Below is analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, now run by a Republican appointee who believes in dynamic scoring (i.e., conservative economics imbued with magic), indicating the net impact of the Senate’s proposed tax bill on various groups of earners. This is not a joke. This is the Republican-led CBO’s official projected impact of the bill.
Just look at this. The chart plainly shows that folks earning less than $50K/year will receive significantly less in government services to facilitate massive tax cuts for those earning above $500K/year. Again, this is not a joke. These are the official estimates from the Republican-led CBO. Not shown in this chart are the potential financial losses for uncovered medical expenses for the 13,000,000 million people, mostly middle and low-income individuals, who will lose health insurance as a result of the bill. Also not shown is the economic impact of significant new deficit spending required for the bill — inflation and higher interest rates, both of which typically hurt lower earners and help higher earners.
Yet, this bill proceeds. It proceeds exclusively with Republican support, despite the fact that it will severely undermine the already precarious economic standing of tens of millions of middle and low-income individuals so that a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals get massive tax cuts. This is bizarre. It’s perverse public policy meant to force million of Americans into a state of permanent financial destitution.
What the fuck is the GOP thinking? Is it pure intellectual detachment? Are they living some Ayn-Randian fantasy where the needs of the least fortunate among us simply disappear if society spurns them?
Or maybe this is another attempt to rebrand the same failed economic policies centered around tax cuts for the rich. First there was Ricardian equivalence, but that was much too academic for public consumption and what’s with all those French negative implications anyway. Then we were sold supply-side economics but that supply-curve magic never materializes and all we got were massive deficits. Then we got trickle-down economics, with the trickle coming in the form of a deluge increase in income inequality. And most recently we had the Grover Norquist contrived starve-the-beast economics, a concept that has actually been tested and shown to be unbelievably disastrous in Kansas and here in Oklahoma.
So, how do they brand this effort? Maybe “Fuck-the-Poor-Because-We-Don’t-Give-a-Shit-About-You-or-Your-Kids-and-All-We-Want-Are-Tax-Cuts-for-the-Rich Economics”? Kind of long and severely hyphenated for a brand but nonetheless accurate.