Pierce: The Republican Tax Plan Is Doomed, But It'

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Pierce: The Republican Tax Plan Is Doomed, But It's Still Worth Gawking at in Amazement

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If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the GOP tax plan is a camel designed by a committee of drunkards.

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www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13517592/republican-tax-plan-senate/

This is pure supply-side cult fantasy.

By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 10, 2017


It was the Senate’s turn to produce a tax plan. The Senate did so. We already have seen the plan produced by the House of Representatives Next week, we will see the plans proposed by middle-school glee clubs, the International Federation of Retired Elevator Operators, and the food-truck vendors along the National Mall. All of these have approximately the same chance of becoming law.

At least, in keeping with the lifelong goals of Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, the House budget was straightforward pilfering of the national wealth by the wealthy from the poor and the middle class and a mechanism to starve what’s left of the social safety net.

The Senate bill is just a mess. The essential goal is the same as that of the House—to shove as much of the country’s wealth upwards as possible. But a combination of Senate rules and political timorousness—one cannot gerrymander a Senate seat—has forced the Republican Senate majority to propose something almost comical in its institutional contortions. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the GOP tax plan is a camel designed by a committee of drunkards.

In short, because no plan the supply-side cult proposes is likely to attract any Democratic votes, and because any such plan would be filibustered to death, the Republicans need to pass their tax cuts through the reconciliation process.

The problem there is that any such bill passed through reconciliation cannot add to the deficit over the next decade. A study of this present Senate bill by the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that, by the end of the next decade, the Republican plan would balloon budget deficits by $1.5 trillion by 2027.

So, no, unless Mitch McConnell has the stones to blow up the filibuster entirely and then ram this drunkard’s camel through by a one-vote majority, this plan is as dead as Julius Caesar in the Senate.

And then there were those pesky results on Tuesday night which clearly showed that the Republicans had lost whatever temporary advantage they had among suburban voters, especially in the blue and purplish states.

The math behind the Republican bill makes even less sense unless you eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes, something that will sock those same blue and purplish states the hardest. With a lot of GOP congresscritters still hiding behind the drapes in the wake of Tuesday’s results, that provision is an even harder sell than it was before.

That, of course, means that the one thing that both the congressional majorities and the White House are shooting for—a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate—is probably bereft of life itself.

And it probably doesn’t help that a) the president*’s key economic adviser, Gary Cohn, is deep in public ecstasy about how much the country’s CEOs are going to love the plan, and b) that the president* is still, you know, Donald Trump, who doesn’t know how government works, nor does he care to learn.

Still, though, that neolib sellout Democrat didn’t get elected so there’s that.

I’m holding off final judgment until I see what the food-truck people come up with.

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