Republican budgets do what Republican budgets do
Donald Trump is giving tax breaks to his rich friends while you pay more at Walmart. That line from Sarah Longwell is a pretty succinct summary of how his stupidly named budget bill will impact families from coast to coast. After some arm-twisting over the weekend, Republican members managed to vote the taxa and immigration measure out of the House Budget Committee last night on a party-line vote. Four GOP fiscal hardliners voted present.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) counts the vote as a win but admits that there’s “a lot more work to do.”
The Washington Post reports:
GOP leaders can only lose two votes on the House floor if all lawmakers are present and voting. They have two days to quell concerns from the far-right flank and moderates before the House Rules Committee meets as soon as Tuesday to make final changes to the bill.
[…]
The massive package forms the centerpiece of Trump’s second-term agenda. In addition to extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire in December, the bill would make good on Trump’s campaign promises to end taxes on tips, overtime wages and auto-loan interest while directing hundreds of billions of dollars in spending to immigration enforcement, defense and other White House priorities.
Between the new spending and the lost tax revenue, the measure would increase the nation’s $36.2 trillion debt by at least $2.5 trillion over the next decade — an amount the hard-line conservatives found impossible to stomach.
The resisters will put on a good show before the final vote and maybe draw lots for which two has to cave and which have to vote with Trump.
What’s in the soon-to-be final budget reconciliation bill is somewhat in question. It’s structured so it can pass with no Democratic votes. In some ways, it will be the usual from Republicans, but Paul Krugman suggests it will be more vicious and built on what for years he’s called zombie lies:
Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.
And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.
For comparison with Trump’s first-term effort, Krugman offers a chart showing the effects on after-tax income:
The expected cuts to Medicaid benefits are especially cruel, Krugman argues:
Medicaid, in case anyone needs reminding, is the national health insurance program for low-income Americans who probably don’t have any other way to pay for medical care. In 2023 Medicaid covered 69 million Americans, far more than Medicare (which covers seniors), including 39 percent of children.
Providing health care to children, by the way, isn’t just about social justice and basic decency. It’s also good economics: Children who receive adequate care grow up to be more productive adults. Among other things they end up paying more taxes, so Medicaid for children almost surely pays for itself.
After raiding the temple grainery to feed the Hebrew slaves, what was it Moses told Pharoah in The Ten Commandments?
Moses: A city is built of brick, Pharoah. The strong make many, the starving make few. The dead make none.
Someone send the script over to Mike Johnson. But he’ll skim past that line.
When is a cut not a cut?
The bill doesn’t specifically target children’s care, Krugman adds, but the added paperwork requirements will make it harder for low-income Americans to access the benefits.
Wait, it gets worse. One of the ways Republicans will try to slash Medicaid is by requiring that adult Medicaid recipients be gainfully employed — or, more accurately, that they demonstrate to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats that they are gainfully employed, which is not at all the same thing.
The belief that many Americans receiving government support are malingering, that they could and should be working but are choosing to be lazy, is a classic zombie idea. That is, like the claim that cutting taxes on the rich will unleash an economic miracle, it’s a doctrine that should be long dead. It has, after all, been proved wrong by experience again and again.
Only 3 percent of Medicaid recipients are “non-disabled working-age adults persistently not working.” What else keeps them from work, or from work that generates the kind of paperwork overseers demand? We don’t know. But by the GOP’s spin, the system is rife with such malingerers, and that shit has to be nipped in the bud. So they’ll make all recipients jump through hoops like trained dogs in a circus to access plan benefits to which they are legally entitled.
Why, then, are Republicans doing this? Part of the answer is to save money: By making the poor even poorer they reduce the extent to which tax cuts for the rich explode the budget deficit.
But I’m actually skeptical that this is the whole story, or even most of it. If you pay attention to what right-wing Republicans do, as opposed to what they say, it becomes obvious that they don’t really care about budget deficits. Oh, they do a lot of posturing, issuing dire warnings about debt and pretending to be deficit hawks. But can you think of a single example in which the U.S. right has been willing to give up something it wants, such as tax cuts for the rich, in order to reduce the deficit?
As I see it, right-wingers’ rhetoric about the budget deficit is a lot like their rhetoric about antisemitism. It’s not something they actually care about. It’s just a club they can use to bash their opponents.
Like constitutional order and the rule of law that way.
But in that case, why the cruelty toward less-fortunate Americans? Well, as I see it the cruelty, as opposed to the dollars saved, is actually the point. Inflicting harm on the vulnerable isn’t something they do with regret, it’s something they do with a sense of satisfaction.
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