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.
So basically, someone giving a great speech in front of roaring crowds, despite being nothing but a former PTA member, who left before all of her kids went through school, mayor of a small town, (with the aid of a city administrator which no other mayor ever needed) and holder of one of the weakest gubernatorial offices in the nation, in alleged “command” of one of the smallest National Guard Contingencies in the country equates with being qualified to be president of the United States.
Contrary wise, someone giving a great speech in front of roaring crowds, having once gone to Harvard Law School, been editor of the Review, a community organizer, an Illinois State Senator, a published author, and United States Senator, and actually being elected, (instead of appointed) to the ticket, is all style and no substance.
I guess that would be the line you would have to tow, if you were a Jesus freak that screamed, out of both of your faces, about the sin of pre-marital sex, and the folly of women working out of the home while their kids are off having sex… until a gun-toting MILF shows up and gives a mean spirited, elitist speech at your convention. Then, and only then, is the Christian value of forgiveness actually exercised, and the rhetoric of “Jesus wants you to stay at home, and teach your teens the wonders of celibacy” overthrown.
I guess that would be the line to tow, if you are more concerned about defining a red-blooded American as someone who kills prisoners, but forbids abortion, than you are about defending decisions to try to ban books, address and bid good luck to the convention of a political party that holds Alaska’s succession from the United States as a possibility, and use the Governor’s mansion as a place to settle family disputes.
In experience vs. inexperience, there is no argument. In style vs. substance, there is no argument. In humble beginnings and American values, there is no argument. Barack Obama clearly wins in all three. But if I were to give the benefit of the absolute doubt, the best I, (and anyone that is more worried about logic than they are Bible thumping and ass kicking) can say is that Palin and Obama have both have sufficient experience, substance, and American values imbued into their stories.
Or you can choose to deny that either of them has any of that. But you can be nothing but a stupefying hypocrite to conclude that PTA meetings, small town elections and official titles in the National Guard is any more impressive than law school, book writing, and stints in two legislatures.
But that would require an intellectual honesty that Republicans in general, and Sarah Palin in particular do not, or will not possess.
You said, “The reaction from the Democratic base hasn’t gotten as much airtime (it is the GOP convention, after all), but I’m going to wager it is just as strong.”
The media hasn’t given Democratic critiques any airtime (although they gave Republicans double in the D convention), see: Media Mattes report:http://mediamatters.org/items/200809030022