The stunning collapse of the Republican healthcare bill now imperils the rest of President Trump’s ambitious congressional agenda, with few prospects for quick victory on tax reform, construction projects, or a host of other issues in the months ahead despite complete GOP control of government.
While Republicans broadly share the goal of Trump’s promised “big tax cuts,” the president will have to bridge many of the same divides within his own party that sunk the attempted overhaul of the Affordable Care Act. And without savings anticipated from the healthcare bill, paying for the “massive” cuts Trump has promised for corporations and middle-class families becomes considerably more complicated.
Meanwhile, other marquee agenda items, including a $1 trillion investment in roads and other infrastructure and proposed crackdowns on both legal and illegal immigration, will require the support of Democrats, many of whom have been alienated by the highly partisan start to Trump’s tenure. …
House Republicans leaders had been counting on changes to the tax code included in the healthcare bill to make the task of paying for future tax cuts easier.
Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said the bloc of hard line Republicans who helped stymie the healthcare overhaul were guilty of “ripping the lungs out of tax reform.” If they don’t revisit the healthcare bill immediately, Norquist said, they will soon realize that “they didn’t shoot and wound healthcare reform, they shot and killed permanent tax reform.”
House Speaker Paul D Ryan (R-Wis) acknowledged Friday that the healthcare defeat “does make tax reform more difficult, but it does not make it impossible.”
–John Wagner, Damian Paletta and Sean Sullivan
Trump’s Path Forward Only Gets Tougher After Health-Care Fiasco
They won’t find it difficult to raise taxes on the poor and cut them on the rich. They never do.
No, they won’t — say the magic words, “tax cut,” and Americans will cream their shorts in support of it. At least the repugnant health care bill is dead. For now. My thanks to everyone who showed up at recess Town Hall meetings and made GOPers run back to D.C. all twitterpated with fright. “I knew I had constituents; I didn’t know there were SO MANY of them!”
…”including a $1 trillion investment in roads and other infrastructure…”
This always chaps me, because so far as I can see the Trumpkins never intented to “invest” so much as a nickel in hardscape work. Pretty much the whole thing is just another massive transfer of tax dollars from Joe and Molly, in this case to construction firms and “investors” who will get public funding and massive tax kickbacks for doing this work. It would shock me if anything that passed didn’t include the sort of “sell the parking meter revenue to MegaCorp in return for a one-time payment that will eventually come to less than 1% of the future revenues” kind of “deal” we’ve seen Republican state and municipal governments make.
One of the crucial first baby steps back towards actual small-r republican governance will be the punditry and the various news outfits calling out this sort of bullshit. No, it’s not a “$1 trillion investmant”, it’s “a complex crony-capitalist scheme amounting to $1 trillion in tax breaks, and handouts to private contractors”. See? Fixed that for ya.
Speaking of “complex crony-capitalist scheme” I’ll just leave this here:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a54149/jared-kushner-white-house-nepotism/
Oh, Lord. The “Office Of American Innovation.” That’s like if Uber & Jamie Dimon fucked to make some hell-baby.