Every day is a Shitnado of racism, bigotry, corruption and incompetence, so I won’t try to offer a digest of events since the last such digest. I’ll just deal with today’s big story.
No, not the impending firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
No, not the Muslim-baiting that’s getting Trump uninvited to the UK (probably) and the Royal Wedding (definitely).
No, not Sessions being hauled in front of the House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors.
No, not the ever-expanding sexual harassment sinkhole.
No, it’s the tax bill. It’s going to pass the Senate tonight, even though they haven’t even finished writing it yet. They tried to get it done before the Congressional Joint Committee for Taxation issued its analysis, but
the JCT rushed out its report today, and it’s everything we already knew and that Republicans have been denying. Even using the controversial method of dynamic scoring – favored by Republicans because it incorporates the imaginary boost to the economy generated by tax cuts to the wealthy – the bill comes up a little short. $1 trillion short, to be exact.
This bill is so fucking dishonest that it beggars belief, even for these crooks. It gives the middle class tax breaks early on, but these breaks expire as time goes on such that those families making less than $100,000 a year will end up paying more in tax in perpetuity. If you make less than $30,000 a year, you will more than likely start paying more tax right away. Meanwhile, income tax breaks for the wealthy kick in later but are enshrined. This has the effect of transferring trillions of dollars from hundreds of millions of Americans up to the 1%. Oh, and the estate tax repeal, coupled with the “improvement” to carried interest and pass-through loopholes, means that the beneficiaries of inherited wealth can live off that money tax free forever. Seriously.
Then there’s the corporation tax reduction – predicated entirely on the lie that the US has the highest corporate tax rate on Earth. It doesn’t. We’re 38th. The supporting lie is that businesses will take the tax credit and give it to workers in the form of higher wages. They won’t; the C-Suite would be voted out at the next AGM if they did. No, they will take the tax break and do what they did with the last tax break (Bush’s tax amnesty), buy back shares which increases the stock price, making shareholders happy and ballooning CEO pay which is customarily these days tied to the stock price.
Oh, and it has the bonus of kicking 13 million people off health insurance while gutting Medicare / Medicaid to the point that expensive life-saving treatments will be scaled back. Death panels, anyone?
I am incandescent with rage over this.
