Whoopsie, forgot about the deficit
Updating to add: disregard the whole “the minute they” part, because I overlooked the date. This is actually about how they did both at the same time…which is even more ridiculous but also less sneaky. My source was an excoriating Twitter thread by Ben Wikler.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the minute they get their slash taxes on the rich bill signed, they say they’re going to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Of course they do. Inch by inch they get closer to their goal: heavy taxation on the poor and zero taxation on the rich.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit.
Citing the need to reduce America’s deficit when he just finished straining every nerve to increase the deficit. Week one: cut taxes on corporations almost in half; week two: cut benefits for the bottom 90% to pay for week one.
Ryan said that he believes he has begun convincing President Trump in their private conversations about the need to rein in Medicare, the federal health program that primarily insures the elderly. As a candidate, Trump vowed not to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
Everything must flow to the billionaires, while the people on the bottom must be left to starve and freeze. It’s what god intended.
Ryan’s remarks add to the growing signs that top Republicans aim to cut government spending next year. Republicans are close to passing a tax bill nonpartisan analysts say would increase the deficit by at least $1 trillion over a decade. Trump recently called on Congress to move to cut welfare spending after the tax bill, and Senate Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while growing the economy.
Republicans have cited the need to reduce the national deficit while pushing through a tax bill that balloons the national deficit. Makes sense.
Tell me more about the forgotten white working class who voted for Trump.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1762956310389489/?type=3&theater
It helps to keep in mind that the reason deficits matter to Republicans is that they provide an excuse for cutting government programs. “Gosh, we’d like to have frills like roads and clean air and school lunches and health care, too, but look at the deficit — we just can’t afford them!”
And the reason for cutting government programs is that it clears the decks for cutting taxes. Even the GOP knows it’s a hard sell to justify cutting social programs just to give tax breaks to the rich. Far easier to just fund the tax breaks for the rich with deficits, and then wait a year or two before pointing to the deficits as the reason why social programs must be cut. It’s the Republican Two-Step: one step backward, then another step backward. Repeat until you’ve reached the 1800s.
Sorry for the poor phrasing: “[i]t helps to keep in mind” is hardly necessary here, where I think everyone gets the game they’re playing.
Oh yes. It’s all too clear that they want both, no matter how incompatible the two are – ever more $$$ for the rich and ever more grinding poverty for everyone else. It’s a bizarre goal, but that’s Republicans for you.
I suppose the reality is that they know they’ll be stopped before they reach that goal but they want to take as many huge strides toward it as they can before that time.
I get that they want to be richer. Everyone wants to be richer. What I don’t get is how they can stomach this way of getting there. There won’t even be enough people to cart the bodies away.
But it’s not so much that they want to be richer, it’s that they want the already rich to be richer. It doesn’t necessarily even apply to them. They want rich people as a class to get richer and richer and richer while everyone else gets poorer, and most people in Congress aren’t even in that class.
We already have the biggest gap between rich and poor since the 1920s, and they want to make it even bigger. I find that baffling.
Ben and Ophelia, my guess is that Republican politicians break down into these categories:
1) Self-interested plutocrats. As you say, not that many of them, because why do all the work of going into politics yourself when you can just buy politicians instead? Examples: Trump, Mnuchin.
2) True believers. They aren’t rich themselves, but they really, honestly, truly believe that it is right for the rich (excuse me, “wealth creators”) to get richer (excuse me, “be compensated for their largesse”). They read too much Ayn Rand in college and never outgrew it. Examples: Paul Ryan, Rand Paul.
3) Self-interested pragmatists. They don’t care whether it’s right or not, they just know that if they don’t deliver the tax cuts, then bye-bye donor money, and bye-bye job, and bye-bye post-Congress retirement plan (lobbying position, think tank, conservative media blowhard position). Examples: geez, like 80% of them.
4) Those who made an ideological deal with the devil. They don’t much care about tax cuts, but they know it’s the price they have to pay to keep their position and exercise influence on the issue(s) they really care about, whether that’s abortion or foreign policy or whatever. Examples: John McCain, Lindsay Graham.
One need only read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to see their ultimate goal.