Republicans Stunned: Voters Realize Tax Bill Screwed Them

The Republican Party has become a full time insane asylum where both the party base - especially the evangelical Christians - and now the party leadership are utterly unhinged and detached from reality.  The descent to insanity began years ago and, in my view, was sparked by the rise of the Christofascists within the party.  Now it is full blown and the party is beyond saving.  Yet, it is entertaining when on occasion Republicans are hit in the face by reality.  One such instance is the revulsion that most Americans have towards the Trump/GOP tax cut that was supposed to provide a wave for GOP candidates to ride to victory in the 2018 midterm elections.  A GOP poll concluded that by a 2 to 1 margin voters recognize that the tax bill was a massive give away to the very rich and large corporations.  Similarly, independents see the truth of the tax bill by a 36% margin.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this delicious circumstance.  Here are highlights:

[E]very once in a while, the public will actually figure something out on their own and come to an accurate conclusion about a policy. When this happens, one party or the other is bound to be deeply disappointed that their efforts at mass hornswoggling have failed.

This is the position Republicans now find themselves in, Sahil Kapur and Joshua Green report:

A survey commissioned by the Republican National Committee has led the party to a glum conclusion regarding President Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement: Voters overwhelmingly believe his tax overhaul helps the wealthy instead of average Americans.

By a 2-to-1 margin — 61 percent to 30 percent — respondents said the law benefits “large corporations and rich Americans” over “middle class families,” according to the survey, which was completed on Sept. 2 by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies and obtained by Bloomberg News.

The result was fueled by self-identified independent voters who said by a 36-point margin that large corporations and rich Americans benefit more from the tax law . . .

This information is contained in a slide under the title, “But, we’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue.” Indeed they have — they lost both to the Democrats and to reality.

The reality is not in dispute. Around two-thirds of the benefits of the tax cuts went to those in the top quintile of taxpayers, with about 20 percent of the benefits going to the richest 1 percent. By 2025, when the cuts are fully phased in, the top 1 percent will get 25 percent of the benefits. (See details here.) The centerpiece of the plan, furthermore, was a gigantic corporate tax cut. Republicans promised that this cut would produce a wave of investment and wage increases for workers, but so far the only wave that has resulted is a tsunami of stock buybacks benefiting wealthy shareholders, which is exactly what liberals predicted.

What people do notice, however, is that their paychecks didn’t look much bigger after the tax cut. Maybe they’re getting a few more dollars a week, but it certainly wasn’t life-transforming.

That probably influences perceptions, but I’d contend that where Republicans really lost was not in the fact-checking and media analyses (close as those are to my heart) or even in people’s paychecks, but in the relentless Democratic messaging on this issue. It had the benefit of being 1) easy to understand, 2) consistent with what people already believed about Republicans, and 3) completely true.

So what is the Republican answer to their communication failure?

Republican leaders continue to try to sell the law. They’re planning on holding a floor vote in the House next week for a second phase of tax changes that would make the individual changes permanent. Since it has a slim chance of passing the Senate, the effort is seen as a political messaging tool to remind voters of the cuts and force Democrats to take an uncomfortable vote against tax relief for middle-class Americans.

That is no doubt what Republicans think, but it’s somewhere between questionable and ridiculous. Why would a vote to reinforce an unpopular law do Republicans any favors, and why would Democrats be uncomfortable voting against it?

I think the answer is that Republicans are so deeply committed to cutting taxes that they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the public doesn’t agree with them. Doesn’t everyone believe taxes are too high? Aren’t tax cuts inherently good? Won’t the party that advocates them always be rewarded?

Well, no. As it happens, Americans have surprisingly nuanced views about taxes. Most people think that the amount they have to pay is fair, which makes it harder to make a direct appeal to self-interest by saying “I’ll cut your taxes!” Most importantly, when you ask people what bothers them about the tax system, the top responses are that corporations and wealthy people aren’t paying their fair share.

So if you’re going to pass a huge tax cut whose benefits go mostly to corporations and the wealthy, it would seem almost inevitable that it won’t be popular. But Republicans were so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they convinced themselves that the public would simply have to agree with them.

Thank goodness a majority of Americans see the Trump/GOP tax cut for what it is.  I hope they loudly oppose GOP efforts to cut other programs to address budget deficits that they created with their massive give away to the rich.

Republicans Find Themselves Trapped by Their Own Flimflam

Yesterday I noted that both the Donald Trump "tax reform" plan and the tax cut proposals of GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie are based on the long disproved GOP economics that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow miraculously cause an expansion of economic activity and replace the revenues lost to massive tax cuts.  It did not happen under the Reagan tax reform and more recently it utterly failed in Kansas where extremist governor Sam Brownback and a GOP controlled legislature imposed a GOP dream approach to tax cuts on that state. the results were disastrous and eventually many Republicans joined with Democrats to raise taxes to avoid junk bond status for the state's borrowings and to fund needed services such as roads, public schools and higher education.  Thus the question becomes one of why does the GOP continue to cling to economic and tax policies that have been documented to never work in any way except to put money in the pockets of the super rich and large corporations?  A column in the New York Times gives and explanation.  Here are excerpts:

Last week the Trump administration and its congressional allies working on tax reform achieved something remarkable. They released a tax plan — or, actually, a vague sketch of a plan — that manages both to add trillions to the deficit and to raise taxes on a large fraction of the population. That takes talent.

But like the G.O.P.’s terrible, no good, very bad health plans, this tax debacle was years in the making. On taxes, as with health, leading Republicans have been lying for years. And now the fraud has caught up with the fraudsters.

The road to this tax-cut turkey began in 2010, when Paul Ryan — now speaker of the House — unveiled the first of a series of much-hyped budget plans, all purporting to offer a blueprint for eliminating the U.S. budget deficit.

In fact, they did no such thing. They proposed major tax cuts — primarily benefiting the rich, of course — then simply asserted that no revenue would be lost, because reduced tax rates would be offset by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions. Which loopholes and deductions? Ryan didn’t say.

[T]he Ryan plans also assumed drastic cuts in spending outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What programs would be cut? The budget office again: “No proposals were specified that would generate that path.”

And what was the Ryan plan if you took out those mysterious revenue raisers and spending cuts? A plan to drastically cut taxes on the rich, savagely cut benefits for the poor and the middle class, and increase the overall deficit.

In other words, it was all a con. As I wrote in a 2010 column titled “The Flimflam Man,” “The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.” That judgment looks as valid now as it did then.

And the con went on for years. To this day one sometimes reads articles portraying Ryan as a serious policy wonk, despite abundant evidence of his unseriousness and real questions about his actual command of policy.

But then Republicans regained the White House, meaning that they had to come up with actual tax legislation. And this has put the con under terrible strain.

True, Republicans could just cut taxes on rich people — always their overriding priority — not worry about paying for it, and blow up the deficit. After all, their supposed concern about federal debt was always just a pose, applying only when a Democrat was president. But after all those years of pretending to be deficit hawks, they feel the need to be seen doing something to offset their high-income tax cuts, to close some loophole somewhere.

So they came up with what probably seemed like a clever idea: eliminate the deductibility of state and local taxes. Hey, that would mainly punish people in tax-and-spend blue states, right? Not their problem.

But this turns out to be a much bigger deal than they seemed to realize. (As with health care, they appear to have no idea what they’re doing.) . . . . But eliminating deductions would make many Americans, especially in the upper reaches of the middle class, directly worse off: Almost 60 percent of households between the 80th and 90th percentiles of the income distribution would face tax increases.

And this would happen even though the plan would add several trillion dollars to the deficit. Did I mention that many of those facing tax hikes vote Republican?

In broad outlines, the tax story is a lot like health care. In both cases, Republicans have spent years getting away with big promises backed by lies. Now, with real policy to be made, the lies won’t work anymore. And they can’t handle the truth.

More Tea Party Candidates Are Challenging the GOP Leadership

As a former Republican who held a seat on a local city committee for eight years and watched the initial stages of the take over of the GOP grassroots by Christofascist extremists, I continue to want to say "I told you so" to those I warned about the Frankenstein monster being created.  Now most of the Christofascist are aligned with (if not renaming themselves as and/or joining) the so-called Tea Party ranks and their combined effort make yet spell the end of the GOP.  In the run up to the 2014 midterm elections in November, more and more of the Congressional GOP leadership is finding itself challenged by insane extreme Tea Party primary candidates.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

There is the Tea Party Patriots “Fire the Speaker” petition, which is not to be confused with the FreedomWorks “Fire the Speaker” petition, or the websites variously urging people to “Fire John Boehner” and “Pledge to Fire Boehner.”

A new one, “Replace the Speaker,” appeared after Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, allowed a vote on raising the country’s debt ceiling to move forward.

[G]rowing unease among the most passionate and motivated conservatives is complicating the re-election campaigns of many of the highest-ranking Republican leaders in Washington. Across the country, candidates like Ms. Pierson are waging what is perhaps the most forceful challenge in generations that either political party has seen from within its own ranks.

“It’s very uncommon to challenge incumbents — period. So this is truly unusual,” said Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University who has written about fissures in the conservative movement.

Primary campaigns against party leaders are often more of a nuisance than a serious threat, token challenges waged by local gadflies. But what is startling to Republicans this year is the sheer number of candidates who are willing to take on the party’s most powerful players in Washington, and the backing they are receiving from third-party groups.

The primaries are another measure of the internal tensions within the party, and the erosion of allegiance to it, as it seeks to maintain the enthusiasm of Tea Party supporters even as it tries to project a message with broader appeal to swing voters Republicans will need in the fall.

Mr. Lichtman said the best historical parallel was in 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to purge anti-New Deal conservatives from the Democratic Party. 

The odds for an upset in any of the primaries this year are small. But the election will test whether the Tea Party, a force that has helped Republicans topple Democrats in local races across the country, has become more self-destructive than advantageous.

In the House, in addition to Mr. Sessions, leaders being challenged from the right include Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. In all, six Republican committee chairmen in the House face contested primaries, including Fred Upton of Michigan, of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Frank D. Lucas of Oklahoma, of the Agriculture Committee.

In the Senate, the No. 1 and No. 2 Republicans are fighting off Tea Party-inspired challengers.

These politicians, many of them in their 30s and 40s, take a less deferential view toward their party leaders, revealing how divisions among Republicans have become ideological as well as generational.

Here in Texas, Ms. Pierson, who is two decades Mr. Sessions’s junior, focuses most of her sharp attacks not on President Obama or Democrats, but on Republicans. After a long day that included an interview with the talk show host Glenn Beck at his studios just outside Dallas (“Republicans are worthless,” Mr. Beck muttered to her off camera) and meetings with people she hoped would donate to her campaign, Ms. Pierson stopped in University Park to meet with potential donors and supporters. She also has the backing of FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express and Sarah Palin.

There is more to the article on additional races.  While most of these primary challengers will go down to defeat, they serve two purposes: (i) they will drain campaign funds from the general elections, and (ii) they will force incumbents to shift rightward and embrace more extremist positions which could hurt them come the general election and play to the advantage of Democrats.