So…Are We Extending Trump's Tax Cuts?
GOP Infighting
Picture a Dylanesque side-eye on Elmo and Vivey + the Billionaire Boys Club salivating over that luscious $2.8 trillion Social Security Trust Fund. Like sighting a stag just before hunting season opens, that conveniently sized pot of gold presents a scrumptious, possitively irresistible target for their first year’s goal of cutting $2 trillion in the federal debt.
[Excuse me but the Trust Fund is not to be used to pay off the national debt. Ronnie Reagan said so in 1983. He even signed a law saying that.]
[Oh shut up. This is how the big boys play.]
Put the Money in the Middle and Go to Your Corner
Today brings a different story altogether as the GOP fights over extending the expiring Trump tax cuts. While some “budget hawks” still remain in the party (who knew?) worrying over the debt and wanting to rein it in, others cannot wait to extend it. Great revelry will no doubt ensue from the grasping side in this latest round of fisticuffs. Hope Hegseth brings the beer.
“I know! Let’s play hide the ball!”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, that will add between $4.6 trillion and $5 trillion (says Fox!) to the debt over the next 10 years, depending on the media source you consult.
Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, Center for Children and Families, says the GOP is gambling on a push to make trump tax cuts permanent.
To top it off, CAP 20’s Extending Trump’s Tax Cuts Is a Gimmick article says
In crafting their bill, the Republican trifecta chose to make the corporate provisions of that bill largely permanent, and they chose to set most of the portions that affect individuals to expire after eight years, at the end of 2025, to keep the scored cost of their bill artificially small.
With large portions of the law set to expire at the end of next year, Congress is debating how much of these tax cuts to extend and whether to offset any of the cost. A full extension of the expiring individual side provisions would add roughly $4 trillion in costs to the approximately $2 trillion in costs that the 2017 law has already incurred.
Daunted by the prospect of being held responsible for spending trillions more dollars on tax cuts, leading Republican tax legislators such as Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) have proposed a solution to the problem: just pretend the tax cuts do not cost anything. This would be accomplished by switching from the “current law baseline” congressional Republicans exploited when the tax cuts were initially passed in 2017 to a “current policy baseline” for the extension in 2025. This gimmick would produce a “double no count” wherein Congress never counts trillions of dollars of tax cuts in 2017 or 2025.
So, it’s anybody’s guess what the ultimate cost of this magic 8-ball gambit is, as is usual with today’s GOP. But the smart money is on Crapo.
Reverting to the Meanness
Grabby billionaires gonna be grabby billionaires and it makes no difference to them who pays the bill so long as it ain’t them. First suckers up: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Or some other shiny pot of “handout” gold. SNAP? HEAP? Vets’ healthcare? Eh, so what?
Income after retirement? There’s no crying in baseball and there’s no such thing as retirement for the “little people.” It’s your fault that you’re not a billionaire like us. And no, you get sick? Suffer. Health care is a privilege, not a right.
An Admired Coda
As the sainted Linda Ellerbee used to say at the end of NBC News Overnight (with co-anchor Lloyd Dobbins), “And so it goes.”
She pilfered that from Vonnegut, a sainted novelist who ruled as another lone public figure who sanely observed his nation’s cultural insanity.
For some reason, that little child who said the Emperor had no clothes is nowhere to be seen yet. Perhap soon, someone of that in-touch-with-reality mindset will emerge and announce, yes, and describe it this way: “The only way to cut the national debt to the extent it needs is to take back some of the gluttonous tax cuts for the rich that have resulted in monumental income inequality which has redistributed over $50 TRILLION from the working class and middle class.” Wouldn’t that be nice?
Bringing Vonnegut into this, with a panache
Carol L. Clark: Here you state the nub of the issue:
"Reverting to the Meanness
"Grabby billionaires gonna be grabby billionaires and it makes no difference to them who pays the bill so long as it ain’t them. First suckers up: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Or some other shiny pot of “handout” gold. SNAP? HEAP? Vets’ healthcare? Eh, so what?
"Income after retirement? There’s no crying in baseball and there’s no such thing as retirement for the “little people.” It’s your fault that you’re not a billionaire like us. And no, you get sick? Suffer. Health care is a privilege, not a right."
And the little people vote for THIS?!
There has been a major disconnect in the American polity.
This 76-year-old grew up in admiration of Progressivism from Theodore Roosevelt through Eugene Debs, the great Labor movement, the New Deal, the Great Society, the War on Poverty.
What you describe in the billionaires is something I have understood for a long while, but I am in disbelief, when I compare the current pedestrian, nihilistic rich-man's club with the 19th Century greedy billionaires -- Vanderbilt, Rockefeller -- who at least formed great philanthropies, building the renowned Vanderbilt University and the Rockefeller philanthropies.
If we could have philanthropists at the top, the billionaire privileges would at least contribute something worthwhile to society.
Maybe it is symbolic: The once great Boeing has had aircraft hatches blown-off midair, and now on its Starliner the astronauts in perpetual rotation around the atmosphere . . .
And the wheels go round and round . . .