The con man caucus
Paul Ryan and the GOP remain unready for prime time
It is amazing to watch this chaotic horror show play out at the highest levels of a great nation’s government. But this is what you have to expect when you hand the reins of power to a con man, whose whole career has been based on convincing naive marks that he’s a brilliant deal maker, but turns out to have no idea how to actually govern.
Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about Donald Trump? I’m talking about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, an obvious phony who nonetheless convinced the rubes — that is, much of thenews media and the political establishment — that he was a brilliant fiscal expert. What we’re witnessing now isthe end of the charade.
Thursday, House Republicans unveiled a tax “reform” bill after the same careful deliberation they exercised when unveiling their attempts to repeal Obamacare. With years to prepare, they waited until the last minute to throw something together, without hearings or serious analysis.
Budget wonks are frantically going through the legislative language, trying to figure out what it would do, but they can take comfort in the factthat the bill’s authors are almostequally in the dark.
OK, some things are clear: The bill would give huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, while opening vast new opportunities for tax avoidance. Think of the big tax cuts as having been custom-designed to benefit theTrump family.
But the big tax cuts would blow a multitrillion-dollar hole in the budget, so Republicans have been scrambling to find “pay-fors” that limit the addition to the deficit. What they came up with was a hodgepodge of stuff: ending deductions for some state and local taxes, limiting deductions for mortgage interest, phasing out child tax creditsand so on.
Since the point of these measures is to offset tax cuts for the rich, they will, more or less by definition, end up raising taxes on large numbersof middle-class families.
Will this bill pass the House? Unclear: Some important interest groups, like homebuilders and the smallbusiness lobby, have declared opposition. In any case, it almost surely can’t become law in anything like its current form: A tax bill can’t pass the Senate with less than 60 votes if it raises the long-term budget deficit, whichthis bill surely does.
So right now, tax cuts are looking like health care redux: With many years to prepare, Republicans turn out to be completely unready for primetime. Why?
This week’s debacle was predictable from the moment, more than seven years ago, that Mr. Ryan began establishing himself as a media darling by publishing impressive-looking blueprints for fiscal reform with titles such as “Roadmap for America’sFuture.”
Like the bill just released, they all included huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, but Mr. Ryan insisted that any revenue losses would be made up for by ending unjustified tax breaks. Which tax breaks? Herefused to say.
These evasions worked brilliantly as a public relations strategy. Those who warned about his plans’ phoninesswere ignored.
But actual legislation can’t close huge fiscal gaps with vague promises. To hand out those big tax cuts while raising the deficit by “only” $1.5 trillion, Republicans needed to find real money somewhere, and that turnsout to be really hard.
The big question should be, why do any of this? Mr. Ryan used to claim that his plans were about reducing the budget deficit, but he has nowgiven up that pretense.
And why should tax cuts even be on the table? We have budget deficits, not surpluses, and lots of unmet needs for future spending. U.S. taxes are low, not high, compared with similar countries. Predictions that tax cuts lead to rapid economic growth have been wrong time and again. And by large margins, voters want taxes on corporations and the wealthyto go up, not down.
The ruling theory among Republicans seems to be that going into the midterm electionsthey need a “win” to offset their failure to repeal Obamacare. Perhaps, but it’s a theory that reveals extraordinary contempt for voters, who are supposed to be impressed by the GOP’s ability to ram through policies that benefit only a tiny elite.
Most Americans realize Donald Trump is a terrible president. His party’s congressional leadership is pretty awful, too.