Republican hypocrites will move to slash your benefits

Republicans don’t care about budget deficits, and never did. They only pretend to care about deficits when one of two things is true: a Democrat is in the White House, and deficit rhetoric can be used to block his agenda, or they see an opportunity to slash social programs that help needy Americans, and can invoke deficits as an excuse.

So it’s not at all surprising that they were willing to enact a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy even though all independent estimates said this would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt. And it was also predictable that they would return to deficit posturing as soon as the deed was done, citing the red ink they themselves produced as a reason to cut social spending.

Yet even the most cynical among us are startled both by how quickly the bait-and-switch is proceeding and by the contempt Republicans are showing for the public’s intelligence.

During the Senate debate over the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Sen. Orrin Hatch was challenged over support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million U.S. children — but whose funding lapsed two months ago. Hatch declared his support for the program, but insisted that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore” — just before voting for a trillion-and-ahalf-dollar tax cut that will deliver the bulk of its benefits to the richest few percent of the population.

He then went on to say, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Was he talking about food stamps, most of whose beneficiaries are children, elderly or disabled?

Was he talking about the earned-income tax credit, which rewards only those who work?

Was he talking about Medicaid, which again mainly benefits children, the elderly and the disabled, plus people who work hard but whose jobs don’t provide health benefits?

Now, to be fair, there are some people in America who get lots of money they didn’t lift a finger to earn — namely, inheritors of large estates. Strange to say, however, Republican legislation would give these people much more — indeed, billions and billions of dollars — without requiring any additional effort on their part.

The House version of the big tax cut would eliminate the estate tax entirely; the Senate version would double the level of wealth exempted from the tax, to $22.4 million for a couple. How can this be justified if it’s supposedly hard to find money for children’s health care?

Well, Sen. Chuck Grassley explained it all: “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Hmm. Somehow, I don’t think limiting spending on booze, women, and movies (movies?) is going to be sufficient for the median American household — which had an income of $59,000 last year — to end up with a $22 million estate.

The important thing to realize, however, is that the hypocrisy and contempt for the public we’ve seen in the past few days is just the beginning.