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Friday, March 30th, 2018

GOP to Push for More Tax Cuts — and a Balanced Budget Amendment

Author:     Eric Levitz
Source:     New York Magazine
Publication Date:     March 28, 2018 12:17 pm
Link: GOP to Push for More Tax Cuts — and a Balanced Budget Amendment
Stephan:   As predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano the Republicans, after significantly cutting taxes for the rich, thus creating a $1.5 trillion increase in the deficit, are now planning to reduce that deficit by cutting the already shockingly shabby social safety net programs of the United States to pay for that transfer of wealth to the rich. It is as blatant a smash and grab as we have ever seen in American history. The Republicanism of Eisenhower, Dirksen, and Baker that your father and mother may have voted for  is long gone, replaced by christofascism. Today the Republican party espouses every man for himself, White men first, women submissive to their men and the state, democracy in form perhaps, but not in substance.  Because this is factually so, you cannot be an ethical person and vote Republican in my opinion. But people do, and that is what is wrong with America.

Senate Majority Leader Republican Senator Mitch McConnell

A wise, out-of-touch coastal elite once wrote that American conservatism was less a political philosophy than a set of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” This was never a fair summary of our nation’s rich tradition of reactionary thought — but it is a serviceable definition of the Republican agenda, circa 2018.

Today’s Grand Old Party is officially committed to ever-lower taxes on the rich, ever-higher spending on the military, and a balanced budget within ten years. It would be virtually impossible to square these three priorities, even if Republicans had the courage of Charles Koch’s convictions on entitlement spending. But they don’t. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned against Barack Obama’s “Medicare cuts” in 2012; Donald Trump ran on a promise not to cut one penny from Social Security or Medicare in 2016; and last year, the Republican leadership proved unwilling to fully abolish Barack Obama’s main addition to the welfare state — and unable to get 50 GOP senators to […]

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