THERE THEY GO AGAIN

By Robert P. Bomboy

            As Ronald Reagan, the late president, famously might have said: "There they go again!"

            Republicans in Congress have once again conceived a scheme to make the rich richer - immensely richer - and once again they have taken the low road to getting it passed. The last time up to bat it was the Unaffordable Care Act, in which they would have further enriched themselves and their richest friends while gutting Medicaid and stealing the health insurance of you and me and 22 million of our fellow Americans.

Now here comes the cruelest budget in our nation's history and a loophole that would let rich men pretend they were small business operators while they were raking in the dough from a big tax cut. Are they ever going to stop?

            The budget calls for a $1.5 trillion tax cut¸ most of it for our richest Americans, even as the Treasury Department reported that the budget deficit for fiscal 2017, which ended September 30, had grown to $666 billion. Losing taxes from the one percent would vastly increase the deficit.

"The plan does indeed favor the wealthy - overwhelmingly, undeniably," says the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. "It's shocking that as many as 40 percent of Americans don't realize this."

            The House of Representatives and the Senate have already taken sleeper votes. Both say they're "non-binding," but they are set-ups for next month when the big boys will get out their tax-cutting scissors, cutting the top one percent's individual tax rates; cutting corporate taxes; cutting the estate or death tax that only applies to rich people.

Beyond that they've made room in their blindman's bluff strategy for a big new loophole that, as I said, will let rich people like lawyers pretend they are small businesses and get a lower preferential tax rate.

And, with a last-minute amendment, they have built in a boobytrap that allows the Republicans to get their $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy with only 50 votes - half the Senate's members and without any Democrats. Normally this kind of budget action would need 60 votes - enough so that a minority party could throw up a roadblock to such avarice by filibustering.                                                           

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that, over the next 10 years,
almost 80 percent of the gains from this sneaky budget set-up and its proposed $1.5 trillion tax cut would go to the top one percent, the rich guys. More than a quarter of middle-class families would actually see their taxes go up.

Over those same 10 years this blueprint for the rich would cut $470 billion from Medicare and more than $1 trillion from Medicaid. If you want to do the math, a trillion is a thousand billions, and even a billion is an awfully lot of money.

As New York Senator Chuck Schumer pointed out, "This nasty and backwards budget green-lights cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in order to give a tax break to big corporations and the wealthiest Americans."

The only thing that Republicans in Congress and the White House care about is giving trillions of dollars to themselves and the one percent, the richest people in America.

President Trump has raged on and on about the Republicans' failure to pass his Unaffordable Care Act by hook or by crook. He's on the pointed end of a pitchfork with his party's big donors who are furious that they didn't get the $700 billion in promised tax cuts by killing Obamacare.

            "If they don't get big bucks out of this 'tax reform,'" says Paul Krugman, "they might close their pocketbooks for the 2018 midterm elections."