept blathering on about how we had the highest taxes in the world, and that cutting taxes would make it more likely for businesses to come here and invest. I actually demonstrated that we do not, in fact, have the highest taxes in the world, but he just kept repeating the mantra. I also pointed out that some of our most prosperous periods were when the taxes were much higher than today, and that I suspect higher taxes encourages corporations to sink more money back into the business in some form or other (which is what grows the economy) to put it in tax deductible investments. He kept repeating what he’d heard on every television station, every radio, every soapbox. Cut taxes, and that will increase spending, and the economy will be stronger.
Reagan couldn’t accomplish his goals because they had not yet managed the critical saturation that put these words into every mouth, even the mouths of people who have never had economics, have no idea how our tax structure works, and no idea what is paid for by taxes. So many of the stories I read over the past 30 years have peddled the idea that lower taxes were good, or even when they didn’t, there was always some sort of implied idea that lower taxes were good, that the other voices were drowned out. Plus, people don’t like paying taxes, so it was easier to hear the voices saying they shouldn’t.