Sunday Reading -- "A Historic Tax Heist"

How maliciously bad is the Senate Republican "wealthfare" tax bill?

The New York Times

The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act. [snip] 

You can expect the lies to become even more brazen as Republicans seek to defend this terrible bill. But no amount of prevarication can change the fact that Congress and Mr. Trump are giving a giant gift to their donors and sticking the rest of the country with the tab.

The Washington Post 

The future they have mandated for the next generation is one in which the government has fewer resources to respond to a major economic crisis, let alone to invest in keeping the country competitive. The next time there is a recession, Congress will have to choose between pumping needed money into the economy and pushing the debt into ever more dangerous territory. Many more people could lose their jobs. [snip] 

Future generations will bear an enhanced debt burden so Republicans can cut taxes in the midst of an increasingly strong economic expansion that requires no intervention. The bill would exacerbate wealth inequality, perhaps the defining issue of the time. It is packed with gifts to the rich, including a totally unjustifiable cut in the estate tax, which would help only extremely wealthy heirs. Reform of the personal tax code would bring mild changes to ordinary people but massive benefits to wealthier people. Breaks for working folks would phase out in several years; those for corporations would not. The bill would limit states’ capacity to respond with policies of their own, and it harms Democratic states more than Republican ones. [snip] 

For those in the individual health-care market, the bill promises only to promote chaos by repealing the Affordable Care Act’s individual insurance mandate, a key element of the law, without a replacement. Senators such as Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who halted a sloppy repeal a few months ago, voted Friday to betray many of the people they once sought to protect. 

The Los Angeles Times

It’s worth remembering how congressional Republicans blocked all of the stimulus proposals Democrats made after the recession ended even though the economy was still stuck in low gear. Back then, they believed that budget deficits were a horrible, awful, no good thing. Now, not so much. 

Under federal budget law, however, Congress can’t just run a bigger deficit. If the tax cuts go into effect as proposed, they could trigger automatic, across-the-board cuts in a wide range of federal mandatory spending, including a 4% cut in Medicare. GOP leaders say they won’t let that happen; a more likely result is that Congress will agree to waive the across-the-board cuts and let the deficit grow. That would raise a different set of problems. More of the federal budget would be consumed by debt payments, and the ever-larger borrowing could push up interest rates for everyone. Ultimately, the next generation would be left to foot the bill for this Congress’ irresponsibility. That’s some victory for the GOP. 

The Miami Herald

The fiscal impact of the Senate bill would be even worse except for this perverse fact: It saves money by reducing Americans’ access to health care. Here’s how that works: A partial Obamacare repeal hidden in the GOP plan would result in 13 million fewer people carrying health-care coverage. With fewer people enrolled, the government would spend less money helping people pay for insurance. Under the GOP scheme, some people would choose not to get coverage, but the CBO is clear that many others would be priced out of the market. Republicans are proposing to sacrifice people’s access to health care in order to balance their numbers — and even then, their math does not add up. [snip] 

The Senate bill would, on paper, phase out tax breaks for individual filers after several years, which in theory reduces the bill’s cost over the 10-year period that the law requires Congress to take into account. But Republicans promise that future Congresses will not allow those breaks to sunset. In other words, the true increase in the debt they are proposing is much bigger than $1.4 trillion. They’re just not being honest about it.

Republicans at every level need to pay for this cynical abomination. None should be spared electoral defeat because all who call themselves "Republican" are complicit in this vicious wealth (and health) heist from low- and- moderate income Americans to corporations and the wealthiest. It's Class Warfare at it's most blatant and damaging, and they've chosen their side.

BONUS: Stephen Colbert on what Republicans pinched out --