COVID-19 & Healthcare

After their tax bill, the GOP is coming for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

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The Senate Finance Committee late Thursday approved the Senate’s version of the GOP’s “tax cuts for corporations and Plutocrats” bill, after the House passed its version earlier in the day. Senate panel approves GOP tax plan. The panel voted to send the tax plan to the full Senate on a party-line vote of 14-12.

The Septuagenarian Ninja Turtle, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement “When the Senate returns after Thanksgiving, I will bring this must-pass legislation to the floor for further debate and open consideration.”

Well, this is going to make for some heated discussions at Thanksgiving dinner when your drunk uncle shows up wearing his MAGA hat and Trump T-shirt. Here’s some information that you can use to try to properly educate your ignorant drunk uncle.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post explains, The GOP tax plan is moving forward. It’s a big scam on Trump’s base.

If you’re one of those white working-class voters who propelled Donald Trump into the presidency and gave Republicans total control of Washington, the GOP has a message for you: Sucker!

Today the House [passed] its version of a tax reform bill, and if and when the Senate passes its version, the two will be combined in a final bill that will most likely wind up becoming law. We already knew that the House version would raise taxes on tens of millions of Americans — about 36 million, according to figures from the Joint Committee on Taxation, whose job it is to analyze tax bills before they’re voted on. Now we’re learning more about the Senate version:

The tax bill Senate Republicans are championing would give large tax cuts to millionaires while raising taxes on American families earning $10,000 to $75,000 over the next decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ official nonpartisan analysts.

President Trump and Republican lawmakers have been heralding their bill as a win for hard-working Americans, but the JCT report casts serious doubt on that claim. Tax hikes for households earning $10,000 to $30,000 would start in 2021 and grow sharply from there. By the year 2027, Americans earning $30,000 to $75,000 a year would also be forced to pay more in taxes even though people earning over $100,000 continue to get substantial tax cuts.

Everyone always knew Republicans were going to cut taxes for the wealthy. They’re Republicans; that’s what they do. But it’s a genuine surprise to see them raising taxes on people with more modest incomes. Why isn’t this being angrily decried by all those conservatives who believe that tax increases are a crime against humanity? Could it possibly be that they don’t really care about the middle class as much as they say? Was the whole point of this exercise to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and if regular people have to pay more so those at the top can pay less, then that’s fine with them? Say it isn’t so!

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House votes on GOP ‘tax cuts for corporations and Plutocrats’ bill today

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The House is scheduled to vote on the GOP “tax cuts for corporations and Plutocrats” bill today. House Is Poised to Pass Tax Bill in Major Step Toward Overhaul:

The House tax bill, which passed in the Ways and Means Committee last week, would cut taxes more than $1.4 trillion over 10 years. It cuts the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, collapses the tax brackets to four from seven, switches the United States to an international tax system that is more in line with the rest of the world and scales back many popular deductions, including one for state and local taxes paid.

The House bill appeared on track for passage on Thursday, despite some Republican opposition. If all House members vote and every Democrat opposes the bill, Republican leaders can afford to lose no more than 22 of their members for it to pass.

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The House is expected to begin floor debate at 9 a.m. on Thursday for about two hours. Mr. Trump is expected to make a visit to the Capitol to speak to the Republican conference around 11:30 a.m., according to a congressional aide. A vote is then expected to take place in the early afternoon.

The House GOP tax bill does not include the repeal of the “Obamacare” individual mandate that is in the Senate bill to help ensure passage in the House. This is all just a ruse. There is an explicit understanding that if the Senate can pass its version of the tax bill with repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, the House will follow suit. Paul Ryan: Senate will have to take lead on scrapping Obamacare individual mandate in the tax bill:

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested that his members could get behind eliminating Obamacare’s individual mandate as part of a tax reform bill. However, he said the House will not do so in the bill it hopes to pass Thursday. Instead, it will wait to address it in a conference committee with the Senate, he said.

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Ryan did not outright say the House would back such a measure, but he noted that his members have voted to repeal the mandate in the past.

“We’ve had the House votes to do that. We passed our repeal of the individual mandate back in May,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “But we never had the votes in the Senate. So what we didn’t want to do is make tax reform harder than it already is.”

“But it really is whether or not the Senate has the votes for this or not. So, we’re seeing what the Senate can do. If the Senate can get it through committee, if they can get it through the floor, then we’ll meet them in conference and we’ll assess at that time,” Ryan added.

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

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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.

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GOP tax bill is a vehicle to sabotage ‘Obamacare’

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Neil Young once did a live album entitled “Rust Never Sleeps.” Well, neither do evil GOP bastards. Even in defeat, they are constantly plotting and scheming their next move to impose their evil plans on America. They are unrelenting. This is why, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The latest example of this: Trump personally pushing GOP leaders to use tax bill to undermine Obamacare:

[GOP] leaders took a preliminary step to study Trump’s proposal to include language in the tax bill that would scrap the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, a change nonpartisan analysts say would save the government more than $400 billion over a decade but would also leave 15 million more Americans without health insurance.

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Undermining the Affordable Care Act through a tax overhaul, meanwhile, would probably draw the same type of opposition that earlier efforts did in the Senate, dooming several such attempts to repeal what some call Obamacare earlier this year. Many in Congress say such an effort would destroy Republicans’ chance of passing major legislation this year.

Still, under heavy pressure from Trump, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said he would ask the Congressional Budget Office to assess the implications of repealing the individual mandate as part of the tax overhaul, the first step toward including the proposal in the bill.

“The president feels very strongly about including this at some step before the final process,” Brady said at a Friday event hosted by Politico. “He’s told me that twice by phone and once in person.”

Brady also suggested he was unlikely to ultimately adopt the change Trump had personally pushed him to make, noting the possibility such a change would sink the bill’s hopes in the Senate.

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