Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kaplan at The New York Times bring us the latest analysis of the Republican tax bill:
Republicans, who reached agreement Wednesday on a merged version of the House and Senate tax plans, expect to unveil the final bill on Friday and vote on the legislation early next week so that it can be sent to President Trump before Christmas.
But those plans were thrown into some disarray on Thursday when Mr. Rubio said that he would vote no on the bill unless it included a greater expansion of the child tax credit, which he and another Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, have been pushing for to benefit lower-income individuals.
Here is Paul Krugman’s take:
As usual, Republicans seek to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, but they don’t treat all Americans with a given income the same. Instead, their bill — on which we don’t have full details, but whose shape is clear — hugely privileges owners, whether of businesses or of financial assets, over those who simply work for a living.
And this privileging of nonwage income isn’t an accident. Modern Republicans exalt “job creators,” that is, people who own businesses directly or indirectly via their stockholdings. Meanwhile, they show implicit contempt for mere employees.
Russel Berman at The Atlantic explains Rubio’s leverage:
Republican leaders certainly can’t afford to lose both Rubio and Lee, and they may not be able to sacrifice either one. The GOP needs 50 out of its 52 members to back the tax bill once a House-Senate conference committee unveils its final compromise. One senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee, voted against the initial Senate bill and appears unlikely to change his mind. Senator Susan Collins of Maine is undecided, having conditioned her vote on promises that party leaders may not be planning to keep. Senator John McCain of Arizona is back in the hospital due to side effects from his treatment for brain cancer. And the election of Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama has added even more urgency to the GOP’s rush to pass its tax bill: Once Jones is sworn in at the end of the year, Republicans likely will have one fewer vote to spare.
All of which means Rubio has leverage, and he’s finally decided to use it. Working with Ivanka Trump, Lee, and other colleagues, Rubio earlier won support for doubling the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. But because Republicans have only made $1,100 of the credit refundable, its benefits skew toward higher earners. As Rubio has argued, a family earning between $20,000 and $50,000 a year does not have a large enough federal tax liability to take the full $2,000. An analysis from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which backs Rubio’s proposal, found that 26 million children would not qualify for the full credit because of the refundability cap. “We have a provision in which the family making more gets more for their children than the family making less. That makes no sense,” Rubio argued during floor debate over the Senate bill.
Catherine Rampell:
The GOP tax plan’s top beneficiaries aren’t actually rich people, or even corporations, though both groups will indeed benefit mightily. The biggest winners are the nation’s tax planners, thanks to the tax-sheltering bonanza this bill is about to unleash.
Meanwhile, Ryan Cooper at The Week highlights the coming attempts to shred the social safety net:
The Republican tax bill is moving closer and closer to passage. If the GOP manages to ram it through, make no mistake about what's next: a pell-mell rush to eviscerate social insurance programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
It's a simple trick: You blow up the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, then feign shock at the deficits you just caused, then insist that the only way to "get the debt under control" is by slashing social programs to the bone.
Don't buy this nonsense, not from Ayn Rand worshipers like House Speaker Paul Ryan, and not from the more moderate deficit scolds who make up the Beltway's spineless and squishy center. America can easily provide for a decent standard of living for retired people, and decent medical care for the elderly and those in need. All that is necessary is raising taxes a bit — mainly on the rich.
Here is Elenor Clift’s analysis of Donald Trump’s poll numbers:
President Nixon was at 22 percent when he resigned in August of 1974 and Republican Party affiliation had dropped to 18 percent, recalls Reagan historian Craig Shirley.
“Going below 30 percent kept Truman from seeking another term and going below 30 percent eventually drove Nixon out of office,” he says. “In the modern era, beginning with FDR, presidents get into trouble when they fall below 30.”
Don’t miss this incredibly important piece on gun violence by David Bernstein at The Atlantic:
The hardships facing those gravely injured in Las Vegas represent a horrific microcosm of gun violence in America generally—horrible deaths provoke widespread reaction, while the wounds of many multiples more take their toll largely unnoticed, unnumbered, and unstudied. Fatal gun violence is often categorized in ways that make it easy to track and study. That’s how researchers know that the murder rate in the United States has declined steadily over the past three decades. But what about gun violence that does not result in death? That is far trickier to measure. That’s because nonfatal gun violence has mostly been ignored.
And of course, let’s move on to net neutrality. John Nichols at The Nation highlights the stakes:
Commission chair Ajit Pai, the telecommunications-industry lawyer who has done Donald Trump’s bidding in debates on a host of media and democracy issues, has cleared the way for service providers to establish information superhighways for political and corporate elites, while consigning communications from grassroots activists to digital dirt roads.
Addressing the American people on the day when the FCC dismissed millions of appeals on behalf of net neutrality, dissenting Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said Thursday: “What saddens me is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is abandoning you.”
Pai and his associates have moved to create what former FCC commissioner Michael Copps refers to as “a gatekeeper’s paradise,” where “our civic dialogue—the news and information upon which a successful self-governing society depends upon—would be further eroded.”
Nick Frisch at The New York Times:
It is much more dangerous to grant American telecom companies — those that do control the pipes — the right to tamper with data flows and discriminate among content. American businesses’ track record of helping China export censorship and Beijing’s aggressive and platform-agnostic efforts to squelch unwanted speech overseas are a dangerous combination.
On a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s thoughts on the aftermath of Roy Moore’s stunning defeat in Alabama:
“I was right !” Trump pathetically tweeted, having been utterly wrong. Sad! [...]
What should worry Trumpists, Bannonites and the quisling Republicans who go with the flow of this aberrant presidency is that Alabama cannot be seen in a vacuum. A trend is brewing.