The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent put it succinctly this morning when he tweeted about Republican plans since the defeat of their health care bill,
Republicans set to pivot from cutting taxes for the rich (AHCA) to cutting taxes for the rich (tax reform).
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) March 27, 2017
Because that’s precisely what the AHCA was: a tax break for the rich. It was just disguised as health care reform. It was only “reform” in the sense that reforming something means destroying it. And Trump barely paused to draw a breath after Trumpcare’s defeat before saying,
“Now we’re going for tax reform, which I’ve always liked.”
Tax reform means, in Republican-speak, tax cuts for the rich. What’s for Donald Trump not to like?
So Trump tried and failed to cut taxes for the rich by stealing our healthcare and giving his rich pals our money instead. Now he’s going to try to cut taxes for his rich pals by trying his hand at tax reform by stealing from widows and orphans in another way.
Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz argues that Donald Trump just wanted a cheap and easy win, a “deal” to get some momentum going for his administration.
Trump miscalculated badly, however, in thinking he could sell to Republicans what he promised the American people, and as Kurtz said, “realized he’d rather move on than fight this losing battle indefinitely.”
So much for the art of the deal. Trump’s problem was that he “didn’t care that much about the details.” Kurtz won’t say it but we can: Trump isn’t a detail-oriented kind of guy. Details bore and confuse him. Like facts.
Trump and Republicans told a whole bunch of lies about Obamacare being bad and Trumpcare being good. They will tell a whole bunch of lies about why giving rich people more money is going to help everyone else too.
They failed to succeed in selling their first set of tax breaks for the rich. But don’t expect what the Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein calls “the biggest broken promise in political history” to hurt their chances with their second set of tax breaks for the rich.
As CBS News’ MoneyWatch reports, according to John Maloney, head of New York’s M&R Capital Management,
“Health care is a temporary setback that won’t have a nefarious effect on tax cuts, which is like handing out candy.”
The trouble with the AHCA was that 24 million people were going to lose healthcare, a fact which easily translated – even for those doing Republican math – into Republicans who voted for it losing their jobs.
Tax breaks for the rich are so essentially Republican that poor white Republicans won’t even bat an eye.
Trumpcare may have exposed the cruel apathy of the Republican Party, but the cruel apathy won’t end with its failure. It will live on in tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor.
That’s language any Republican politician can understand.
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