The Republicans' Reverse Robin Hoodery

The GOP budget is a new low in shameless greed on behalf of the richest Americans.

Hey, remember all those stories about how Republicans, led by President-for-Life Donald Trump, were considering raising taxes on the rich? For the past few months the MSM has been full of them, eagerly pushed by the GOP itself. (You can read three of them here, here and here.)

But anyone with even the brains of Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow could have told you that those stories were utter bullshit, mere misdirection ahead of what we all knew was coming, and just this Thursday, did.

In the wee pre-dawn hours of May 22, when almost no one was watching, the GOP-controlled House rammed through a sweeping piece of legislation called—and as Dave Barry likes to say, I Swear I Am Not Making This Up—the One Big, Beautiful Bill. The vote was a whisker-thin 215-214 with every Democrat voting against, joined by two renegade Republicans (Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio), plus one voting “present” and two AWOL altogether, including one who fell asleep.

Does the bill raise taxes on the rich? Hell no. On the contrary, it makes permanent the massive 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first administration, which otherwise would have expired this year, and which overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans and corporations. At the same time, it sadistically guts programs that tens of millions of ordinary Americans rely on, like Medicare, not to mention nutrition programs for poor children, funding for cancer research, FEMA, and many other long-standing and invaluable government services.

So the notion that Trump and the Republicans would not do that, and might even raise the share of our collective tax burden that the wealthy bear, has proven to be so much smoke-and-mirrors. (I’m shocked!) Can’t blame them for trying, though: that sort of trick has worked pretty well for them so far.

The other thing that ought to be patently clear is that the Trump-led Republican Party is a truly reprehensible organization, and has just carried out one of the most shameless con jobs in postwar American history, one that represents a fundamental shift in what this country aims to be.

THE PRIME DIRECTIVE

What happened this week—and will be completed when the Republican-controlled Senate inevitably passes some similar version of the “OBBB,” ahead of reconciliation between the two chambers—was the culmination of the entire effort to put Donald Trump back in office. Indeed, it is the whole reason that Donald Trump was elected in the first place. As Jonathan Chait writes in The Atlantic, if enacted, this “massive piece of legislation” would represent “the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.” And that “is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose.”

From the very start of his political career, this has been the chief goal of the GOP in supporting Turmp™ and represents the only thing that party really stands for: increasing the wealth of its richest members. It's also a big fat middle finger to the rest of us, including those tens of millions of Americans who believed the GOP propaganda and voted against their own self-interest by supporting Donald and the Republican Party.

As a previous Republican president once said, “Fool me once….shame on….can’t get fooled again.”

Or maybe that was Pete Townshend. The early 21^st century is a little fuzzy for me.

Yes, I understand very well that there was and is an unholy alliance between the GOP’s plutocratic faction, which represents its old school base, and the so-called “populist” MAGA wing, which is animated less by stock portfolios than by white nationalist grievance, xenophobia, and a desire to punish everyone they despise, which includes immigrants, Brown and Black people in general, the LGBTQ+ community, liberals, women, Springsteen, etc.

But the plutocrats ultimately are the more important partner in that coalition because they are the ones with the money. It’s true that a some of those plutocrats share those retrograde MAGA opinions on social issues, but many don’t, and many others just don’t care one way or the other. At the end of the day they’re motivated only by the bottom line, and that is precisely what was in play this week with the House budget. As we saw in the H1B visa fight between the Bannonite and Muskovite factions even before Trump was re-inaugurated, the rich guys usually get what they want.

The plutocrat wing of the Republican Party got behind Donald Trump specifically because he would deliver to them the permanent tax cuts for the wealthy that are their prime directive. Everything else—abortion, guns, homophobia, vaccines, deportations—is what apostate GOP staffer Mike Lofgren calls “rube bait.”

MIKE JOHNSON AND HIS MERRY MEN

The other thing worth noting is how this armed robbery flies in the face of Republicans’ longstanding claim to be “the party of fiscal responsibility.”

In the past, this blog has discussed the shameless hypocrisy of the GOP’s so-called “deficit hawks,” who regularly scream bloody murder over what they claim is the impending collapse of these United States because of the deficit…..but only under Democratic administrations. When they are the ones in power, they are as reckless with the taxpayers’ money as a drunken sailor on shore leave in Hamburg.

Non-partisan experts estimate that Trump’s 2017 tax cut added some $7 trillion to the federal deficit; those experts now estimate that this new bill will add another $4 trillion over the next decade. (Some estimates are higher.) In a feeble attempt to pay for these cuts, the new budget bill slashes funding for Medicaid, which provides healthcare for poor and disabled Americans, and adds new work requirements for its remaining recipients (you, lazy cripples!), as well as for people receiving aid from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. But those requirements are really just a mechanism for booting people off the program. As The Guardian’s Chris Stein writes:

The Urban Institute thinktank, based on an analysis of a similar policy, believes those (requirements) would cost as many as 5.2 million people their health insurance coverage, largely because of enrollees not understanding the requirement or being unable to prove their compliance. People who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps pay for groceries and other essentials, would also face work requirements beginning in October 2027. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates those would put about a quarter of SNAP recipients, or nearly 11 million people, at risk of losing their benefits.

The GOP bill cuts Medicare by about $500 billion, and is expected to cause at least 8.6 million Americans to lose their Medicaid coverage. According to the historian Heather Cox Richardson, “Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be ‘the biggest cut in the program’s history,’ Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.”

This is truly a case of reverse Robin Hoodery. (Watch your lupins, people.)

Carl Davis, research director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, writes:

The Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that the bill would put the nation on a path toward a future where 13.7 million fewer people would have health coverage. Of that amount, 8.6 million would lose coverage as a direct result of provisions contained in the bill, especially those slashing Medicaid. Another 5.1 million would lose coverage because of the expiration of temporary enhancements to the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits which, contrary to what we have seen in past Congresses, this current Congress appears to have no interest in making room for in its legislation.

The Republicans’ response, Jonathan Chait explains, “is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program—when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings.”

Not surprisingly, this is not what the American people want. Gallup reports that a large majority of Americans—58%, an all-time high—believe lower-income people pay too much in federal tax. By coincidence, the exact same share of respondents, 58%, believe rich people pay too little. (70% also believe corporations pay too little.)

Right wingers also want to cut those programs out of sheer cruelty, because the Horatio Alger myth on which their economic ideology depends requires a willfully blind adherence to the fantasy of bootstrapsism to rationalize it. This has always been the GOP’s ur-con, and with the OBBB they are trying to pull it yet again.

Some believe that the dynamic works this way round: that cutting taxes is a deliberate ploy to necessitate cutting spending—on social services; not on the Pentagon of course!—which is what really thrills the far right zealots. Personally I think that the plutocratic impulse for tax cuts for their own sake is the true driving factor, but in a way, it’s a chicken or the egg argument. The relationship within the right wing ecosystem is symbiotic irrespective of which way it flows.

Gifting the rich yet again while cutting crucial social services to the mass of Americans at large is plenty despicable even without taking the deficit into account, but Republican caterwauling about the deficit under Democratic administrations just adds to the outrage. This shit is so far beyond simple hypocrisy that the term no longer even applies.

But the point is that even those draconian cuts will not begin to make up for the lost tax revenue. In fact, as reported by Richardson, the GOP's proposed budget is so egregious and damaging to the long-term interests of America’s economic health that in anticipation of it, Moody’s stripped the US of its coveted triple A rating, downgrading “US credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the US rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011," after Republican brinksmanship over the debt ceiling nearly triggered a default. In explaining its decision, Moody’s noted that if the 2017 tax cuts are extended, the federal deficit will widen, “reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

So much for Republicans’ self-proclaimed “fiscal responsibility,” so much for the lie that they won't cut Medicaid, so much for everything except the stark reality that the Trumpist GOP is nothing more than a gang of rapacious assholes who intend to rob this country blind for their own benefit and that of their deep-pocketed patrons.

BAD TO THE BONE

So just how bad is this bill?

Using information on revenue cost and distribution by income level published by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), ITEP’s Davis reports that the bill “would offer larger tax cuts as a share of income to high-income taxpayers than to either middle-class or working-class families. It also makes clear that most of the tax cuts would go to families with above-average incomes.”

What does that mean in hard numbers? According to Heather Cox Richardson, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that Americans “in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.” The highest earners, the top 0.1 percent of Americans, stand to save roughly $390,000 per year. By contrast, when both losses in benefits and tax cuts are factored in, Americans making between $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. And the poorest Americans, those with annual incomes less than $17,000, will lose more than $1,000 per year on average.

Put another way, The Guardian’s Stein reports:

Taxpayers with the highest incomes will see their household resources increase by 4% in 2027 and 2% in 2033, largely due to the extended tax cuts. The poorest tax payers would see their resources drop by 4% in 2033, largely due to the downsized benefit programs, the (the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office) forecast.

If all that sounds to you like something its perpetrators might want to, you know, hide, you’d be right. (Taking food out of the mouths of hungry children so fat cats can deduct the cost of their yachts and vacation homesis usually bad politics, except in certain parts of ruby red America.)

“Most Americans are strongly opposed to all of these things, according to polls,” writes former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. But many Americans don’t know what’s in the bill.

That’s because of (1) distortions and cover-ups emanating from Trump and magnified by Fox News and other right-wing outlets; (2) a public that’s overwhelmed with the blitzkrieg of everything Trump is doing and can’t focus on this; (3) outright silencing of many in the media who fear retaliation from the Trump regime if they reveal things that Trump doesn’t want revealed.

The bill is so bad that even Obama weighed in on Facebook, saying:

Right now, Republicans in Congress are trying to push through a bill that would put millions of Americans at risk of losing their healthcare. They want to cut federal funding for Medicaid, take away tax credits that help more people afford coverage and raise costs for working-class families. That means some of the most vulnerable Americans—families, the elderly, folks with disabilities—won’t be able to get the lifesaving treatment, medication, or care they need. These are people you know. So let your voice be heard and reach out to your senators now to let them know how much this will impact you.

It’s curious that in this tax battle we haven’t heard much of the old argument that “these cuts will pay for themselves,” which may be a hopeful sign that that tedious canard has been put to rest at last. The fairy tale of trickle down (aka supply side) economics has been essential to the Republican project, as it presents a justification for the implicitly irrational idea that cutting taxes on the rich will help everyone—the claim that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” as yacht-friendly Republicans like to say. Sadly for those sailors, decades of evidence exposes trickle down as an absolute hoax, albeit an enduring one. In reality, the implementation of supply side economics that began with the Reagan administration has vastly exacerbated wealth inequality in the United States, and with it, had a deep perverting effect on our democracy.

Central to this comforting vision is the parallel right wing myth of “makers and takers,” with its undercurrent of racism, even though the American economic system is vastly skewed to perpetuate wealth rather than fostering social mobility. (As Pete Buttigieg quipped in 2020, if you want the much vaunted “American Dream” that we are consistently promised, move to Denmark. The US is a lowly 14^th when it comes to social mobility.) Yet it is central to the world view of the wealthy that they earned everything they have, with no government assistance, when in fact the system is designed to benefit them and disadvantage others. No surprise: they run it.

But whether they try to explain it away with what George H.W. Bush once called “voodoo economics,” or by claiming that making poor children go hungry will do the trick, the fact is that the deficit is going to balloon—again—in order to give America’s richest citizens this early Christmas present. (Actually, for extra nauseating symbolism, Republicans are aiming to have the legislation on Trump’s desk for him to sign on the 4^th of July.)

THIEVES IN THE NIGHT

It is madness that the Trump administration is ramming through this legislation, which a large majority of Americans oppose, including even its own supporters when presented with the idea in a blind taste test. But it’s not a surprise—it was right there in Project 2025, albeit presented in heavily camouflaged form during the presidential campaign, disguised as something that would benefit the mass of Americans.

Here’s a little insight into how well that gaslighting worked, from ITEP’s Carl Davis:

One of the more remarkable takeaways from the JCT’s revenue estimates is just how insignificant the tax provisions discussed most during the last presidential campaign—especially tax breaks for tips, overtime, car loan interest, and senior citizens—are in the broader context of this very large bill. These core features of the Trump campaign’s platform, which continue to dominate much of the debate over taxes today, come at a total cost of $293 billion. While that amount is not trivial, it equals just 3.8 percent of the $7.7 trillion gross tax cut being offered under this bill. The tax cuts being offered to businesses, by contrast, are more than four times larger.

The surreptitious way the GOP went about passing this bill betrays the party’s bad faith. Jonathan Chait again:

The minority party always complains that the majority is “jamming through” major legislation, however deliberate the process may be. (During the year-long debate over the Affordable Care Act, Republicans farcically bemoaned the “rushed” process that consumed months of public hearings.) In this case, however, the indictment is undeniable. The House cemented the bill’s majority support with a series of last-minute changes whose effects have not been digested. The Congressional Budget Office has not even had time to calculate how many millions of Americans would lose health insurance, nor by how many trillions of dollars the deficit would increase.

Just as Republicans know that the spending cuts in the new bill won’t offset the loss of revenue from these tax cuts for the wealthiest, they also know that once these cuts to Medicaid and other much very popular programs become known, it runs serious risk of ruining them at the ballot box come 2026 and 2028, no matter how hard they try to make people believe the Democrats are to blame. (Spoiler alert: they’re not.) That is why they have pushed the most painful repercussions of those cuts until after the 2028 election.

The members of the Republican majority, Chait writes, “are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.”

But as I’ve noted in previous blogs, it may not matter because the GOP doesn’t really intend to hold any free fair elections ever again. The fact that the Republican Party is taking pains to protect itself against well-deserved electoral blowback is actually a good sign, even as it’s despicable.

Then again, maybe it’s just that Congressional Republicans are not inside the central autocratic planning cell. Hopefully Mike Waltz can loop them into the Signal chat.

AND NOW A WORD FROM THE DEAR LEADER

With characteristic restraint and understatement, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country! Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! There is no time to waste.”

(NB: The ALL CAPS are on brand, but you will never convince me that he used the word “arguably.”)

In The Times, Hugh Tomlinson reports Trump saying, “’This is the biggest tax cut in the history of our country … bigger than any Ronald Reagan tax cut.’ Asked what he would tell fiscal hawks in the party who want bigger spending cuts, Trump replied: ‘I’m a bigger fiscal hawk. There’s nobody like me’.”

In The Guardian, Stein has also written of the bizarre provisions that sunset these benefits when Trump leaves office. (If in fact he does.) The deductions meant as sweeteners for working families are “available only through 2028, meaning that when Trump finishes his term in January 2029, his tax relief will have expired.” The bill would “allow taxpayers to write off overtime, tips and the interest paid on loans for cars assembled in the US, in line with Trump’s campaign promises. Parents would see the child tax credit increase by $500, and be given the option of opening ‘Trump accounts’ to save money to help their children afford a home or schooling once they turn 18, into which the government would deposit $1,000……But once the year 2028 ends, so too do these deductions, as well as the government’s deposits into any Trump accounts and the increased child tax credit.”

In short, the OBBB is a poison pill for Trump’s successors, be they Democratic or Republican. Stein:

(T)he temporary deductions combined with the delayed start of the spending cuts will create a “fiscal cliff” for a future Congress and president, who will face pressure to stop or further delay what could be a politically toxic combination of policies….Cancelling the spending cuts and keeping the new deductions in place would cost $4.8tn, the CRFB forecasts—more than the government spent responding to the COVID pandemic.

Trump of course does not care, and his enablers in the GOP are happy with the short term win, and will worry about the future later. Ironically, it might be the only thing that makes he choose retirement over an attempt to serve a third term and deal with this mess.

And there’s some other weird shit in there too.

The bill includes funding for the southern border wall (hey, wasn’t Mexico supposed to pay for that?) and for the mass deportation program, and ends clean energy incentives passed during the Biden administration. Davis again:

The section of the bill titled “Make Rural America and Main Street Grow Again,” for example, includes everything from cutting taxes on multinational corporations’ offshore profits to repealing an excise tax on indoor tanning services. Similarly, the section titled “Make America Win Again” includes provisions as varied as scrapping tax credits that help homeowners purchase more energy efficient furnaces, significantly raising taxes on nonprofit foundations and colleges, and eliminating taxes on firearm silencers.

Another eyepopping provision buried in the bill strips the courts—including the Supreme Court—from enforcing citations of contempt, which effectively strips them of their powers full stop. The Trump administration and its allies never miss a chance to expand their powers, even when in the midst of a scam that would make Bernie Madoff blush.

#Multitasking

THE OLD DEAL

Ever since 1932, the reactionary faction in this country, led by the Grand Old Party, has been desperately trying to roll back the New Deal and return the country to an unregulated, Darwinian state of affairs in which them that have can do pretty much whatever the fuck they please and the rest of us can just suck on it. (That’s not how most historians and economists phrase it, but trust me—I was a history major—that’s the gist of it.)

The Reagan Revolution of 1980-88 and continuing into the Bush 41 administration was one enormous step in that direction. Now Trump has delivered the coup de grâce. The pain for the rest of us, and the transformation of the United States into a right wing shitshow, will play out over the coming decades.

I’m not an economist, but I did spend the last five years with my filmmaking partner Justin Schein working on Death & Taxes, a feature documentary about wealth inequality, which will be in theaters in July. That topic is wrapped in the story of Justin’s late father, who rose from poverty to become a highly successful record company CEO, but also obsessed with building his wealth and (legally) avoiding taxes. The film includes interviews with thinkers across the ideological spectrum, from Robert Reich, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Matthew Desmond, Roosevelt Institute CEO Felicia Wong, author Anand Giridharadas, New School economist Darrick Hamilton, progressive activist Chuck Collins, and ITEP Executive Director Amy Hanauer, among others on the left, to anti-tax maven Grover Norquist, GOP strategist Frank Luntz, and the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore on the right. The battle they collectively describe over taxation makes it clear: taxes are at the very heart of what we conceive the role of government to be, the values we hold dear, how we direct strategic resources to support those values, and even the very core of how we define ourselves as a country.

Reasonable people acting in good faith can have reasonable disagreements about such issues. But that is not what is going on here. The Republican Party’s budget is a new low in Trumpian megalomania, shameless greed on behalf of the richest among us, and bald-faced lies to the American people, including their own supporters.

Is America great again yet?

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Illustration: Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), from Warner Bros., directed by Michael Curtiz (who also helmed Casablanca) and William Keighley.