McConnell Blames "Entitlements", Not Massive Trump/GOP Tax Cuts for Rising Deficits

One need not be a math whiz to do the math involved in comparing the amount of the massive Trump/GOP tax cuts to the very wealthy and huge corporations with the amount by which the federal deficit is soaring.  Yet, Mitch McConnell is ignoring this simple arithmetic exercise and is blaming the federal deficit on "entitlements" such as Social Security and Medicare into which American taxpayers have been paying funds their entire working lives.  In my own case, over the years, I have paid a very large sum into Social Security and Medicare, yet McConnell is depicting me and millions like me as greedy, irresponsible freeloaders looking for a free give away.  Meanwhile, McConnell and his wife have parlayed their political positions to become very wealthy and, in McConnell's case, he enjoys a platinum retirement package that relieves him of the financial concerns the rest of us have to deal with.  The man is despicable.  Give massive tax cuts to the obscenely wealthy and then demand cuts to programs for the poor, the middle class, and the elderly.  This from a man and political party that pretends to honor "Christian values."  A piece in Bloomberg looks at this foul batshitery.  Here are highlights:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

McConnell’s remarks came a day after the Treasury Department said the U.S. budget deficit grew to $779 billion in Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the result of the GOP’s tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases and rising interest payments on the national debt. That’s a 77 percent increase from the $439 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, when McConnell became majority leader.

Shrinking those popular programs -- either by reducing benefits or raising the retirement age -- without a bipartisan deal would risk a political backlash in the next election. Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, even though his budget proposals have included trims to all three programs.

The Office of Management and Budget has projected a deficit in the coming year of $1.085 trillion despite a healthy economy. And the Congressional Budget Office has forecast a return to trillion-dollar deficits by fiscal 2020.

Republicans in December 2017 also passed a tax cut projected to add more than $1 trillion to the debt over a decade after leaders gave up on creating a plan that wouldn’t increase the debt under the Senate’s scoring rules.

At the time, McConnell told reporters, “I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue-neutral.” He added, “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York responded Tuesday by saying McConnell and other Republicans “blew a $2 trillion hole in the federal deficit to fund a tax cut for the rich. To now suggest cutting earned middle-class programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid as the only fiscally responsible solution to solve the debt problem is nothing short of gaslighting."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement, “Under the GOP’s twisted agenda, we can afford tax cuts for billionaires, but not the benefits our seniors have earned.”

Elderly White Voters Are Starting to Turn on the GOP

With all of the bad news that has racked the GOP - losing special elections, record numbers of Republicans opt ing to retire, almost unprecedented Democrat energy, and, of course, the Trump/Pence shitshow - polls suggest that a new menace is forming: defections of elderly whites repelled by the GOP threats to access to health care and the Trump/GOP tax cuts.   True, poor whites more prone to fall for GOP racism and/or pandering to Christian extremism are stay true to the GOP, but educated aging whites seem to belatedly coming to the realization that the GOP is working against their interests - actually for years now - and poses a threat to their future and retirement years.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this new defection from the GOP.  Here are highlights:

One of the many odd features of American politics, circa 2018, is that the primary beneficiaries of our nation’s social safety net are also the core supporters of the party that wants to slash it. No age group derives a bigger benefit from our welfare state than America’s elderly; but no cohort is as susceptible to the cultural paranoia and racial resentment that sustain the modern right, either. Thus, conservatives can’t shrink “big government” without retaining the allegiance of the voters who stand to lose most from the erosion of social insurance.

The tensions inherent to this arrangement grew conspicuous during last year’s fight over Obamacare repeal — when congressional Republicans tried to pass a health-care bill that would have drastically increased the cost of health insurance for older, working-class voters in rural America (a core GOP constituency) while dramatically lowering premiums for 20-something city-dwellers (an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic). Many purple-district Republicans voted for the bill, anyway, effectively betting that it was more politically hazardous to thwart the ideological goals of their big-dollar donors, than to betray the material interests of their gray-haired voters.

This may have been costly mistake.

According to polling from Reuters/Ipsos, the percentage of college-educated white voters who say “health care” is their top issue rose from 8 percent in 2016 to 21 percent today; over that same period, the demographic went from favoring a Republican Congress by ten points, to backing a Democratic one by two.

[T]he Ryan agenda does seem to have played a role in alienating college-educated white Republicans, whose educational backgrounds already rendered them a less-than-ideal audience for Trump’s anti-intellectual shtick.

John Camm has been a Republican since the Nixon Administration, but the 63-year-old Tucson accountant says he will likely support a Democrat for Congress in November. He is splitting with his party over access to health insurance as well as its recent overhaul of the nation’s income tax system. He also supports gun control measures that the party has rejected.

“I’m a moderate Republican, and yet my party has run away from that,” Camm said. “So give me a moderate Democrat.”

… Voters between the ages of 60 and 65 are particularly worried about healthcare, said Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University in New Jersey, because they are paying ever higher private health insurance premiums and are not yet eligible for Medicare.

Republicans have sought consolation in the fact that core Democratic constituencies (like nonwhite and younger voters) have historically failed to turn out for midterms in high numbers. But the Democrats’ turnout advantage in the past year’s special elections put a dent in that hope — and the leftward lurch of elderly whites all but eviscerates it. Older, college-educated whites are among the most reliable voters in the nation.

Republicans were already at risk of losing the House due to shifts in turnout patterns, alone — but if those shifts are accompanied by significant defections among reliable GOP constituencies, the party could suffer historic losses up and down the ballot.

“The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” political scientist Larry Sabato told Reuters. “If that continues to November, they’re toast.”

Remarkably, even as Republicans have lost ground with this key demographic — and Democratic candidates have won improbable special election victories while painting their Republican opponents as enemies of Medicare and Social Security — Paul Ryan has persisted in calling for sweeping cuts to entitlement spending.

Ryan and his reverse Robin Hood agenda may yet prove to be the death of the GOP.  Add in revulsion toward Trump, and it could be a perfect storm for the GOP's annihilation.

The GOP: Twilight of the Apparatchiks

0In an almost equally snarky column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman looks at the delusional nature of the so-called GOP establishment that cannot grasp that it has unleashed a Frankenstein monster that the party base will not reject as directed from on high.  Trump is running his campaign to pander to precisely the racism and misogyny that the party elites have cultivated for years going all the way back to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to win the South after desegregation.   In the process, the establishment types came to live in a bubble where facts and the lives of average Americans do not matter.  Rather, it's all about playing by the rules and swearing allegiance to the party orthodoxy no matter how out of touch with reality it may be.  Donald trump's rise is a signal that the bubble is perhaps about to burst and the neat little game plan of the establishment may be about to go down the toilet.  Here are column highlights:

Lack of self-awareness can be fatal. The haplessness of the Republican establishment in the face of Trumpism is a case in point.

As many have noted, it’s remarkable how shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the G.O.P. the party of Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high-minded philosophical messages, like talking about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks?

Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles.

What I find even more amazing, however, are the Republican establishment’s delusions about what its own voters are for. You see, all indications are that the party elite imagines that base voters share its own faith in conservative principles, when that not only isn’t true, it never has been.

Here’s an example: Last summer, back when Mr. Trump was just beginning his rise, he promised not to cut Social Security, and insiders like William Kristol gleefully declared that he was “willing to lose the primary to win the general.” In reality, however, Republican voters don’t at all share the elite’s enthusiasm for entitlement cuts . . . 

Yet the Republican establishment still seems unable to understand that hardly any of its own voters, let alone the voters it would need to win in the general election, are committed to free-market, small-government ideology. 

Oh, and the G.O.P. establishment was also sure that Mr. Trump would pay a heavy price for asserting that we were misled into Iraq — evidently unaware just how widespread that (correct) belief is among Americans of all political persuasions.

So what’s the source of this obliviousness? The answer, I’d suggest, is that in recent years — and, in fact, for the past couple of decades — becoming a conservative activist has actually been a low-risk, comfortable career choice. Most Republican officeholders hold safe seats, which they can count on keeping if they are sufficiently orthodox. Moreover, if they should stumble, they can fall back on “wingnut welfare,” the array of positions at right-wing media organizations, think tanks and so on that are always there for loyal spear carriers.

And loyalty is almost the only thing that matters. Does an economist at a right-wing think tank have a remarkable record of embarrassing mistakes? Does a pundit have an almost surreal history of bad calls? No matter, as long as they hew to the orthodox line.

But back to the hermetic world of the Republican elite: This world has, as I said, existed for decades. The result is an establishment comprising apparatchiks, men (mainly) who have spent their entire professional lives in an environment where repeating approved orthodoxy guarantees an easy life, while any deviation from that orthodoxy means excommunication. They know that people outside their party disagree, but that doesn’t matter much for their careers.

Now, however, they face the reality that most voters inside their party don’t agree with the orthodoxy, either. And all signs are that they still can’t wrap their minds around that fact. . . . Even now, when it’s almost too late to stop the Trump Express, they still imagine that “But he’s not a true conservative!” is an effective attack.

Things would be very different, obviously, if Mr. Trump were in fact to lock in the Republican nomination (which could happen in a few weeks). Would his raw appeal to white Americans’ baser instincts continue to work? I don’t think so. But given the ineffectuality of his party’s elite, my guess is that we will get a chance to find out.

The Shrinking Tent of the GOP's Policies of Obstruction

I don't much like columnist Jennifer Rubin, but in a column in the Washington Post she a kick in the ass litany of what's wrong with today's Republican Party and its fantasy world that we are still living in the 1980's and that all the GOP needs to do is fix its "messaging problem."  The reality is that the world and the country have changed and are continuing to change yet the GOP base - especially the reality denying Christofascists - simply do not get that message.  She candidly states that the GOP needs to change or die.  Candidly, I am not going to hold my breath and expect that to happen any time soon.  The party grass roots has become an insane asylum where acceptance of reality simply isn't on the agenda.  Here are column highlights:

If the GOP can’t win elections and win adherents, it is headed for the ash heap of history.

The right is not divided into moderates and conservatives, as a smart pollster told me, but between those who can count and those who cannot. If conservatives do not attract larger numbers in the fastest-growing parts of the electorate, they will not win elections, their agenda will become a dusty artifact on the shelf and the country will slide further into decline.

Those who say that the right needs only to be more articulate and more forceful in defense of the exact same agenda are kidding themselves. Those who say they can’t find common ground with gay conservatives who believe in capitalism, Second Amendment rights, and federalism are harming the movement, the party, and the country. Those who refuse to recognize that we will not deport 11 million immigrants who came here illegally are in Never Never Land and are defending a lawless system, not the “rule of law.”

It is also time to stop complaining about the left and the voters. Conservatives sound too whiny; victimhood is unappealing. They need to be forward-looking, optimistic and practical. It is not enough to be against Obamacare. They must be for market-based health-care reform. It is insufficient to be against excessive spending. They must be for entitlement and tax reform. It’s not enough to rail against the breakdown of the family. They must be for policies that encourage and sustain marriage and make child rearing easier and less costly. It’s not going to work just to inveigh against teachers unions; conservatives have to enact school reform including school choice.
It is time to get out of the 1980s and into the 21st century.

CPAC should pass out some writings of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. They were practical and prudent, and they understood that we cannot remake our fellow citizens or reinvent their habits and inclinations. 

The leaders of CPAC and many in the conservative movement have lost track of that. They are creatures of the 1980s, when our problems, our country and the world were different. They became so adept at the politics of the 1980s that they never left that decade.

Why Seeking Unity With Extremists Is Wrong

In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank has a column that suggests that the man has his head so far up his ass that it is a wonder he hasn't suffocated.  Obama's inaugural address cited the founding principles of America and called on Americans to embrace their better angels and work to deliver the full fruits of those principles: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.Yet all Mibank can do is chide Obama for not seeking unity with the extremists and political saboteurs within the Republican Party.  I guess, those who opposed Hitler and his policies were wrong as well in Milbank's book.  Seeking peace with evil and those who would knowingly and deliberately wreak harm on others - in this case the poor, those without health insurance, the unemployed, disadvantaged minorities - while bestowing tax cuts to billionaires and pandering to bigots and white supremacists is never the right thing to do.  Yet, Milbank would have Obama roll over to the agenda of those who want to bring back the inequality of the Gilded Age and a time that saw even a higher percentage of Americans doing without protections in the work place or any kind of social safety net.  Here's a sampling of Milbank's head up his ass whining:

President Obama began his second inaugural address with a reminder that this ceremony, like the 56 inaugurations before it in U.S. history, was a unifying symbol.

What followed was less an inaugural address for the ages than a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address. Obama used the most visible platform any president has to decry global-warming skeptics who “still deny the overwhelming judgment of science.” He quarreled with Republicans who say entitlement programs “make us a nation of takers.” He condemned the foreign policy of his predecessor by saying that “enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”

“We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate,” the president informed his opponents. Not that they were listening.

[T]he emphasis was unusually political for an inaugural address. Obama reminded his opponents that his oath of office, “like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction.”

But if the speech wasn’t as grand or as memorable as previous addresses, perhaps that’s not entirely a bad thing. In his first term, Obama was undone by impossibly high expectations. This time, expectations are quite low that he can do much to change the grim state of Washington. With a lower hurdle to clear, Obama’s pedestrian rhetoric and tough words for his opponents gave Americans a fair sense of what to expect in the coming years.

The blunt truth is that the American people need to face reality: many of the nation's problems track directly to one political party, the GOP.  It's failed policies brought about the 2008 financial collapse, it's rush into unfunded wars that were fool's errands and based on lies, and it's blind fealty to the wealthy and those who seek to undo the Constitution's promise of equality and religious freedom have all helped to put America in the bad place in which it finds itself today.  Yet Milbank expects Obama to embrace these people and not challenge their lies.