The GOP is trying to pass a super-unpopular agenda — and that's a bad sign for democracy

Jacob S. Hacker And Paul Pierson · Thursday, December 07, 2017, 11:41 am

Political science (and common sense) says they ought to pay a price at the polls. They might not.

Tax experts are in widespread agreement that the GOP tax cuts are bad policy — a giveaway to the rich paid for by the middle class and poor, with little upside for the economy. But Congress writes legislation that experts hate all the time. What’s really striking is that the people Congress is supposed to represent also hate the GOP tax cuts, with only around 30 percent of Americans expressing approval.

Nor are the tax cuts the only recent Republican legislation that has garnered terrible poll numbers. So did the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care. Indeed, the GOP health care drive had even less popular support.

Massively unpopular bills used to be unicorns. You didn’t see them. And for an obvious reason: They could cost politicians their jobs. But now we’ve seen two unicorns in the first year of our all-Republican government. What gives?

The puzzle isn’t explaining why the bills are so unpopular: Their basic design runs exactly counter to voters’ stated preferences. Americans don’t consider tax cuts a high priority, and they are spectacularly unenthusiastic about reducing taxes on the rich in particular. Which, it turns out, is exactly what the GOP tax bills aim to do, even as they threaten to raise taxes on many Americans and prompt future spending cuts. Despite all the deception and haste, most voters get this.

The GOP health bills were unpopular for the same basic reason: They sought to impose painful cuts on most Americans while promising lucrative benefits to those at the top of the income distribution (through, yes, tax cuts). Without even a thin candy coating of middle-class goodies, they polled in the low 20s — the lowest reading for any major piece of legislation in at least a generation.

These bills aren’t just unpopular — they may be unprecedentedly unpopular

To put these numbers in perspective, the reviled TARP bill to rescue the financial industry in 2008 — benefiting unpopular companies, attacked as a budget-buster —polled at around 40 percent. Indeed, the GOP tax bills are less popular than any major tax bills of the past quarter-century, including two that required sizable tax increases: the deficit-reduction packages of 1990 and 1993. And both of those measures contained not just new taxes but painful spending cuts too.

So give Republicans credit: Alienating a substantial majority of citizens while adding at least $1 trillion to the deficit isn’t easy. A trillion dollars in borrowed money should buy a lot of good will, especially when you can rely on a conservative media echo-chamber to back you up and your voting base is inclined to support you no matter what.

So what’s going on? The answer can be broken down into two parts: motives and means. Republicans are advancing these initiatives because they really, really want to and because they think they can.

The “really, really want to” part is one of the main political facts of our age. In 1990, the Republican Party split over George H. W. Bush’s reversal of his “read my lips” pledge on tax increases. After his defeat in 1992, the anti-government Newt Gingrich wing of the GOP rose to dominance. Since then, reducing taxes on the wealthy and corporations has always been the top priority of Republican Washington. Recall leading House Republican Tom DeLay insisting during the debate over the Bush tax cuts in the early 2000s that “nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes.”

Republicans have celebrated and promoted a vicious circle in which economic inequality grows, empowering the wealthy, who are then rewarded with policies that further concentrate income and wealth. While Democrats are often torn between their business-oriented contributors and their less affluent voters, the GOP shows no such ambivalence. Indeed, a surprising number have suggested that donors are driving the GOP tax train. As Rep. Chris Collins of New York put it, “My donors are basically saying ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’”

Lots of politicians have some unpopular policy wishes. What’s different now is that the GOP is emboldened to act on them.

Yet if the aspiration to cut taxes on the rich has become a constant, the capacity to deliver these benefits in the face of intense popular disapproval now seems to be supercharged. True, the Bush tax cuts were skewed to the top. But the 2001 and 2003 bills provided “only” around a third of their benefits to the top 1 percent over their first ten years. By contrast, the current tax bills provide roughly 60 percent of their ten-year benefits over the first decade to that group. What’s more, the Senate legislation eliminates essentially all the middle-class benefits after that initial decade to ensure the cuts for corporations and the rich can be made permanent under Senate budget rules.

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https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/7/16745584/republican-agenda-unpopular-polls-tax-reform