Saturday, December 09, 2017

Trump economic adviser on tax bill: 'It's death to Democrats'

By Joan McCarter 
Tuesday Dec 05, 2017 · 11:57 AM EST

The massive social reengineering project that the GOP called a tax bill wasn't just designed to redistribute wealth from the bottom up and to reward Republicans' corporate donors, though it did all that. It was designed very specifically to punish Democrats—and not just elected Democrats but voters, too. You know, the people all those elected officials are supposed to be representing. The thing is, they're not even making a secret of that. And to make it even more enraging, they're blaming that on the Democrats.

Benefits used by universities and graduate students are also on the chopping block. And the repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate to buy insurance -- a centerpiece of Democrats' biggest achievement in a generation -- is estimated to generate some $300 billion to pay for tax cuts.
"It's death to Democrats," said conservative economist Stephen Moore, who advised Trump's campaign on tax policy.

"They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. They go after university endowments, and universities have become play pens of the left. And getting rid of the mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare," Moore said in an interview, arguing that it would accelerate "a death spiral" in the health-care law's marketplaces. […]

"The people who are going get the most whacked by this are wealthy and upper-middle class people who live in big cities," said John Feehery, a GOP lobbyist and former communicator for House leadership. "In other words, Democrats."

"I don't think there's a conspiracy to go attack Democratic districts. But that's how the legislative process works—if you're not going to participate in a game you're going to lose," he said. "You need the revenue, and those constituencies are not really being represented because their representatives refused to participate."

Pretty rich, huh, when Republicans announced from the outset that they were going to do the bill with budget reconciliation, so they could pass it with just 51 votes in the Senate and cut out Democrats entirely. But that's not really the problem here—it's an outgrowth of the larger problem.

That larger problem is that Republicans in 2017 believe that they only have to represent the people who elected them. That means the Republican voters, sure, but more importantly the donor class that elected them. This is not "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" to Republicans. It's "we got ours, and we're going to fuck with all of you who aren't us."

Read more
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/5/1721329/-Trump-economic-adviser-on-tax-bill-It-s-death-to-Democrats

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