Rolling Back the Twentieth Century: The Endgame of the Trump Tax Cuts
The men who would be kings are showing their hand
As the wrecking crew slashes its way through the Federal Government, it appears they are bent on stripping it down to the bones. Recently, The Nation observed that Thomas Frank, in his book of the same name back in 2008, rightly observed that “the core mission of the government-baiting right is to marshal all available power and cash to demonstrate its central ideological presupposition: that government is incapable of functioning effectively.” Some things never change.
Despite all the stage craft and suffering involved in the present assaults, the truth is that Trump simply cannot make the government small enough to pay for the boat load of tax cuts he hopes to give the rich and corporations. The New York Times reported last week that the massive $4.5 trillion that Republicans want to spend on tax cuts is not remotely offset by the current catastrophic cuts to the government, and the money saved is still not enough to accommodate the President’s list of promised give aways.
Hence, “The overriding goal of this year’s bill is to extend the expiring provisions, which provide their largest benefits to the rich, before they end.” But on top of that extension, Trump has promised a grab bag of other tax cuts where, “Even such a huge sum is not nearly enough for all of their ideas.”
House Republicans are preparing to adopt a budget plan that puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of the tax cut. Such a massive sum, however, won’t come close to covering their grand schemes, and so lawmakers must now decide which policy commitments are essential and which ones they can live without.
One might think that the budget hawks in the GOP would balk at the size of Trump’s bag of goodies, but the White House insists that even more is on the table according to the Times:
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, reminded reporters recently that Mr. Trump wants the bill to include his ideas to not tax tips ($100 billion, per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget), not tax overtime pay (at least $250 billion), lower taxes for companies that make their products in the United States (at least $100 billion) and eliminate taxes on Social Security income (at least $550 billion).
It doesn’t take a budget expert to see that this wave of tax cuts will gut federal revenue and make it harder and harder to cover the cost of programs like Social Security and Medicare. If the budget hawks fold to Trump’s demands, as the entire GOP has done up to this point, it’s easy to see how Trump could grow the deficit with little more than a few grumbles as he did last time, only to change course once the wealth has been redistributed. In the short term, the sacrificial lambs will be the poor and socially marginalized who will feel the pain of the budget axe; eventually, though, everyone but the wealthy will be on the table.
Despite the President’s protestations that he will never touch Social Security and Medicare, his desire to dismantle the New Deal legacy of the Democratic party can be more easily warranted if the tax cuts the Republicans give now end up pushing the federal deficit up to the point where he will create the justification for gutting entitlements in the service of a newfound fiscal responsibility. The answer? Is there anything the market can’t solve if everything is privatized for profit while risk is socialized? Not in our brave new world.
The old line from Grover Norquist that the aim of the American Right was to shrink the government down until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub is quickly becoming a reality. Behind the façade of populist rhetoric, we are witnessing the fever dreams of the libertarian right come to fruition—democracy enchained while America’s plutocrats are left utterly unchecked by regulations or reasonable taxation. The logical result of this will be what William Greideronce called “rolling back the twentieth century.”
One can look to the past, as Nancy MacLean does in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America, and discover that since the middle of the twentieth century, the Right’s goal has been to protect capitalism from democracy, permanently. The present gang of disrupters in D.C. is teaching progressives that it is they, not the Democrats, who really learned how to demand the impossible long enough and loud enough to make it a reality. It is up to the rest of us to build a countermovement that refuses to accept oligarchy and pushes long and hard for thoroughgoing democracy in the face of the blatant authoritarianism and corruption of Trump and company.
As Mother Jones angrily told a crowd of striking miners nearly a century ago, “There are no Kings in America!”