We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its analysis of the Republican tax bill, calling it a bill that would make Scrooge McDuck proud:
The Republican tax proposals were bad from the get-go. But they have become steadily worse as they have been turned into bills, which seem so cartoonishly evil they could have been dreamed up by Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”
Consider the latest changes to the Senate tax-cut bill being championed by the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and his merry band. It lavishes generous permanent tax breaks on corporations, while modest tax cuts for the middle class would vanish into thin air after 2025. Millionaires would enjoy average tax cuts of $5,580 in 2027, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, at which point families earning less than $75,000 a year would pay more taxes.
Let that sink in. This tax bill would take money from working families and give it to the world’s wealthiest people.
Here is Paul Krugman’s analysis of the Trump tax plan:
Corporate tax cuts wouldn’t actually do much to raise investment. They would, however, explode the budget deficit.
So in an attempt to limit that deficit blowout, Senate Republicans are proposing significant tax increases on working families. In fact, according to Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation, taxes would rise on average for every group with incomes under $75,000 a year, and would surely rise for many families even in higher-income groups. The only significant winners would be those making more than $1 million a year. Populism!
Oh, and this doesn’t even take account of the health care sabotage that’s an integral part of the Senate plan. By repealing the mandate — the requirement that people purchase insurance — the plan would, as I said, cause 13 million to lose coverage; that loss of coverage, and the associated government subsidies, is why mandate repeal saves money that can be given to corporations.
The Washington Post focuses on the negative impacts the bill will have on higher education:
Many graduate students, who might receive only $20,000 in actual cash per year, could not cope if they suddenly had to pay income taxes on $50,000 of waived tuition. The best international students would no doubt look to attend graduate school outside the United States, preventing the country from attracting and keeping future innovators. No doubt some of the best American students would leave, too.
Catherine Rampell has a pitch-perfect take on the bill which points benefits corporations, not people:
Corporations are people, my friend. Both Mitt Romney and the Supreme Court told us so years ago.
Still, they left out one key fact: It’s way better to be a corporate-person than a person-person. At least when Republicans are reshaping the tax code.
Republicans love cutting taxes. They’d cut all the taxes in the world if they could. But the rules that allow senators to pass their tax agenda with only 51 votes require setting priorities for who gets the most generous cuts, or any cuts at all. This week, the party made its top priority abundantly clear.
And yes, even conservatives hate the bill.
Turning to the groping allegation against Senator Al Franken, Joan Walsh at The Nation provides some insight:
I don’t know him well enough to be devastated, but I’m enormously sad. Women have spent the last 13 months, in the wake of the 16 or so sexual abuse allegations against Donald Trump, which weren’t enough to keep him from being president, obsessing over and reevaluating their mistreatment by men, from their childhood well into adulthood, and telling those painful, awful stories. Publicly and privately. Now we have one about a man who’s a self-described feminist, a champion of Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, accused of the same thing. This one really hurts. [...]
Republicans are rushing to equate Franken and Moore, which is ridiculous. Franken is accused by one woman—at this point—not nine, like Moore (or 16, by the way, like the president). His accuser was well into adulthood, not a teenager, like Moore’s victims. Franken quickly apologized after the charge was made on Thursday; Moore denies all of it.
Meanwhile, as
Ed Kilgore points out, Trump and the Alabama GOP are sticking with embattled Roy Moore:
In dual developments that together represent a huge victory for embattled Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore, his state’s Republican Party reaffirmed its support for him (and more importantly, its unwillingness to strip him of its nomination) as the White House signaled the president would not intervene to try to get him to withdraw from the race.
These developments probably ensure that Moore will face Democrat Doug Jones on December 12 without official opposition from his own party. But that could mean this very red state has a chance of going blue.
And, on a final note, as if there wasn’t enough news happening this week, 200,000 gallons of oil have leaked from the Keystone XL pipeline. Here is some context from Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic:
TransCanada has already completed two spans of new pipeline around the trading hub in Oklahoma. Those projects make up about 40 percent of the Keystone XL project, and oil is already flowing through them. But even if the company wins approval next week, some analysts argue that the falling price of oil has made Keystone XL uneconomical.
The long-term environmental costs of an oil spill can vary greatly by location and the length of time the spill goes unnoticed. In 2006, BP spilled 267,000 gallons of crude oil in Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s northern coast. Though that is about the same amount that leaked from Keystone on Thursday, it flowed from the BP pipeline over at least five days. BP ultimately paid more than $100 million to the federal government, the state of Alaska, and Alaskans for damages related to the incident.