It is, as sports fanatics everywhere know, Selection Sunday, when the 65-team field of the NCAA basketball tournament is revealed, and–thanks to an entire industry of “bracketology”–the one or two remaining mysteries about “bubble teams” and seedings are resolved. I will not watch the official Selection Sunday show on television, with its endlessly tedious references to “dancing” and “dance cards,” and its sadistic focus on live coverage of a team or two that will be left out. I will view the brackets online, however, and try to finally figure out which team or teams I will embrace during next week’s frenetic first and second round games. My beloved Georgia Bulldogs will not, of course, be in the mix; they are still rebuilding from the calamity of the Jim Harrick years, and after a brief spate of exciting success earlier in the year, finished 15-15, probably not qualifying for an NIT bid. But their future looks bright. (The Georgia women’s team will, as always, be in the tournament, and perhaps they won’t break my heart with an early upset loss this time around). Selection Sunday always brings back fond memories of the one time I actually attended NCAA tournament games: it was in 1990, in New Orleans’ Superdome (ah! how painful it is to type those words today!). Georgia Tech was playing in the regional semifinals and finals, and I decided to put aside my usual disdain for the Dirt Daubers and cheer for them as a matter of home-state chauvinism. I managed to get tickets through a media contact for seats better than that enjoyed by Tech’s president, and was rewarded with two incredibly exciting games: the Jackets beat Michigan State in the semis on a controversial last-split-second shot by Kenny Anderson, and then beat Minnesota in overtime for the championship. Aside from the games themselves, my most vivid memory was of the young woman from Minnesota who sat behind me in the Final, dressed up as a gopher, and constantly recited the school’s charmingly atavistic cheer, which sounded like something out of an early Mickey Rooney college movie (Sota! Sota! G-o-o-o-o Gophers! Rah!). That was sixteen years ago, and I wonder: where is that woman today? Does she still dress up as a gopher? And does she blog? The whole scene was a nice reminder of the essential silliness of the tribal loyalty so many of us assign to sports teams. Years after this event, I learned that my paternal grandfather, who died when my father was an infant, actually attended Georgia Tech for a brief while before the money ran out and he had to get a full-time job. Nobody in my extended, and generally non-college-educated family, attended the University of Georgia. My father was largely indifferent to sports, and my mother, good southern liberal that she was, reserved her loyalities for the Dodgers baseball team that played Jackie Robinson. Yet I was a confirmed Georgia Bulldog fan from early childhood. Why is that? I couldn’t possibly have known that I would wind up attending law school in Athens. Was it the mascot, UGA? The school colors? I have no clue.And so, on this Selection Sunday, I cast about for an irrational attachment to other peoples’ tribes. Should I risk further identification as a Washington Insider by supporting Georgetown or George Washington? Choose a Southern Surrogate for the absent Bulldogs? Get into an emotionally satisfying and vaguely progressive Mid-Major obsession? Speaking for God knows how many other people who face this particular dilemma, I must say, dear friends, that this is why they call it March Madness.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 25: Democrats Dodge Bullet As Trump Kills Higher Income Tax on the Wealthy
Sometimes dogs that don’t bark are very significant, and I noted one at New York:
Republicans have both an arithmetic and a messaging problem as they try to enact Donald Trump’s second-term agenda via a giant budget-reconciliation bill. The former involves finding a way to pay for the $4 trillion-plus tax cuts Trump has demanded, along with a half-trillion or so in border security and defense spending increases. And the latter flows from the necessity of hammering popular federal programs (especially Medicaid) to avoid boosting budget deficits that are already out of control from the perspective of conservatives. This sets up Democrats nicely to deplore the whole mess as a matter of “cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for Trump’s billionaire friends,” a very effective message that has vulnerable House Republicans worried.
To interrupt this line of attack while making the overall agenda slightly more affordable, anonymous White House sources lofted a trial balloon earlier this month via a Fox News report:
“White House aides are quietly floating a proposal within the House GOP that would raise the tax rate for people making more than $1 million to 40%, two sources familiar with discussions told Fox News Digital, to offset the cost of eliminating taxes on overtime pay, tipped wages, and retirees’ Social Security.
“The sources stressed the discussions were only preliminary, and the plan is one of many being talked about as congressional Republicans work on advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.
“Trump and his White House have not yet taken a position on the matter, but the idea is being looked at by his aides and staff on Capitol Hill.”
The idea wasn’t as shocking as it might seem. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the top income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, so just letting that provision expire would accomplish the near-40 percent rate without disturbing other goodies for rich people in the 2017 bill like corporate-tax cuts, estate-tax cuts, and a relaxed alternative minimum tax for both individuals and corporations. One House Republican, Pennsylvania’s Dan Meuser, suggested resetting the top individual tax rate at 38.6 percent, still a reduction from pre-2017 levels but a “tax increase on the rich” as compared to current policies.
Crafty as this approach might have been as a way of boosting claims that Trump had aligned the GOP with middle-class voters (the intended beneficiaries of his recent tax-cut proposals) rather than the very rich, the idea of backing any tax increase on the allegedly super-productive job creators at the top of the economic pyramid struck many Republicans as the worst imaginable heresy. You could plausibly argue that total opposition to higher taxes, or even to progressive taxes, was the holy grail for the party, more foundational than any other principle and one of the remaining links between pre-Trump and MAGA conservatism. At the very idea of fuzzing up the tax-cut gospel, old GOP warhorses like Newt Gingrich and Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist arose from their political rest homes to shout: unclean! Gingrich called it the worst potential betrayal of the Cause since George H.W. Bush cut a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal in 1990 that included a tax increase.
As it happens, it was all a mirage. In virtual unison, both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said a high-end tax cut won’t happen this year, as Politico reports:
“President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday came out against a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans — likely putting the nail in the coffin of the idea.
“Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he thought the idea would be ‘very disruptive’ because it would prompt wealthy people to leave the country. …
“Johnson separately knocked the idea earlier in the day, saying that he is ‘not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally.’”
Trump’s real fear may be that wealthy people would leave the GOP rather than the country. Many are already upset about Trump’s 19th-century protectionist tariff agenda and its effects on the investor class. Subordinating the tax-cut gospel to other MAGA goals might push some of them over the edge. As for Johnson, the Speaker is having to cope with the eternal grumbling of the House Freedom Caucus, where domestic budget cuts are considered a delightful thing in itself and the idea of boosting anyone’s taxes to succor the parasites receiving Medicaid benefits is horrifying.
If Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill runs into trouble or if Democrats set the table for a big midterm comeback wielding the “cutting Medicaid to give billionaires a tax break” message, squashing the symbolic gesture of a small boost in federal income-tax rates for the wealthy may be viewed in retrospect as a lost opportunity for the GOP. For the time being, that party’s bond with America’s oligarchs and their would-be imitators stands intact.