AZ Congressional Delegation

Action Alert: Time to kill the evil GOP bastards’ ‘tax cuts for corporations and Putocrats’ bill

by

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch released the revisions to the Senate tax plan Tuesday night. The new version sunsets most of the individual tax provisions after 2025, but makes the lower corporate tax rate permanent. Senate GOP changes tax bill to add Obamacare mandate repeal, make individual income cuts expire:

Senate Republicans announced that the individual tax cuts in the plan would be made temporary, expiring at the end of 2025 to comply with Senate rules limiting the impact of legislation on the long-term deficit [by making the individual income tax cuts temporary, Senate leaders are seeking to ensure that the bill does not violate the chamber’s Byrd Rule that prohibits legislation passed with fewer than 60 votes from raising the deficit after 10 years]. A corporate tax cut, reducing the rate from 35 to 20 percent, would be left permanent.

Oh, and it also repeals the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.

This would result in 13 million fewer people having health insurance, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO has also projected that repealing the individual mandate would drive up insurance premiums for many Americans by roughly 10 percent.

As Axios.com says:

Remember “skinny repeal”? The repeal bill that all but three Senate Republicans voted for on the express condition that it not become law? Because, as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, “the skinny bill as policy is a disaster”? The policy is basically the same this time around.

  • “Skinny repeal” would have done more than just end the individual mandate, but that was its biggest change, and the one that made it a “disaster” for insurance markets. Any vehicle that repeals the individual mandate, without a replacement, will cause premiums to rise and leave millions more Americans uninsured.
  • That said, none of the three senators who killed skinny repeal — Susan Collins, John McCain or Lisa Murkowski — has said repealing the individual mandate would be a deal-breaker for their tax votes.

Why now? The savings. Repealing the mandate would save the government roughly $340 billion over a decade, and Republicans need that money to help offset the lost revenues from $1.5 trillion in tax cuts.

  • As CBO reminded lawmakers yesterday, if the tax bill does end up adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, automatic cuts would kick in — including $25 billion from Medicare. Some Republicans have also said they won’t vote for a tax bill that adds to the deficit, making the search for spending cuts especially important.

Read more

House GOP tax scam exposed

by

The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday approved the House Republicans’ bill to rewrite the tax code on a party-line vote. GOP tax bill clears hurdle, heads to House floor:

The measure — which reduces the number of individual tax rates, slashes the corporate tax rate and eliminates many deductions and credits — was approved on a party-line vote of 24-16.

The only changes made to the bill during the markup were from amendments offered by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

Thursday afternoon, Brady made a number of changes to the bill which included restoring the adoption tax credit, additional tax relief for pass-through businesses and higher tax rates on repatriated foreign earnings.

Republicans and Democrats argued during the markup over whether the bill would help the middle class. GOP lawmakers pointed to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation that showed that on average every income group would get a tax cut in 2019.

“It was established over and over again that the Joint Committee on Taxation says taxpayers at every quintile will pay less taxes under this plan,” said Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.).

But Democrats cited Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that showed some middle-class taxpayers would still see their taxes go up, particularly in later years.

“This bill will raise taxes on the middle class. It will raise taxes on the middle class. It will raise taxes on the middle class,” said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.).

So who is right? As one should surmise, it’s not the GOP bait-and-switch tax scammers. Paul Waldman of the Washington Post reports, The GOP tax plan will raise taxes on lots of people. A new analysis shows how many.

Republicans have always been good at spin, but right now they’re facing one of the most extraordinary PR challenges they’ve ever confronted: Can they sell a bill that raises taxes on tens of millions of Americans as a glorious tax cut for everyone?

It would be an extraordinary trick if they managed to pull it off, but distracting from the facts will be no easy task.

Read more

Lawrence Summers on the fraud that is the GOP tax plan

by

It is dishearening to read headlines in the New York Times from good reporters like Carl Huse like this: Paul Ryan Puts It All on the Line in Tax Fight:

The new Republican tax proposal is arguably the pinnacle of Paul D. Ryan’s legislative career, the culmination of years spent in the wonky trenches of conservative think tanks and esoteric congressional budget and tax debates.

I’m sorry, but no. Perpetuating this myth of wonkishness is unforgiveably wrong.

Economist and Times columnist Paul Krugman identifed the GOP’s alleged boy genius and Ayn Rand fan boy, Paul Ryan, “the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin” as an inellectual fraud and the GOP’s flimflam man more than 7 years ago.

Krugman recently wrote, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and the Con Man Caucus:

It really is amazing to watch this chaotic horror show play out at the highest levels of a great nation’s government. But I guess this is what you have to expect when you hand over the reins of power to a con man, whose whole career has been based on convincing naïve marks that he’s a brilliant deal maker, but turns out to have no idea how to actually govern.

Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about Donald Trump? I’m talking about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, an obvious phony who nonetheless convinced the rubes — that is, much of the news media and the political establishment — that he was a brilliant fiscal expert. What we’re witnessing now is the end of the charade, the political equivalent of what happened when graduates of Trump University tried to get some value in return for their money.

On Thursday, House Republicans unveiled a tax “reform” bill with the same good order and careful deliberation with which they unveiled their various attempts to repeal Obamacare. That is, after having had years to prepare, the G.O.P. waited until the last minute to throw something together, without any hearings or serious analysis.

Budget wonks are frantically going through the legislative language, trying to figure out what it means and what it would do — but they can take some comfort in the fact that the bill’s authors are almost equally in the dark.

Read more

Sen. Jeff Flake: ‘It’s time we all say: Enough’

by

After announcing that he will not run for reelection on Tuesday in a dramatic Senate floor speech, Senator Jeff Flake follows up with an op-ed in the Washington Post simply titled Enough:

As I contemplate the Trump presidency, I cannot help but think of Joseph Welch.

On June 9, 1954, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Welch, who was the chief counsel for the Army, famously asked the committee chairman if he might speak on a point of personal privilege. What he said that day was so profound that it has become enshrined as a pivotal moment in defense of American values against those who would lay waste to them. Welch was the son of a small prairie town in northwest Iowa, and the plaintive quality of his flat Midwestern accent is burned into American history. After asking Sen. Joseph McCarthy for his attention and telling him to listen with both ears, Welch spoke:

“Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.”

And then, in words that today echo from his time to ours, Welch delivered the coup de grace: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The moral power of Welch’s words ended McCarthy’s rampage on American values, and effectively his career as well.

After Welch said his piece, the hearing room erupted in applause, those in attendance seemingly shocked by such bracing moral clarity in the face of a moral vandal. Someone had finally spoken up and said: Enough.

Read more