Daily Kos

Forbes Botton Lines Insanity of GOP Tax Bill:

They’re Coming For Your Social Security & Medicare

Why would they want to do that?

By Heavy Metal        November 20, 2017 

Today’s article in a Forbes oped contributor blog post describes how the current GOP tax bills are “the end of GOP economic sanity” and goes through a long list of problems that would never have been inflicted on the US populace before:

“If it’s enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.”

“There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.”

After going through a list of problems it will cause, such as high inflation which monetary policy will no longer be able to affect, they come to this:

Without massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon, it won’t be possible to reduce federal spending enough to do more than tweak the deficit.

And there it is. The only option that will be available to ameliorate the significant problems these tax cuts will cause is to cut these parts of the budget. None of the other options is feasible. And the Pentagon budget is sacrosanct. That leaves Social Security and Medicare.

This was a goal of the invasion of Iraq- explode the debt and deficit to the point where cuts to entitlements are the only solution. But that was staved off with a democratic president. And now we are back to square one. Only this time the super rich get a massive windfall in the bargain.

This is what they have wanted for decades. They have had their eyes on the prize and they see it getting closer and clearer. This won’t be an unintended consequence- it is the plan. The goal.

And the gall to try and sell a measly tax cut of a few hundred dollars as a boon for the “middle class”.

I’m sure Democratic legislators are well aware of this. My question- is it taboo for them to engage on this subject?

www.forbes.com/…

Forbes

GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington

Stan Collender, Contributor       November 19, 2017

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

TWEET THIS

• the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.

• The GOP’s insanity is compounded by its moving ahead without having any idea of what this policy will actually do to the economy.

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

No doubt many of you read the above headline and immediately started to tweet that the GOP tax bill can’t be the end of economic sanity in Washington because there never was any to begin with.

I have two responses.

First…please do tweet that, and link to this post when you do.

Second…you’re wrong. If it’s enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.

There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.

This is actually the ideal time for Washington to be doing the opposite.  But by damning the economic torpedoes and moving full-speed ahead, House and Senate Republicans and the Trump White House are setting up the U.S. for the modern-day analog of the inflation-producing guns-and-butter economic policy of the Vietnam era. The GOP tax bill will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches brew of gimmicks and outright lies) that, unless all the rules have changed, is virtually certain to result in inflation and much higher interest rates than would otherwise occur.

The GOP’s insanity is compounded by its moving ahead without having any idea of what this policy will actually do to the economy. The debates in the Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees and on the House floor all took place before the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis and, if it really exists, the constantly-promised-but-never-seen report from the Treasury on the economics of this tax bill.

Meanwhile, Congress has ignored other estimates like this one from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showing that the tax bill won’t do what the GOP is promising.

In other words, the GOP tax bill may be enacted without anyone who votes for it having any understanding of the damage it could do to the economy. They have wishes, hopes and prayers but in reality nothing beyond the economic equivalent of pagan superstition.

On top of everything else, there is no reason to rush this debate as the GOP is doing. Given that it’s not really needed, a bill that is enacted next January or February will make as much economic sense as one signed into law by the end of this December. The must-do-it-by-Christmas deadline Trump has imposed is completely artificial and nonsensical.

The real economic insanity of the GOP’s tax bill will be felt in future years. Consider the following.

• The $1 trillion a year budget deficit will not be the result of cyclical changes that will be reversed when the economy improves. These will be permanent structural deficit increases.
• The tax hikes that will be needed to resolve the structural imbalance between federal spending and revenues will be impossible for political reasons.
• Whenever the S. economy grows more slowly than expected or there’s a downturn, an annual deficit of $2 trillion could easily become the norm.
• The federal government will have far less ability to respond to economic downturns unless previously unimaginable and politically intolerable deficits, tax increases or spending cuts suddenly become acceptable.
• Reduce the national debt? As they say in New York, fuhgeddaboudit at least in the next decade.
• Much more national debt plus rising interest rates means interest on the national debt will be the fastest growing part of the federal budget.
• Without massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon, it won’t be possible to reduce federal spending enough to do more than tweak the deficit.
• Washington’s ability to invest in anything new that will improve the economy (think infrastructure, education and medical research) will be far less given the already-high deficits.
• Even though the limits to monetary policy became obvious the past few years, the Federal Reserve will be the major economic policy maker in Washington over the next decade.

In other words, if the GOP tax bill is enacted, Congress and the president this year will give up almost all ability to deal with the U.S. economy for at least a decade even when, as almost certainly will happen, there’s a downturn. No one else will be able to fulfill this role.

That’s almost a textbook definition of economic insanity.

Follow Stan Collender on Twitter at TheBudgetGuy

New York Times – Opinion

OP-ED COLUMNIST

When Our Allies Are Accused of Harassment

Sen. Al Franken on Capitol Hill last week. Credit Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Michelle Goldberg             November 20, 2017

Last Thursday, after a photograph emerged of Senator Al Franken either groping or pretending to grope a sleeping woman, Leeann Tweeden, with whom he’d been traveling on a 2006 U.S.O. tour, I wrote that he should resign. Almost as soon as it was published I started having second thoughts. I spent all weekend feeling guilty that I’d called for the sacrifice of an otherwise decent man to make a political point.

Then I saw the news that a woman named Lindsay Menz accused Franken of grabbing her butt while they posed for a photo at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, when he was a senator, and I read Franken’s lame non-denial: “I feel badly that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”

Yet I am still not sure I made the right call. My thinking last week, when the first accusation emerged, was: cauterize the wound. It doesn’t matter that Franken’s transgression wasn’t on the same level as the abuses that the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore or Donald Trump have been accused of. That photo — the unconscious woman, the leering grin — is a weight Democrats shouldn’t have to carry, given that they’ve lately been insisting that it’s disqualifying for a candidate to grab a woman sexually against her will. It seemed cruel to expect Democratic women to make Jesuitical arguments that the shadows under Franken’s hands meant he wasn’t really touching Tweeden’s chest. Especially since, with a Democratic governor in Minnesota, the party would maintain control of Franken’s seat.

But even as I made the case for resignation, I was relieved that it seemed as if Franken might stick around, because I adore him as a public figure. It’s easy to condemn morally worthless men like Trump; it’s much harder to figure out what should happen to men who make valuable political and cultural contributions, and whose alleged misdeeds fall far short of criminal. Learning about all the seemingly good guys who do shameful things is what makes this moment, with its frenzied pace of revelations, so painful and confounding.

Personally, I’m torn by competing impulses. I want to see sexual harassment finally taken seriously but fear participating in a sex panic. My instinct is often to defend men I like, but I don’t want to be an enabler or a sucker. I try not to be a hypocrite, while being aware that the right plays on the media’s desire to seem fair-minded, which is part of what led to wildly excessive coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the presidential campaign, among other distortions.

It’s not a coincidence that the post-Harvey Weinstein purge of sexual harassers has been largely confined to liberal-leaning fields like Hollywood, media and the Democratic Party. This isn’t because progressive institutions are more sexist than others — I’m confident there’s at least as much sexual abuse in finance as in publishing. Rather, organizations with liberal values have suddenly become extremely responsive to claims of sexism. Feminists, enraged and traumatized by Donald Trump’s election, know they can’t expect accountability from Republicans, but they’ve forced it from people who claim to share their ideals. As a result, it sometimes feels as if liberal institutions are devouring themselves over sex while conservatives, unburdened by the pretense of caring about gender equality, blithely continue their misrule.

Adding to the confusion is the way so many different behaviors are being lumped together. Weinstein’s sadistic serial predation isn’t comparable to Louis C.K.’s exhibitionism. The groping Franken has been accused of isn’t in the same moral universe as Moore’s alleged sexual abuse of minors. It seems perverse that Franken could be on his way out of the Senate while Moore might be on his way in.

It’s possible that feminists, in trying to hold Democrats to standards that they wish were universal, risk unilateral disarmament. Kate Harding made this case in The Washington Post last Friday, arguing against Franken’s resignation. If Democrats “set this precedent in the interest of demonstrating our party’s solidarity with harassed and abused women, we’re only going to drain the swamp of people who, however flawed, still regularly vote to protect women’s rights and freedoms,” she wrote. And when the next Democratic member of Congress goes down, there might not be a Democratic governor to choose his replacement.

I’m partly persuaded by this line of reasoning, though conservatives mock it as the “one free grope” rule. It’s a strange political fiction that anyone can really separate partisanship from principle. In general, the character of the party that controls the government has a much greater impact on people’s lives than the character of individual representatives. Those who care about women’s rights shouldn’t be expected to prove it by being willing to hand power to people devoted to taking those rights away.

Yet just as there’s a cost for cutting good but imperfect men loose, there’s a cost to defending them from consequences we’d demand if the politics were reversed. It forces feminists to treat our own standards as unrealistic, to undermine our own arguments. Ultimately, however these dilemmas play out, we lose: either the moral high ground or men whom we need, admire and maybe even love.

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The Washington Post -Opinion

Democracy Dies in Darkness

A Republican ‘win’ on the tax bill will actually be a loss

By Jennifer Rubin        November 20, 2017

President Trump, flanked by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, sits down with staff members during a federal budget luncheon at the White House in Washington in February. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Democrats are reaching the conclusion that the GOP tax bill — with huge benefits for the rich and elimination or limits on the state and local tax deduction — could be a Pyrrhic victory for Republicans. The Post reports:

A University of New Hampshire poll released Tuesday found the tax bill already underwater, with just 39 percent of voters in support. A majority of New Hampshire voters favored the bill’s expanded child tax credit, but just 35 percent favored its slash to corporate taxes, which Republicans have described for months as a job creator. But the talk of changes to state tax deductions overwhelmed all.

“A lot of people here work in Massachusetts and pay some of those taxes,” said Chris Pappas, a member of the state’s Executive Council who’s now running for the Manchester-based 1st Congressional District. “They’re going to get whacked if they cut the state and local tax deduction.”

Democratic confidence about fighting the tax cuts has also been bolstered [by] experience in recent years. In 2009, the party passed a stimulus package with little Republican support, and waited for voters to appreciate its payroll tax and alternative minimum tax cuts. In a sluggish 2010 economy, Democrats were blown away, with voters largely unaware of minor changes to their taxes.

Democrats are already polishing their campaign themes, arguing that the middle class will get hit twice — once by the tax bill and again by the cuts in federal spending that will be needed to pay for it. (“At the New Hampshire dinner, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who just months earlier had warned his party not to rule out a tax plan, described a Republican Party that would put suburban and working-class taxpayers in hock.”)

Republicans face two additional issues — the real cost of the bill and the meager economic results it is likely to generate.

Mulvaney: White House may drop the individual mandate repeal to pass a tax bill. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Nov. 19 that they would remove the repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate if “a good tax bill can pass.”

As to cost, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Budget and Management, has no real answer to the argument that the tax bill is using a phony sunset provision to disguise its actual cost. On “Meet the Press,” there was this exchange:

MULVANEY: We’re using reconciliation so that we only need 50 votes in the Senate instead of 60. In order to do that the certain proposals can only have certain economic impact. And one of the ways to game the system is to make things expire. The Bush tax cuts back in early 2000 did the same thing. They supposedly would expire after nine years. What we tell folks is this is if it’s good policy it will become permanent. If it’s bad policy it will become temporary. That’s just the way that it is. So this is done more to force, to shoehorn the bill into the rules than because we think it’s good policy.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Isn’t that an admission though that it’s a gimmick. You’re saying it’s a $1.5 trillion tax cut. The impact on the deficit. But in fact, it’s, according to most analyses, $2.2 trillion.

MULVANEY: Well, not most analyses …

MITCHELL: Well, a non-partisan analysis. And the fact is that you’re squeezing it into these rules. But you really do intend for it to be extended down the road which will explode the deficit even farther … We’re not taking a political point of view here. We are actually going by nonpartisan groups like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, all the impact on the exploding deficit which will impact future generations.

In addition, the $1.5 trillion limit on debt expansion in the budget assumes billions of cuts in entitlements — something President Trump said he would never do and something moderates such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have said they won’t allow. The explosion of debt that Republicans will unleash will not only be a drag on growth but also exert pressure to make cuts in both defense and domestic spending.

Moreover, the premise of the bill — we need to jump-start the economy to create jobs — is flawed. We are already at “full employment,” and the bill’s incentives to reinvest in the U.S. economy make little sense. For one thing, U.S. businesses already are sitting on mounds of cash; for another, U.S. businesses — as senior economic adviser Gary Cohn learned — are not keen on using any tax savings to hire more workers or pay them more.

David Frum sums up the consequences of the GOP’s legislative recklessness:

By refusing to hold hearings and forestalling Congressional Budget Office scoring, Republicans have moved fast. But they have not convinced the public mind to recycle an antique but still meaningful phrase. They may win a vote. They have not won the argument. What they are doing will not last, and will therefore not deliver any of the promised benefits. It’s the equivalent of a 1980s-style corporate raid, which will yield a hasty and morally dubious windfall for a few insiders while damaging the longer-term economic health of the larger enterprise.

In sum, it’s quite likely that by the midterms and certainly by the 2020 election, the only real results of the tax bill will be bigger debt and greater income inequality. Sure, Democrats would like to defeat a bill that they consider to be rotten policy. They’d be delighted to see Trump humiliated by another legislative defeat and watch as the GOP’s circular firing squad forms. Nevertheless, watching vulnerable Republicans cast votes for a very unpopular bill that will likely have little benefit for all but the super-rich would be a fine consolation prize.

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.    Follow @JRubinBlogger