Republicans Didn’t Have to Do This to The Country

This 4th of July is not a time to celebrate.  Rather, with the passage of the horrific "big beautiful bill" pushed by the felon, it is a time for both fear and to mourn: mourn those who will die because of lost health care coverage, fear for senior citizens forced out of nursing homes due to Medicaid cuts, fear for patients and employees of rural hospitals - one analysis indicates 300 rural hospitals could be forced to close, including a number in Republican voting districts in Virginia - fear for children losing food assistance - the list is long. Most ugly is the reality that these cruel cuts have been made in order to give huge tax breaks to the super wealthy.  Yet, even with the cuts, the federal deficit will explode and potentially lead to increased inflation and a downgrade of federal government bonds. None of these horrors had to happen.  They were a conscious choice by congressional Republicans who chose to take their reverse Robin Hood agenda to new extremes and betray thousands, if not millions of their constituents.  The Felon has continued to lie about the impact of this legislation and Fox News and its imitators have been only too eager to repeat the lies.   A piece at The Atlantic looks at this conscious chose to harm millions:

In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After that, things go as you might expect.

Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors’ sanity. . . . Congress is about to impose immense harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.

Given that President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in The Sopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: Why are they doing this?

Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.

Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.

Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” he explained.

Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.

In reality, the megabill will take food assistance away from some 3 million Americans, while causing 12 million to lose their health insurance. That is how you save money: by taking benefits away from people. Congress is not finding magical efficiencies. To the contrary, the bill introduces inefficiencies by design. The main way it will throw people off their health insurance is by requiring Medicaid recipients to show proof of employment. States that have tried this have found the paperwork so onerous that most people who lose their insurance are actually Medicaid-eligible but unable to navigate the endless bureaucratic hassle.

Another source of cost savings in the megabill involves killing tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy. Because renewables supply some 90 percent of new energy capacity in the United States, and because electricity demand is rising dramatically, these components of the bill will raise household costs, with the highest spikes hitting Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina, which have huge wind and solar resources.

Perhaps the most severe political risk of the megabill is the potential for setting off a debt crisis. Rising deficits can cause interest rates to rise, which forces the government to borrow more money to pay the interest on its debt, which in turn puts even more upward pressure on rates, in a potentially disastrous spiral. This prospect is far from certain, but should it come to pass, it would dwarf the other harms of the bill.

You’d think sheer venal self-interest, if nothing else, would cause members of the Republican majority to hesitate before wreaking havoc on multiple economic sectors. Yet none of these outcomes has given them pause.

One explanation is that they don’t understand just how unpopular the bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly cheered the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding members from exposure to concerns

The second explanation is that Republicans in Congress, or at least some of them, do understand the consequences of their actions, and are willing to accept the political risk because they truly believe in what they’re doing. Republicans have, after all, spent decades fighting to reduce the progressivity of the tax code and to block the expansion of guaranteed health care for people unable to purchase it on their own.

The third explanation is that the political logic of doing the president’s bidding has created an unstoppable momentum. Trump has been flexible on the specifics of the legislation. . . . Using Trumpian lingo to label the bill was a clever decision to brand it as a Trump bill rather than to identify the measure by its much less popular contents.

Trump has accordingly treated internal dissent ruthlessly. . . . with rare exceptions, they have never entertained the prospect of actually opposing Trump’s big, beautiful bill. Their criticism begins from the premise that its passage is necessary. They keep repeating the phrase “Failure is not an option,” a mantra that seems designed to prevent them from considering the possibility that passing the bill could be worse than the alternative.

Or perhaps Republicans in Washington have simply grown inured to Trump-era warnings of catastrophe, which have blared for a decade on end, with accelerating frequency during the second Trump term. . . . .They have picked a bad time to let their guard down, however, because this bill is different. One way is that legislation, unlike executive action, is not subject to the TACO principle; once a law has been passed, Trump can’t just quietly back down. The other is that they will all have cast a vote for it. An angry public won’t merely blame Trump. The ignominy for the disaster will fall upon its authors.