I visited the Fox News politics webpage last Sunday to see what Fox reported about the “No Kings” protests. It should surprise no one that Fox News made no mention (that I could find) of nationwide five-million-strong protests of Trump’s policies. Nor should anyone be surprised that Fox valiantly and dutifully covered Trump’s “massive military parade,” while carefully avoiding any mention of crowd size. A friend of mine who lives in D.C. wrote that it “was like a ghost town Saturday. We drove through the city to go to the Bay house and it was eerie, almost like during Covid, how empty it was.” After checking the Fox propaganda website I better understood how it was that on Saturday a woman came up to the edge of the protest I was attending and cluelessly, but honestly, asked, “What are you protesting about?”
Fox and Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill
While visiting the Fox website this headline caught my eye: “Senate GOPs carefully weighing controversial tax provisions before bringing Big, Beautiful Bill to the floor.” The article and the associated 4 minute video of an interview with John Thune (R-South Dakota, the Senate majority leader) were striking in their avoidance of the elephant in the room: the giveaway to the already wealthy and the gaping hole in the federal budget caused by it.
Every single Republican congressperson, Representatives and Senators alike, are trained to talk about only one side of budget, the spending side, while studiously avoiding any mention of the revenue side (i.e. tax receipts). They are trained by Republican propaganda-meisters to treat the income tax provisions in the Big Ugly Bill as a totally done deal, so done that they cannot even mention them.
Every person and every family trying to live in the world today (at least every person and family that isn’t headed for financial disaster) understands that one’s finances have both a spending and an earning (revenue) side. If you spend more than you take in during any given year you run a deficit, a deficit that adds to your cumulative debt, a debt that haunts you by requiring the payment of interest. In a nutshell, that cumulative debt, in this case the national debt, is what our country is facing with the ongoing annual deficits baked into this bill. But Republicans really, really don’t want us to understand the why of these deficits, the elephant—the revenue side of the budget, the persisting giveaways to the wealthy that lie at the root of the deficit.
If you bother to watch the Thune interview linked above, you will hear Thune saying that Senate Republicans are looking hard “for more spending cuts”, including even more cuts in Medicaid and “looking at” Medicare. Never mind that at the same time he supports (on a table of the Bill’s provisions projected in the interview) a “massive” increase in “border security funding”, code for more money to fund indiscriminate ICE dragnets. Another large part of the interview is spent discussing something called “SALT”. Huh? SALT refers to “State And Local Tax” deductions on one’s federal income tax. Of course, Thune, Senator from South Dakota, a state that receives more federal money than it pays in federal taxes, frames SALT as a giveaway to residents of state’s like California, comparatively high tax states, states which, it should be noted, contribute far more to the federal budget than they get back. That’s the sort of arcana Republican U.S. Senators want to focus on while the Big Ugly Bill renews a federal tax giveaway to the wealthy put through by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Don’t talk about that elephant!
Republicans claim and have claimed for years to be concerned about the growing national debt, even while, every time they control the government, they add to the debt. They are right to be concerned. Each year that they let the country spend more than it earns, i.e. run a deficit, more is added to the national debt. “Carrying” the national debt, just like carrying a debt month-after-month on your credit card, costs money that you have to pay each month in interest. That interest cost effectively adds to the price of whatever it was that you borrowed the money in order to buy. Continuously adding to debt, either as a family or as a country, is eventually unsustainable. Republicans, while claiming to be concerned with the national debt, continue to push for this Big Ugly Bill that, if not superseded by subsequent legislation, is reliably projected to add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years ($5 trillion if the cleverly timed expiring provisions of the Bill are extended, see P.S.).
How do Republicans justify ignoring the revenue elephant, the fact that the Big Ugly Bill is a massive transfer of wealth to the already wealthy from the rest of us? When they let it slip out, they will mumble a claim like, the tax cuts “will pay for themselves”. That harkens to a widely discredited economic proposition from the 1970s dubbed “supply side economics”, aka, pejoratively, “trickle down economics”. “Trickle down” is the idea that by transferring money upward, the wealthy (often dubbed “job creators”) will invest in factories and other businesses that will hire more workers—thus benefiting those to whom the wealth “trickles down.” That proposition was nonsense when first articulated—and it is still nonsense—but it is the backbone of Republican justification for enriching the wealthy. There is no telling, of course, how many Republican congresspeople actually believe in trickle down economics and how many of them simply support the Big Ugly Bill because they know it will please their wealthy donors and help them keep their seats in Congress.
Regardless of their sincerity, or lack thereof, they surely don’t want anyone to see—or talk about—that elephant.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Some of the most touted “tax cuts” Trump and his sycophants are offering are due to expire at the end of this second Trump term in 2028—precisely the time when Republicans will dare the next administration not to renew them. It is a cynical political game. Here are some of the standout expiratory time bombs with their ten year costs:
No Tax on Tips Through 2028-$40 billion
No Tax on Overtime Through 2028-$124 billion
Higher Senior Standard Deduction Through 2028-$66 billion
No Tax on Car Loans Through 2028-$58 billion
Indeed, this is exactly the same game Republicans played in 2017. In order to make the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 more fiscally palatable in ten year projections they set the personal income tax provisions to expire guess when? Like a time bomb, they set them to expire after what they expected would be Trump’s second term. Well, that didn’t work out, so here they are trying to pretend that extending the income tax provisions was baked into the original 2017 law. That’s a clever lie.