The Republican Party's War on the Poor

The Republican Party and its most reliable base, evangelical Christians, bloviate endlessly about their supposed support for "Christian values" and worship of the Bible and its admonitions.  Yet the policies they pursue and support are diametrically opposed to Christ's principles and values as laid out in the Gospels.  Indeed, Matthew 25:41-46 states as follows:  

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

The dishonesty and hypocrisy of these Republicans and evangelical Christians is truly mind numbing.  A column in the New York Times underscores just how far apart the Gospel message and the evangelical Christian/Republican agenda have become.  Here are column highlights: 

America hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there’s something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still, we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben Carson’s insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.

And this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.

That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why.

Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover, there’s good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance.

For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.

So what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory.” And I guess you can see where that comes from. After all, he’s a self-made man who can’t attribute any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?

Public Opposition to GOP Tax Bill Grows

Between running candidates that are becoming increasingly extreme and backing legislation viewed as abhorrent by a majority of voters, the Republican Party appears to have a death wish.  A case in point is the so-called GOP tax bill - the millionaire/billionaire benefit bill would be a better name - which is increasingly opposed by a strong majority of voters.  Here are highlights from a new CNN poll:

With the House of Representatives likely to take up the Republican tax reform bill Tuesday, the plan faces growing opposition and a widespread perception that it will benefit the wealthy more than the middle class, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Opposition to the bill has grown 10 points since early November, and 55% now oppose it. Just 33% say they favor the GOP's proposals to reform the nation's tax code.

Two-thirds see the bill as doing more to benefit the wealthy than the middle class (66%, vs. 27% who say it'll do more to benefit the middle class) and almost four in 10 (37%) say that if the bill becomes law, their own family will be worse off. That's grown five points since early November. Just 21% say they'll be better off if the bill becomes law.

More than six in 10 (63%) see the tax bill as leaving the President [Trump] and his family better off. Just 5% think it harms the Trump clan. And disapproval of the President's handling of taxes has risen six points in the last month, to 57%.

Americans see health care and averting a government shutdown as higher priorities than passing tax reform, but among Republicans, taxes top the congressional to-do list. Overall, 17% call tax reform the top priority for Congress, below the 30% who prioritize health care and 23% who say Congress should focus on passing a bill to avoid a shutdown.

The poll also found that 83% favor continuing the policy that allows immigrants brought to the US illegally as children to remain in the country if they meet certain conditions. That's about the same as in September.

Once the true impact of the bill becomes known, I suspect opposition will grow and give Democrats a gift for the 2018 midterm campaigns. 

Is Trump Leading Republicans to Slaughter?

It is Thanksgiving Day - a day for family and friends and hopefully a little bit of love for one's fellow citizens.  Yet even as families gather, Congressional Republicans are taking only a brief respite from the effort to harm countless middle and working class families and the elderly through a tax plan that benefits the very wealthy and large corporations. Most Americans oppose the plan and groups like AARP - which represents the most dependable voters - are condemning the savaging of Medicare and other social programs.   Der Trumpenführer - who estimates show might enjoy a billion dollar benefit - is of course supporting the effort and is supporting alleged child molester Roy Moore because Moore's vote is "needed for the tax bill."  A lengthy piece in Newsweek raises the question of whether Trump is leading the GOP to a slaughter.  I for one, hope that such is the case.  When I left the GOP as the Christofascists (and the white supremacy they brought with them) were ascendant I concluded that only the ruin of the party could excise the cancer.  Here are article highlights:

The prophet led the faithful into the jungle, where he promised they would find salvation. . . . That place was called Jonestown, a village hacked out of the jungle of Guyana. The Reverend Jim Jones did not manage to turn the settlement into the earthly paradise he’d promised his parishioners. In 1978, after a shootout that left visiting U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and four other members of a visiting delegation dead, Jones ordered his followers to perpetuate one of the most grotesque acts of mass murder in American history. “How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life,” he opened his final sermon, laden with dark grievance, as 900 people prepared for their deaths. “But in spite of all of my trying, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible.”

 Time now for the necessary and obvious caveats. Jonestown was a horrific act of homicide. No matter how much you dislike Trump, he is not Jim Jones. His impolitic tweets at North Korean despot Kim Jong Un notwithstanding, he does not harbor a death wish, either for himself or for the country. He probably has more compassion than his critics are willing to concede. And yet his influence on the party he now leads may well prove the political equivalent of Jonestown. Having assumed control of the GOP, Trump may now destroy it: its national infrastructure, its fundraising capacity and, most of all, its support from the American public. A Gallup tracking poll in early October found that only 24 percent of respondents identified as Republicans. That’s the lowest level of affiliation for the party in two years, a lack of popularity that is especially remarkable because Republicans control both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. But whatever the case, the GOP appears to have made a fatal mistake in allowing itself to be seduced by his populism. All the glories of Trumpism will belong to Trump, while all the failures will be passed off to a hapless band he sometimes calls “the Republicans.” “Republican leaders have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump,” says Will Marshall, founder of the centrist organization New Democracy. . . . . Attempts by others to mimic his convictions have been pathetic, transparent and unsuccessful. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, a creature of K Street boardrooms, ran a campaign of Southern racial grievance and anti-immigrant fearmongering. He lost by 9 points to Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam a few weeks ago. Many prominent Republicans believe their party has come to resemble the adherents of Jones, drifting ever further from reality. Trump, meanwhile, has shown no interest in reconciling the disparate factions of the GOP, hectoring leaders of his own party on Twitter as if they were obscure backbenchers . . . .

The GOP “will face obliteration in 2018,” says Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who served as chief strategist on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. When we spoke recently, Schmidt blamed the party’s fortunes on McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, a duo that he says “make Neville Chamberlain look like Churchill,” a reference to the British prime minister famous for capitulating to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938.  “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill said in response to Chamberlain’s cowardice. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Bruce Bartlett, who served as a senior adviser to Ronald Reagan, told me he wishes there were a Republican who’d utter a basic truth: “Our party is being killed by these idiots” in the Trump administration. And a few have, including Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee. They have both chosen to retire, however, aware that their anti-Trump positions would likely engender a ferocious primary battle.

Bartlett thinks fears of electoral defeat shouldn’t discourage critics. “It’s better for us to lose power for a generation than to continue this fraud.”

Many Americans dislike Trump’s vision for the nation, but they like the Republicans’ vision even less. Only 17 percent of Americans supported the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. While the Republicans refuse to enact any tougher gun laws, Gallup finds that 60 percent of American support stricter gun laws. The vast majority of Americans rejected the Republican tax cut plan, with support as low as 25 percent in some polls. . . . It fell to Bartlett, the former Reagan adviser, to admit that correlations between tax cuts and economic growth were “a myth.” But once you’re in the jungle, the way out isn’t easy. The vacated Republican seats may entice Bannon-funded candidates who are true believers in Trumpism. That could turn the marriage of convenience between DJT and GOP into a suicide pact. Insurgent candidates such as former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, who has been accused of child molestation and sexual misconduct, could prove far more devastating than establishment incumbents who may not share Bannon’s nationalist vision but will maintain Republican majorities in Congress.

Speaking last weekend in Arizona, unaware that a microphone had been turned on, Flake admitted to a fear shared by most of his establishment peers: “If we become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast.”

“It's increasingly hard to see how they recover from this,” says Charles Sykes, the onetime conservative radio host who has left the party and written about it in How the Right Lost Its Mind. “By pandering to the Trumpists, they have isolated themselves from the majority of voters. And this association with Roy Moore will be radioactive.”

Trump may do for conservatives what Stalin did for American radicals, forcing them to re-evaluate their convictions. The onetime eager socialists of City College in the century’s first decades became the neoconservatives who formed the backbone of the Republican Party through the George W. Bush presidency . . . . Trump may try to blame Democrats for this dour national mood, but voters aren’t likely to be fooled. “The Republican brand is shattered for the millennial generation and young people,” Schmidt told me. “It’s shattered for all time for Latinos, with African-Americans. And it’s shattered not because of Trump’s terrible behavior, but because of the absolute cowardice of the leaders of the Congress”. Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter that he intends to remain part of the loyal opposition to Trump. “I am staying a Republican,” he wrote. “Will not let GOP be taken over by Russian collaborators, racists, pedophiles and outlaws. Will oppose all elected officials who do not stand up for the rule of law.”

In response to that tweet, someone replied with the image of a tombstone for the Republican Party. The cause of death, the doctored tombstone declared, was Donald Trump.

The Increasingly Grotesque Republican Agenda

As a former Republican who was raised in a predominantly Republican family I am increasingly shocked by the ugliness of the agenda of today's GOP which seemingly puts little effort into the pretense that it is a political party that gives a damn about average American much less their families.  My late parents and grandparents would be shocked  at the willingness of today's congressional Republicans - and they are no better at the state level - to throw millions of Americans into the gutter while lavishing huge tax breaks on the disgustingly wealthy (analysis of the House "tax reform" bill passed today on a party line vote estimates the Trump family will receive over a billion dollars in benefits).  As for the Gospel message, in today's GOP, that is something that receives lip service in order to prostitute party elected officials to Christofascists (who in truth only cling to certain Old Testament passages to justify their hatred of others) while the core of the Gospel message is tossed in the trash or utterly ignored.   A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist who I suspect, like me, has disavowed GOP membership enumerates some examples of the ugliness of today's Republican Party.  Here are excerpts.

It turns out that electing President Trump was not the apex of Republicans’ political insanity. Since last November, consider the Trump GOP’s track record:

The GOP’s idea of health-care reform was trying to remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich. Having learned their lesson (not), Senate Republicans now support a tax bill that will remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich — and to big corporations. Its tax plan contains permanent, huge tax breaks for corporations (e.g. reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent) and a new 25 percent rate for pass-throughs but temporary breaks for the middle class (e.g. the $300 “family flexibility” tax credit per filer).

The GOP’s environmental agenda includes climate-change denial (despite the government’s own confirmation that climate change is real and man-made), lifting the ban on importing elephant trophies (the first sons are avid big-game hunters and Christmas is around the corner) and trying in vain to save the coal industry. Trump’s GOP has made China look like a leader in global environmental issues.

The GOP president now embraces (literally, I think) autocrats like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, applauds autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after a stolen election, barely if at all brings up human rights in China and Saudi Arabia, and has not a bad word to say about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The GOP now opposes multilateral trade deals (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership) while China makes trade deals and the TPP countries forge a deal among themselves without the United States.

The GOP’s constitutional conservatism amounts to giving a totally unqualified nominee who hid a conflict of interest a lifetime federal court appointment. . . . . “Brett J. Talley, the young lawyer nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal judgeship in Alabama . . . did not, however, identify any family members — including his wife, who is one of President Trump’s attorneys. . . . He’s actually one of four nominees rated “unqualified” by the American Bar Association.

The GOP president believes 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally based on no evidence whatsoever but doesn’t think the Russians meddled in our election despite the unanimous findings of our intelligence services.

The GOP-led Congress is content to tolerate Trump’s nepotism, massive conflicts of interest and possible receipt of foreign emoluments. It looks the other way as a president monetizes the office, hawking his properties at every opportunity.

This is not a party that can be described as coherent, sensible, respectful of the rule of law, dedicated to equal protection or grounded in reality — let alone conservative. Today’s GOP stands for a set of crackpot ideas, unworkable and unpopular policies and a president not remotely fit to remain in office. Some sunny optimists think the GOP can be saved. From our perspective, it’s not worth trying.

I completely agree with the last sentence.  The GOP is not worth saving.  I made this decision numerous years ago at this point and believe that the best thing one can do is work diligently to see the GOP defeated in every possible election.  As for "friends" and neighbors who continue to live in a fantasy world and pretend that the GOP is still the party of their grandparents and parents, I have a few words of advice: get your heads out of your asses.  

Welcome to the New Gilded Age

In numerous past posts I have argued that one of the ultimate goals of today's Republican Party is to restore the wild wealth disparities of the Gilded Age when Rockefellers, Goulds, DuPonts and others amassed huge fortunes, paid little in taxes, and the vast majority of the rest of the citizenry struggled to simply get by.   The new Republican tax plan is a prime example of how today's GOP - which bears no resemblance to the GOP of Eisenhower or even of Reagan - seeks only to benefit the wealthy while playing its base for fools by playing to base prejudices based on race and religion.  It's ugly, its the antithesis of Christian values, and it will harm the long term prospect of many Americans.  A column in the Washington Post lays out how the new tax "reform" delivers wealth to the wealthy while throwing crumbs at best to most of us.  Here are excerpts:

Corporations are people, my friend. And this is where they feed. Room 1100 of the Longworth Building, with its ionic columns, gilt-fringed curtains and eagle-topped frieze, has for 80 years been the home of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. But perhaps never before have corporations wielded their power as openly as they have here this week.

As the panel moves to approve the Republican tax plan, this is the room where it happens — where the rich will get richer, where everybody else will be forced to shoulder a greater share of the tax burden, and where a trillion dollars of tax breaks for corporations are being passed by lawmakers who work for these very corporations.

In one case, literally.  On Monday afternoon, as the committee began its markup of the tax bill, there on the top level of the dais, three seats from the chairman, munching from a bag of potato chips, was Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi (R-Ohio). Tiberi announced last month that he’s quitting Congress to lead the Ohio Business Roundtable, a group of “the CEOs of the state’s largest and most influential business enterprises.” Tiberi filed a notification with the House Ethics Committee that he was negotiating terms of employment with the group.

This isn’t illegal or against House rules. But a lawmaker drafting and passing legislation that benefits the people with whom he is negotiating the terms of his employment? That stinks.

So it goes in this new gilded age. The $1.5 trillion tax cut has $1 trillion in corporate tax breaks. The idea was that the corporate tax rate could be lowered if you eliminated corporate tax loopholes. Now corporations will have the lower rates and the loopholes.

Individuals lose the ability to deduct state and local taxes, tax preparation, moving expenses and most medical expenses. But corporations — think of them as Very Important Persons with superhuman privileges — can still deduct these same expenses.

“Will a teacher in my district who buys pens, pencils and paper for his students be able to deduct these costs from his tax returns under this plan?” He will not.

“Will a corporation that buys pens, pencils and papers for its workers be able to deduct those costs from its tax returns?” It will.

“Will a firefighter in my district be able to deduct the state and local sales taxes that she pays from her tax return?” She will not.

“Will a corporation be able to deduct sales taxes on business purchases?” It will.

As the corporate welfare is doled out, the same bill widens the gap between the rich and everybody else. The liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded that the middle fifth of Americans would get a modest tax cut of $460 (1.4 percent of their income) in 2018, while the richest 1 percent would have a cut of $64,720 (2.5 percent of their income). Even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, using a more favorable methodology, acknowledges the plan would cost the federal government $989 billion over a decade.

Corporations have had their way with Washington before. In 2003, Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) caused an uproar when he quit Congress to become the top drug-industry lobbyist right after he helped to write and pass the Medicare prescription-drug expansion. He earned harsh denunciations as a symbol of Washington’s revolving door.

What’s different now is the reaction. Tiberi continues to help shepherd the corporate tax bill even after naming his corporate employer — and he is applauded. . . . . .  If only those financing his next endeavor didn’t benefit so handsomely from his current one.

Trump, Gillespie and the Same Old Party

Tomorrow is election day in Virginia and the choice is between an expansion of the Trump/GOP racist and reverse Robin Hood agenda embodied by Ed Gillespie and the rest of the GOP statewide ticket or, in contrast, the Democrat ticket of Ralph Northam for Governor, Mark Herring for Attorney General and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor or which will continue a progressive, forward looking agenda that makes Virginia a welcoming location for all citizens.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that a vote for Gillespie is a vote for Donald Trump and his ugly agenda.  As a former Republican who is sickened by what the GOP has become, please take the time to read the column and take the time to get out and vote tomorrow for the Democrat ticket.  Our children's and grandchildren's futures depend on you.  Here are column excerpts:

Since last year’s presidential election a number of establishment Republicans have very publicly wrung their hands over what has happened to their party. George W. Bush has even lamented that he may turn out to have been the “last Republican president,” because Donald Trump represents something so alien to the party’s tradition.

But how different is Trump, really? He’s cruder, ruder and less competent than his Republican predecessors — although on that last point, we shouldn’t forget the Bush administration’s disastrous occupation of Iraq and botched response to Hurricane Katrina. But there’s a lot more continuity than his conservative critics want to admit. If Trumpism seems to be taking over the Republican Party, that’s largely because in many ways the party was already there.

What, after all, does the modern — by which I basically mean post-Reagan — Republican Party stand for? A cynic might say that it has basically served the interests of the economic elite while winning votes from the white working class with racial dog whistles. And the cynic would be right.

[H]ow much has changed in the era of Trump? Consider two current news stories: the House Republican tax plan and the campaign that Ed Gillespie, a consummate Republican insider, has been running for governor of Virginia.

On the tax plan: . . . . According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, by the time the law would be fully phased in, there would be huge income gains for millionaires — even bigger if you take repeal of the estate tax into account — with minimal benefits for a great majority of the population. In fact, tens of millions of middle- and lower-income families would end up facing tax increases . . .

In short, Trumpist tax policy is as elitist if not more elitist and anti-populist than the policies of previous Republican administrations. Same old, same old.

[W]e don’t have to argue about the past: Just look at how Ed Gillespie has campaigned in Virginia over the past few months.

Gillespie is, as I said, a consummate Republican insider, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and counselor to George W. Bush. So what does it say about the Republican establishment and its values that he has run a campaign completely focused on stirring up white racial hostility?

So has Gillespie faced strong criticism from establishment Republicans for waging such a gutter campaign? No — there has been a bit of tut-tutting from lower-level figures, but hardly anything from people whose condemnation might matter. . . . . if “never Trump” Republicans really wanted to purge Trumpism from the party, they’d be urging voters to reject Gillespie for his vile tactics.

So how many in the Republican establishment have spoken up to say that Gillespie must lose if the party is to save its soul? Hardly any.

Oh, and if you’re in Virginia, reading this, and haven’t yet voted, please do. This is a hugely consequential election, and it will be a shame — indeed, a tragedy — if its outcome is determined by people who couldn’t be bothered to get to the polls.

The Top Ten Trump/Republican Lies About Tax Cuts

For years now the Republican Party has relied on its appeals to religious based bigotry and racism to convince many lower and middle class voters to vote against their own economic interests so that Republicans could pursue policies that best served the extremely wealthy.   With the GOP and Der Trumpenführer rolling out alleged "tax reform" that will shower the wealthy with huge tax cuts, we are witnessing the same phenomenon yet again.  Here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is likewise promising tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and leave the state with a huge budget deficit.  This time around, Republicans are trotting out a number of lies to help them dupe voters into betraying their own best interest a column in the New York Times bu a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at the top 10 GOP lies about taxes at the moment.  Here are column excerpts (I have looked at the six lies, read the entire piece for the other three):

Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track. 

I thought it might be useful, both for myself and for others, to put together a crib sheet: a fairly long-form description of ten big lies Trump and allies are telling, what they’ve said, and how we know that they are lies.

Lie #1: America is the most highly-taxed country in the world

This is a Trump special: he’s said it many, many times, most recently just this past week. Each time, fact-checkers have piled on to point out that it’s false.

Why does Trump keep repeating what even he has to know by now is a flat lie? I suspect it’s a power thing: he enjoys showing that he can lie repeatedly through his teeth, be caught red-handed in his lie again and again, and his followers will still believe him rather than the “fake news” media.

Lie #2: The estate tax is destroying farmers and truckers

Tales of struggling family farms disbanded because they can’t afford the taxes when the patriarch dies have flourished for decades, despite the absence of any examples. . . . . Lately Trump has added a new twist, portraying the estate tax as a terrible burden on hard-working truckers. For who among us doesn’t own an $11 million fleet of trucks?
[T]he Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, is that only a small number of very large estates pay any tax at all, and only a tiny fraction of those tax-paying estates are small businesses or family farms. . . . it seems quite possible that this year only 2 or 3 truckers and not a single farmer will pay any estate tax.

Lie #3: Taxation of pass-through entities is a burden on small business

Most businesses in the United States, at least for tax purposes, aren’t what we normally think of as corporations subject to profits taxes. Instead, they’re partnerships, sole proprietorships, and S corporations whose earnings are simply “passed through”: counted as part of their owners’ personal income and taxed accordingly. . . . Trump wants to change that, and let owners simply pay a 15 percent tax on the earnings of pass-through entities, with no further taxes owed.

The vast majority of Americans are in a tax bracket of 15 percent or less, so even if they control a pass-through entity, the Trump tax break is worth nothing to them . . . . High-income individuals, however, would gain a lot by paying 15 percent instead of the much higher rates they pay at the margin – 39.6 percent right now. And they’d also have a strong incentive to rearrange their affairs so that more of their income pops up in their pass-throughs. This wouldn’t be small-business creation; it wouldn’t add jobs; it would just be tax avoidance. That’s what happened when Kansas tried something similar, and played a big role in the state’s fiscal disaster.

So this isn’t a tax break for small business, it’s a tax break for, surprise, wealthy individuals.

Lie #4: Cutting profits taxes really benefits workers

Think about what happens if you cut the taxes on corporate profits. The immediate impact is that (duh) corporations have more money. Why would they spend that extra money on hiring more workers or increasing their wages?

Not, surely, out of the goodness of their hearts – and not in response to worker demands, because these days nobody cares what workers think.

Now, they might be inclined to invest more, increasing the demand for labor and therefore raising wages indirectly while competing pre-tax profits down. But there are a couple of major slippages in this story.

So for an extended period – at least 5 years, probably much more — cutting profits taxes is good for owners of corporations. Workers, not so much.

Lie #5: Repatriating overseas profits will create jobs

For tax reasons, corporations hold a lot of money in overseas tax shelters. Tax cutters always claim that lower rates and/or an amnesty will bring that money home and create a lot of jobs.

Those overseas accounts are just an accounting device, which have very little real effect. Many of the companies with big overseas hoards also have plenty of idle cash at home; what’s holding them back is a lack of perceived opportunities, not cash flow. And even those who don’t have surplus cash can easily borrow at near-record low interest rates; remember, they can always use the overseas cash to secure their loans.

And we have solid empirical evidence here. In 2004 the U.S. enacted the Homeland Investment Act, which offered a tax holiday for repatriation of foreign earnings by U.S. multinationals. Careful study of its effects tells us that

Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R&D — even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions and for firms that appeared to be financially constrained. Instead, a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of almost $1 in payouts to shareholders.

Lie #6: This is not a tax cut for the rich

Trump says it isn’t, so that’s that, right? Oh, wait.
Actually, if you look at the major provisions of the Unified Framework, the big items are (i) Cuts in corporate taxes (ii) Pass-through tax cut (iii) elimination of the estate tax (iv) cut in top marginal rate. All these strongly favor very high incomes – and everything else is small change. Hence the Tax Policy Center estimate: . . . . given the general shape of the plan there’s no way it can fail to be very much a gift to the already very rich.

Lie #7: It’s a big tax cut for the middle class

See Lie #6 above. All the big provisions benefit the rich, not the middle class. What’s left is mostly small change – and some of it, like ending deductibility of state and local taxes and other deductions, actually raises taxes on a substantial number of middle-class Americans.

In total, by 2027, according to TPC, 80 percent of the tax cut goes to the top 1 percent; only 12 percent to the middle three quintiles.

The take away? Trump and Republicans - including Ed Gillespie and his running mates - are playing their base for fools yet again.

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.

Trump and Gillespie Seek to Reprise Kansas' Failed Tax Plan

In 2012, Kansas far right GOP governor Sam Brownback of Kansas signed a massive tax cut into law.  Brownback and his GOP allies promised that the massive tax cuts would boost the state's economy.  Among his goals, Brownback and the Kansas GOP he hoped to eliminate individual income taxes entirely.  Brownback's administration claimed the bill would create 23,000 jobs by 2020, and would lead 35,000 more people to move to Kansas.  Saying that the promised economic benefits never materialized would be far too kind.  The state was nearly left bankrupt, essential services, including highway maintenance, were slashed and public education funding dropped to far below 2008 levels, triggering significant program reductions in schools across the state. Class sizes have increased, teachers and staff members have been laid off, essential services for at-risk students were eliminated, some schools were forced to reduce the class week to four days. Now we have Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and other toadies of the likes of the Koch brothers seeking to take the Kansas disaster national.  Meanwhile, here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is seeking to mimic the failed Kansas model with his promise of an across the board tax cut (Virginia already has a relative low tax rate).  A piece in Politico looks at how Democrats are pushing back against this ready-made disaster.  Here are excerpts:

In a warning shot to Republicans crafting landmark tax legislation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that Kansas’ experiment with tax cuts foreshadows what can happen if the GOP relies on “fake numbers” to support its effort.

Speaking on CBS’ "Face the Nation," Schumer rebutted assertions by the Trump administration that the president’s tax plan is not designed to cut taxes for rich Americans.

“It's completely focused on the wealthy and the powerful. Not on the middle class,” Schumer said.

The New York Democrat also attacked Republicans’ assertion that the tax plan won’t add to the deficit. Kansas’ 2012 tax cuts led to a budget deficit that forced the state to cut funding for schools and infrastructure, Schumer said. Facing a major budget deficit, Kansas lawmakers in June approved legislation that rolled back many of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts.

“This idea that cutting taxes on the wealthy, this trickle-down economics which the Republican Party loves, does not create growth,” Schumer said. “It never has."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was dubious of the idea that the plan wouldn't overwhelmingly benefit the rich.

"For Trump to go on television that, oh, this doesn't benefit the wealthy is absolutely outrageous," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Of course, it benefits the wealthy. And of course it benefits large multinational corporations."  . . . "We are living in a moment of massive income and wealth inequality. The very, very rich are getting richer. Middle class is shrinking."

Republicans' trickle down lies have never worked.  Despite the proof of objective reality in Kansas and elsewhere the lie persists.  Hopefully, Virginians do not fall for this lie next moth in our statewide elections.

Most of the Trump Tax Cuts Would Go to Richest One Percent

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A new study has confirmed what anyone sane should have expected: most of the Trump tax cuts would go to the richest of the 1%.   The middle class would once again be played for suckers as those who least need tax relief make out like bandits.  It is part and parcel with the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda championed by Paul Ryan and other false Christians who are only too happy to kick children, the impoverished elderly and working families to the gutter.  How this equates with the GOP's claim to be "pro-life" and the party of "family values" is mind numbing.  It seems that only wealthy families count and the rest of us can wither away financially and die.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the study findings.  Here are highlights:

Republican leaders unveiled the preliminary version of their tax-cut plan. Today, the Tax Policy Center, the most credible analytical source, published its study of the plan. And the findings are not good.

The first and largest problem for the Republicans is that their plan overwhelmingly benefits a tiny number of extremely affluent people. In 2018, 53 percent of the benefit of the tax cut would go to the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers. In 2027, when more provisions would be fully phased in, the proportion would rise to nearly 80 percent.

A tax cut that mostly benefits the richest one percent is not going to be popular. Looked at a slightly different way, the richest people in the country would get a huge increase in their living standard — an 8-to-10 percent raise in after-tax income. Almost everybody else would enjoy a negligible increase on the order of one percent of their income.

And that’s not counting the costs of the spending cuts that would have to eventually offset the lower revenue.

[T]heir plan already imposes more pain on more constituencies than their slender majorities can probably bear. The largest single revenue-raising element of their plan, raising $1.4 trillion over a decade, is an elimination of the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes — a provision of special importance to residents of states that have income taxes. Eliminating that deduction would create big tax increases for upper-middle-class filers in those states.

Republicans in Congress representing those states are already in an uproar over that provision. Yesterday, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn backed way off the proposal, conceding it was “not a red line” for the administration. But while eliminating that provision would mitigate the “raising taxes on the middle class” problem, it would exacerbate their revenue problem. If they lose the $1.4 trillion this provision would buy them, they need to find it somewhere else, and they’re already short.

The easiest way to solve the problems is not to give rich people a big tax cut. But since giving rich people a big tax cut is the motivation for the entire exercise — indeed, the entire reason many Establishment Republicans have put up with Trump’s grossness — they’re going to absorb a lot of political pain in order to make it happen.

Today's GOP: Caught in Its Own Lies

For many years now, the basic agenda of the GOP has been based on lies.  This traces all the way back to Reagan era promises that tax cuts and trickle down economics would work.  It didn't and it hasn't, yet 37 years latter the same lie is being repeated over and over by GOP candidates and elected officials.  Here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is promising tax cuts that would leave a $1.4 billion gap in the budget just as was done in Kansas to disastrous effect.  Like Kansas, Gillespie has not solid plan for where replacement funds would come from.  More recently, of course, we had the Bush/Cheney lies that took the nation to war in Iraq, again with disastrous results.  This debacle has been followed by 8 years of Republican lies aimed at Barack Obama and his policies to the delight of racists within the GOP base.  Now, with the GOP controlling Washington until January, 2019 when things will hopefully change, the party is faced with trying to implement policies based on falsehoods that are becoming glaringly obvious to except the most deranged of the Kool-Aid drinking GOP base. The policies cannot work because they were false from the start.  A column in the New York Times looks at this growing problem of the GOP's own creation.  Here are excerpts:

On Saturday pretty much the entire medical sector — groups representing doctors, hospitals, and insurers — released an extraordinary open letter condemning the Graham-Cassidy health bill. The letter was written in the style of Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”: a series of paragraphs, each beginning with the bolded words “We agree,” pointing out the bill’s many awful features, from the harm it would do to people with pre-existing conditions to the chaos it would cause in insurance markets.

It takes a truly terrible proposal to elicit such eloquent unanimity from organizations that are usually cautious to the point of stodginess. So how did Republicans come up with something that bad, and how did that bad thing get so close to becoming law? Indeed, it still has a chance of being enacted despite John McCain’s “no.”

The answer is that Republicans have spent years routinely lying for the sake of political advantage. And now — not just on health care, but across the board — they are trapped by their own lies, forced into trying to enact policies they know won’t work.
Carl Hulse of The New York Times adds more detail: one big factor behind the push for Graham-Cassidy was anger among big donors, who wanted to know why Republicans had broken their vows to kill Obamacare. . . . . But repealing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the only thing Republicans promised; they also promised to replace it with something better and cheaper, doing away with all the things people don’t like about Obamacare without creating any new problems. Yet Republicans never had any idea how to fulfill that promise . . . . the base, both the grass roots and the big money, believed the lies. Hence the trap in which Republicans find themselves.

The thing is, health care isn’t the only issue on which lies are coming back to bite the liars. The same story is playing out on other issues — in fact, on almost every substantive policy issue the U.S. faces.

The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit. . . . as with health care, these lies will be revealed once actual legislation is unveiled. It’s telling that Republicans are already invoking voodoo economics to justify their as-yet-unspecified tax plans, insisting that tax cuts will pay for themselves by leading to higher economic growth.

At this point, however, few people believe them. The Bush tax cuts didn’t create a boom; neither did the Kansas tax-cut “experiment.”

Foreign policy isn’t usually a central concern for voters. Still, past lies have put the Trump administration in a box over things like the Iran nuclear deal: Canceling the deal would create huge problems, yet not canceling it would amount to an admission that the criticisms were dishonest. And soon the G.O.P. may even start to pay a price for lying about climate change. As hurricanes get ever more severe — just as climate scientists predicted — climate denial is looking increasingly out of touch. Yet donors and the base would react with fury to any admission that the threat is real, after all. [T]he bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern.