The Republicans are about to screw over the middle and lower class with their tax bill.
The Republican tax bill hurtling through Congress is increasingly tilting the United States tax code to benefit wealthy Americans, as party leaders race to shore up wavering lawmakers who are requesting more help for high-earning business owners.
On Monday, as Republican lawmakers returned to Washington determined to quickly pass their tax overhaul, senators were in feverish talks to resolve concerns that could bedevil the bill’s passage. With pressure increasing on Republicans to produce a legislative victory, lawmakers are contemplating changes that would exacerbate the tax bill’s divide between the rich and the middle class.
Those include efforts to further reward certain high-income business owners who are already receiving a tax break in the Senate bill but who are at the center of a concerted push by conservative lawmakers and trade groups to sweeten those benefits.
As Republican leaders pressed for a Senate floor vote this week, there appeared to be little momentum for amendments that would help low-income Americans, which some Republican and many Democratic senators had sought.
The Congressional Budget Office said this week that the Senate bill, as written, would hurt workers earning less than $30,000 a year in short order, while delivering benefits to the highest earners throughout the next decade. Those estimates echo other analyses, like that by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which have found the biggest benefits of the bill increasingly flowing to the rich over time. By 2027, the budget office said, Americans earning $75,000 a year and below would, as a group, see their taxes increase, because individual tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2025.
And when the deficit soars and the economy stumbles (which it will because like the tide it is cyclical on a macro level and doesn’t pay close attention to the meddling around the edges) and the rich get richer beyond the dreams of Avarice and the only trickling-down will be when Trump and the Kochs and the folks at Sinclair Broadcasting are pissing on them, do you really think that the people who voted them into office will suddenly see the light, rise up and elect Democrats?
I would like to think that would be the scenario; that enough people are disgusted by 15 million people losing health insurance, higher taxes on the middle class, fewer services for the needy, strangling public education which includes Title I and education for the disabled, that they would revolt and sweep them out. But if recent history is any guide, the GOP base will love it because #MAGA means they get to watch as someone promises them the moon as long as brown people who pick lettuce and clean their toilets get deported and gay people are shamed back into the closet.
They’re not paying attention to the things that matter, they won’t care who’s in Congress, and I have yet to hear a Democrat make a convincing argument that they should care.
