The GOP’s unquenchable thirst for tax cuts no matter the cost

Last week began with the announcement of President Trump’s tax “reform” plan. Its centerpiece is a gigantic tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. No surprise there. Why wouldn’t the signal accomplishment of a president who ran as tribune of the economically forgotten be a massive giveaway to the opulent? It’s just common sense, I guess.

Some days later, the week reached crescendo with a stunning celebratory photo, taken at the White House, to mark the House of Representatives’ passage of the Trump health care bill. Scores of white male congressmen, jubilant in boastful, triumphant chorus, locking arms in honored tribute, behind the most dishonest and detestable man ever to occupy the presidency – ecstatic for having voted, simultaneously, to secure hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the very richest Americans and take away health care coverage for at least 24 million poor people. A win-win if ever there was one. We can only hope the nauseating depiction will eventually serve as trigger for either the radical reformation or complete elimination of the Republican Party.

A word of perspective.

The United States is the richest nation on earth. It’s also the most economically polarized. We have, already, the greatest income inequality among the major nations. That is particularly so after taxes and government benefits are included in the calculus. Beyond that, the United States has, very nearly, the greatest wealth disparity on the planet.

Though the richest, we have the highest poverty and child poverty rates among the advanced nations. The Pew Foundation informed us, last month, no major nation has a smaller middle class than the United States. Our “shrinking middle,” Pew indicated, results from a “middle to upper income redistribution.” We are the richest, the poorest and the most unequal major nation in the world.

On the tax front, Trump’s remedy for these challenges is a scheme the Tax Policy Center forecasts will provide 51 percent of its benefits to the wealthiest 1percent. He would eliminate the estate tax, which now affects only couples worth more than $11 million. He’d kill the alternative minimum tax – which generally hits households with incomes of at least several hundred thousand dollars. He’d lower the corporate rate and create a loophole for wealthy individuals to take advantage of it. All told, the one-percenters would see a 14 percent cut, middle income folks would get 1.8 percent, and low income Americans, 1.2 percent. Three cheers for the sheriff of Nottingham.

The health care bill is even worse. It cuts an astonishing $880 billion from Medicaid – one fourth of its budget, eliminating 14 million low-income Americans from the rolls. It cuts another $300 billion from health insurance subsidies, requiring a typical 60-year-old to pay another $12,400 for a policy. It essentially eliminates protections for people with pre-existing conditions. And it gives a $600-800 billion tax cut almost exclusively to the top 2 percent of Americans. It is an exercise in moral barbarism.

Bad as it is, none of this is new to folks in North Carolina. The tax-cutting frenzy of the last several years here has resulted in increased bills for the bottom 40 percent and huge cuts for the top 1 percent. Our leaders have eliminated the estate tax, ended the earned income tax credit, flattened and reduced the income tax, dramatically lowered corporate rates and increased regressive sales taxes. And we’re old hands at wrenching health care away from hundreds of thousands of our impoverished brothers and sisters.

Last week the N.C. Senate passed the remarkably named “Billion Dollar Middle Class Tax Cut Act.” Half of its largesse goes to the top one-fifth. Only 29 percent goes to the bottom three-fifths. Oddly, given the title, some 20 percent goes to corporations. The Budget & Tax Center estimates the new Senate bill, when combined with recent income tax reductions, would secure $19,000 for the top 1 percent and $293 for the middle quintile. The bottom fifth gets $51. Apparently “middle” doesn’t mean what it once did.

At some point, you wonder what the end game is here. We’re already the most economically divided major nation in the world. We treat poor people more harshly than any of our peers. We countenance greater barriers to mobility and we visit more wrenching hardship on impoverished children than anyone else does. And, still, the principal permanent policy tenet of the Republican Party, both in North Carolina and nationally, is, quite literally: “More Tax Cuts for the Rich.”

It presents the goal that can never be met; the yen that can never be satisfied. It is unquenchable, no matter the damage that results to the commonweal and no matter how profoundly it requires that we grind our defining commitments to dust. It calls to mind Lincoln’s story about the farmer who claimed he wasn’t greedy, explaining, “I just want the land that joins mine.”

This story was originally published May 8, 2017 at 12:26 PM with the headline "The GOP’s unquenchable thirst for tax cuts no matter the cost."