By Robert P. Bomboy
A long time ago I was a
reporter covering the Maryland General Assembly, the state legislature that
meets in Annapolis for three months each year, from January to March. The assembly’s
penultimate work was approving the state budget, always in a mad late-night
dash lasting into the wee and darkest hours of the final morning.
Long into the night we
reporters hunted for snakes in an airless basement press room beneath the
Maryland Statehouse where George Washington in 1783 nobly resigned his generalship
of the continental army that had won the Revolutionary War.
The “snakes” were nasty
features that the assembly had secreted in every possible crack and cranny of
the budget – hidden political plums and loopholes that purposely enriched
wealthy individuals and corporations. Every year at budget time we found
bushels of them.
That being the norm,
think how many snakes are slithering around in the 479-page federal budget that
the Senate passed last week, almost without looking at it. The hunt for the
snakes is on again!
It’s not as if we have
to look far. Everyone from tax accountants to Nobel Prize-winning economists
had been screaming from the housetops all along that this budget was a tax grab
for the rich. That should not surprise
us because it has now reached the point that the rich own America and they own
Congress. More than half of all its members are millionaires. Eighteen
lobbyists swarm around each and every member, like bees after you know what.
In its final form, the Senate budget is perhaps
the most corrupt legislative document that Congress has produced since the days
of President Warren G. Harding almost 100 years ago. As the Republican majority
leader Mitch McConnell tried to do with the version of the Unaffordable Care
Act that failed in September, a Senate cabal wrote its budget in complete
secrecy, had no hearings on it, heard no expert witnesses, refused to show it
to the Democrats who make up almost half of the Senate’s numbers, refused even
to share it with their own Republican members until 7 p.m. on the night they
were voting on it. During that dreadful final day and night of the vote, they
scribbled dozens of last-minute snakes into their budget – some additions hardly
readable and written in the margins of the nearly 500-page bill, depending on
whose ox was being gorged or gored.
It
was malfeasance to vote yes to it without having even the faintest idea what
was in it.
The rich will gloat and pop their champagne corks. We will
suffer for it. This budget and its long-term consequences will add $1 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. In one of
their unkindest cuts of all, the Republicans will use the very deficit they’ve
created to dramatically unfund Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other
New Deal and Great Society benefits we’ve counted on and paid into.
And of course, by repealing the Obamacare
rule requiring that everyone have health insurance, the budget will immediately
rip the carpet out from under 13 million of us who were previously unable to
get medical insurance. Besides causing millions of men, women, and children to lose their coverage, it will disrupt care for the elderly
and change the American health care system in ways we can’t yet even predict.
The money
saved will be pumped into tax cuts for the very wealthy, the one percent. The
budget just passed includes tax cuts so large that they will trigger
across-the-board spending cuts — including billions from Medicare. The last time Medicare was hit with cuts like this, patients
lost access to critical services like chemotherapy treatment.
Throughout, Trump and his Treasury Secretary, the
multi-millionaire Steve Mnuchin, lied, saying the budget would give tax cuts to
most of us. Munchkin, the guy who got in trouble for using government planes
and helicopters on personal flights, assured everyone – including the senators
- that he had dozens of people in the Treasury working day and night to
demonstrate the benefits of the budget for the middle class. Only at the last
minute did the Treasury point out he was lying – he didn’t have a study like
that going on and no one was working on it.
Let’s look for the ssssssnaakes:
·
For instance, there’s the
“Donald J. Trump loophole.” Trump has a lot of money from his various
businesses that will now be taxed at a cut rate. Steven M. Rosenthal of the nonpartisan Tax
Policy Center says Trump’s 2017 financial disclosure forms show more than 500
pass-through business interests that will get big tax breaks.
·
Thanks to an amendment tacked on by Senator John Cornyn, the
Texas Republican, gas and oil operators will get even bigger tax cuts than they
now have. “The Senate went out of its way to confirm that passive investors in
these publicly traded investment vehicles get the benefit of the pass-through
discount tax rate,” says Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the
University of Southern California and a former chief of staff for the
congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “This is a working definition of a
tax boondoggle.”
·
In
the early morning hours before the awful vote, Vice President Mike Pence cast a
tiebreaker to pass an amendment letting people use up to $10,000 a year from
tax-advantaged 529 savings accounts for private and religious schools and some
home schooling, further undercutting public education. Until now, 529 accounts
could be used only for college and higher education.
·
At
the same time that wealthy investors and businesses are getting big tax cuts —
including eliminating the estate tax for all but a tiny sliver of the country’s
wealthiest households — the Senate tightened deductions for lower- and
middle-income wage earners, and rejected funding that would have let the I.R.S.
offer advice to low-income people as they filed their taxes. It’s the Christmas
season and the old unrepentant Scrooge is alive and well in the land.
·
New tax cuts go to big-money taxpayers like lawyers, accountants,
and a legion of others whose businesses are organized as partnerships. Half of
that kind of income goes to the top one percent of taxpayers, the richest of
the rich, according to the Tax Policy Center. That tax cut will cost the
government about $476 billion over the next 10 years.
·
Banks and other financial institutions will
still be able to avoid taxes by making payments to offshore subsidiaries. The
Senate had initially intended to take away the tax benefits from such
sleight-of-hand finagling, but the banks got a last-minute reprieve. In
calculating the banks’ tax bills, the budget snakes exclude payments related to
derivatives, a big source of income for financial institutions and a main
contributor to the 2008 financial meltdown.
·
The drug maker Pfizer, Google, Apple, and other
huge companies whose profits have accumulated in offshore tax havens will now
have their corporate income tax bills cut nearly in half, to 20 percent, a
break that will save the big guys half a trillion dollars a year compared to the
current law.
Who owns America? Ssssssssssssss!!!!
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