Dear America,
The Republicans have actually gotten away with a great deal lately, which gives me pause when I think that it will all catch up with them by November. Some of it is just detail that no one much will notice. For example, the first discussion of the tax bill in the House Ways and Means Committee that I, as a member of the public was aware of, was held a couple of days ago and it ran into the night (the Republicans had just released a copy of the bill the day before). I watched some of it on C-span and there was one exchange in particular that roused my indignation. The leading Democrat made the point that the bill adds $1.3 trillion to the deficit, and hence to the debt as well, and he remarked that he had run for congress to do something about the deficit. He noted that we hadn't had a budget surplus, much less a balanced budget, since Bill Clinton's legacy budget in 2000, which was for the next fiscal year, the first of the George W. Bush administration. The leading Republican, a good ol' smarmy back slapper from Texas named Sam Johnson, responded with the one of the most odiously demagogical remarks I have ever heard while watching congressional proceedings. He said, gratuitously I might add, that the last balanced budget we had was on September 10, 2001...the day before the 9/11 attacks. The Democrat pointed out that budgets don't run day to day, which was a diplomatic way of saying, you're trying to wrap a bad bill in the flag to sell it with insincerity, but the Republican was undeterred. He repeated what was at best a deceitful, self-serving canard on too many levels, including common sense and knowledge of what congress, his own body, does to be enumerated here, and he did it shamelessly. I might add, he did it without a word of rebuke from a member of either party. Of course, no one saw that exchange, so the hypocrisy it embodied will never catch up to Representative Johnson of rural Texas.
Then today, Ted Cruz stood up on the floor in The Senate and berated the Democrats for unanimously voting against the increase in the child tax credit, which he pointed out serves only the poor. How callous the Democrats are, he fulminated in his best casuistic, bombastic, stentorian roar. Of course Chuck Schumer responded, but by comparison, to Cruz's prosecutorial sanctimony, Schumer sounded tame, though rational as opposed to politically insincere ala Cruz. But my guess is that unless you listen to NPR, you'll never hear that exchange either.
And of course there is the tax bill itself. The Republicans insist that when Americans see less withholding in their pay checks and all the new jobs that the new "tax reform" will yield, they will see that claims that it is a boon to the rich, not the middle class or the poor have been put to rest. There's no way to refute those claims, but they camouflage some of the core of the bill that definitely results in more debt, 13 million fewer people with health insurance in ten years, and the complete absence of funding for the CHIP program, which pays health insurance for poor children. And people won't notice a 20% tax break for people with "pass through" businesses who now pay on their income like the rest of us, but who will get a 20% tax reduction next year on the bizarre theory that they will plow that money back into their businesses and create more jobs once it becomes personal income whereas they could do the same now before paying themselves their compensation...and they don't. As to all these jobs that are supposed to be created with new corporate wealth from tax reductions that reduce the corporate tax burden by 45%, no such thing happened under Ronald Reagan, whose tax cut his vice-president had prophetically called "voo-doo economics" during the Republican primaries of 1980. In fact, more jobs were created during the Clinton administration in which the last of the Reagan tax cuts were repealed than were created by the Reagan "supply side" plan.
My point is that the Democrats can't just sit around waiting for this tax cut to fail to produce what the Republicans promise it will. They have to start asking the Republicans, how exactly is that going to work. What inducements do big businesses have to spend their tax break when they are already sitting on at least $2 trillion in surpluses in their bank accounts now. This merits some thought by Democratic leaders...this rhetorical refutation of the Republican canard. Our only hope is that they realize it...and do it loudly, clearly, and every day.
Your friend,
Mike
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