TDS Strategy Memos
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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.
Good riddance to the distraction of the race based affirmative action debate.
Class and geography based admissions could achieve much better results.
Affirmative action based on race is an inter elites controversy, part of the (mostly useless) cultural wars.
Blacks, Hispanics and Asians don’t support race based affirmative action and those that do don’t obsess about it.
The left still has a general mess with many of the not so progressive views of working class “people of color”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/supreme-court-affirmative-action.html?fbclid=IwAR3X67kFr2D2a49YlvaD9tiRHhzlHVFwtc6tQklRZn_l6sXRmpW2CJXQkSY
If Democrats wanted to get rid of legacy admissions they could have done so one of the many times they have controlled Congress or Department of Education regulations.
Trying to ban legacy admissions via the courts is dangerous.
Legacy admissions are about class. If they result in fewer minority admissions it is only due to an indirect effect.
But it would be rich for Democrats to achieve the precedent of banning class based affirmative action via jurisprudence that would set the stage for also banning class based affirmative action in favour of poorer students.
Ban legacy admissions and next the right will ban privileges for Pell Grant and scholarship admissions.
Color blindness is required by the Constitution and entirely consistent with traditional left wing values, as explained by MLK and other civil rights era leaders.
Legacy admissions should be banned, but they are not the correct tit for tat neither in political discourse nor in judicial caselaw.
Class blindness has not traditionally been seen as required by the Constitution and civil rights law.
It is moronic that Democrats would make the analogy. The fact that they do just shows just how overtaken by elites the party is.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/high-court-ruling-dems-take-aim-legacy-admissions-rcna91983
“White Democrats (75%) are also significantly more likely than nonwhite Democrats (40%) to support broadening how gender is taught.
Clear majorities of both whites (68%) and people of color (57%) say transgender and sexual identity issues should be given less attention.
Similarly, both groups support limiting how gender identity is taught in schools (59% white and 52% people of color).
As may be expected, white Republicans (93%) are much more likely than white Democrats (20%) to want to limit how gender identity is taught in schools.”
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_062823/?fbclid=IwAR0rBgVPOI7ntaIh_C3SSfoFQS3rqvaLchPYdRwQdqeuqHDD2MnGoMmaGl0
“A majority of Hispanic voters (58%), young voters ages 18 to 34 (57%), Democrats who backed progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary (55%) and Black voters (52%) say they’re open to considering a third-party or independent presidential candidate in a Biden-Trump rematch.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/dems-republicans-are-open-third-party-presidential-candidate-rcna91368?fbclid=IwAR2m8IoPEE8F7kcvlsZG0BL2wm6rl9flCkI9e0x598jwRrP-PqM4n2fMUjE
“Our findings suggest that work stress generally increased from 1995 to 2015, and that the increase was mostly driven by psychological demands.
People working in lower-skilled occupations had generally higher levels of job strain and effort-reward imbalance, as well as they tend to have a steeper increase in job strain than people working in higher-skilled occupations.
Most of the change occurred from 1995 to 2005.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8032584/