"It's over," John Cassidy of the New Yorker wrote after Republicans cut his taxes on Wednesday.
Cutting taxes is terrible, terrible, terrible.
And then Cassidy added:
Almost all the elements of the bill that benefit the middle class — reductions in personal tax rates, enlarged personal exemptions, and expanded child tax credits — are temporary measures. If they are allowed to expire, as the bill envisages, tax rates on middle-income people will go back up. By 2027, according to the Joint Committee’s report, households in the fifty-to-seventy-five-thousand-dollar income bracket will have seen their effective tax rate go back to 14.6 per cent. That is hardly different from what the rate is today.It's the old Catskills joke about the restaurant critic who said the food was bad and the portions small.
Cassidy went on:
As the night progressed, it was clear that the criticisms of the bill had rattled some Republican senators. Not content to quibble over the implications for individual family budgets, some of them resorted to outright fantasizing. “First, this is not a health-care bill,” Tim Scott, of South Carolina, declared. Further, Scott went on, “No one loses their insurance.” This was nonsense. The bill that Scott was voting for abolishes the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, a central element of the Affordable Care Act. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the mandate’s elimination will result in thirteen million fewer Americans being insured over ten years.No.
It will result in 13 million people deciding not to buy insurance.
The fashionably fascist on the left cannot understand that a healthy person in his 20s might not want to buy health insurance. Millions now pay the tax tax on this freedom to decide. Republicans ended that tax.
Cassidy ended his piece:
What remains to be determined is whether this victory will help bring down the G.O.P. in next year’s midterm elections. In closing the Senate debate, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, predicted that it would; Republicans would “come to rue this day,” Schumer said. For the sake of American democracy, let’s hope that he is proved right.That last sentence is telling. Americans democratically elected a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House. He does not like the result. In his "American democracy" (and we are a republic but I will defer to his inexact language) only his viewpoint matters.
That the rest of us might be happy to pay less in federal income taxes is somehow undemocratic.
But others in the media are not as negative.
From ABC News:
It’s a clarifying moment for Democrats, too. But there’s a little less confidence in running against a tax cut (one they won’t vow to repeal if elected), and a little less overall swagger than they had a week ago, when Alabama elected a Democrat to the Senate.
For all the odd turns of this year, 2017 is ending in a rather familiar fashion. Republicans are touting tax cuts, and Democrats are saying it’s a giveaway to the rich.
For Republicans, at least for now, the familiarity brings a rare measure of comfort.The Democrats both in and out of the media are hoping for Americans to rise and demand higher taxes.
From Ronald Brownstein:
President Trump and congressional Republicans have just taken the same leap of faith that Democrats did when they passed the Affordable Care Act.
When then-President Obama and the Democratic House and Senate majorities muscled through the ACA in 2010, the bill represented a big policy victory, but an even bigger political gamble. Though Obamacare fulfilled the party’s decades-long goal of providing (nearly) universal health care, the immediate backlash in the 2010 election helped propel Republicans to the biggest midterm gain in the House for either party since 1938 and gave them a majority in the chamber they still haven’t relinquished.
[SNIP]
To pass their bill, Republicans ignored the hostile polls, the unified Democratic opposition, and a succession of independent analyses showing the plan would massively increase the federal debt while generating minimal additional growth. Democrats could point to more favorable analyses of Obamacare’s potential impact when they passed the ACA, but they otherwise blew past similar political guardrails. They paid a heavy price for that choice in the next election, and Republicans have now steered themselves onto the same bumpy road.The one-year lag between passage and actually paying less in taxes does hinder Republicans, especially as Americans file taxes at the old rates next year.
But of course, those polls were hostile anyway, and the darned thing about Obamacare is it is still there. So the lesson is that if you are going to lose, you may as well do what you wanted to do all along. Pending doom is liberating.
Trump, meanwhile, roped-a-dope called the Daily Beast:
The Republican tax-overhaul bill may have only ended the individual mandate aspect of Obamacare, but that won’t stop President Trump from gloating to his base that he “repealed” his predecessor’s signature legislation. “When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed,” the president told the press during a cabinet meeting. “Obamacare has been repealed in this bill.” Contrary to his claim, however, the Affordable Care Act is still largely intact—from its Medicaid expansion to the insurance exchanges it set up to regulations on insurance companies, including those mandating coverage for pre-existing conditions.For more than two years now, Trump has used inexact language to get the media to repeat his message as they "fact check" him.
Buried at the end of the New York Times report was this:
Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who helped lead the 1986 tax effort, said that this year’s bill was at least as sweeping as the one that Ronald Reagan signed into law 31 years ago, even though the bills had different goals.
“They have achieved things that I was unable to achieve,” Mr. Packwood said.If cutting taxes costs Republicans the next election, so be it. What's the point of winning elections if you never do anything?
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