Senate Republican leadership released the legislative text for their second attempt at a budget resolution Wednesday afternoon, signaling that despite several points of contention within the party, they might have the votes to pass a so-called compromise blueprint.
The newly released budget resolution indicates that the Republican leadership is plowing ahead with their plan to utilize an unprecedented “budget gimmick” to make portions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.
The text of the resolution suggests Republicans plan to make up their own numbers and cost estimates as a way of shoehorning in the “current policy baseline,” in order to zero out the nearly $4 trillion cost of their tax cuts and claim on paper that the extension will be costless, budget and tax experts told TPM. That math trick means Republicans may be able to avoid the reality of the huge offsets taxpayers will ultimately pay over time for the Trump tax cuts making it possible for them to bypass a Senate rule that guards against increases to the deficit in any year beyond the 10-year budget window.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) called Senate Republicans’ attempt to fudge the numbers, “cheap, shameless, embarrassing.”
“They’re engaged in trickery,” Warnock, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told TPM Wednesday afternoon. “If you’re busy trying to hide what you’re doing, deep down, you must know that you’re doing the wrong thing. Because if you really believe in it, you ought to own it.”
“Don’t claim that you’re not doing it while you’re doing it,” he added. “The American people are not stupid.”
Budget and tax experts told TPM, the math is simple. No matter what Republicans claim, the tax cuts will increase the deficit over the years and will not erase the impact it will have on the country’s economy.
“The deficits will start pretty soon,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), ranking member for the Senate Finance Committee, told TPM when asked about the impacts of using this budget gimmick. “That will bump up interest rates. That will really hurt consumers and small businesses.”
“There’s an old saying that when you’re digging yourself into a hole you ought to stop digging,” Wyden added as he walked through the tunnel that connects the office building to the Senate basement.
Warnock also reflected on the consequences of using what some Democrats are describing as “funny math.”
“They are literally digging a hole for our children, exploding the debt. I think it would be foolish to do that. Period. But they’re doing it for … the noble cause of giving the wealthiest people in the country a tax break,” the Georgia senator told TPM sarcastically.
While Trump’s 2017 tax cuts did lower taxes for the majority of Americans, they primarily benefited the wealthy — those making $400,000 or more a year.
The Senate is expected to take the initial procedural vote on the budget resolution Thursday, with a vote-a-rama set to begin Friday afternoon. If everything goes as leadership plans, the Senate could pass the blueprint by early Saturday morning. The House will then take up the same text. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he wants to push for a vote on the Senate’s resolution as early as next week. But the almost inevitable resistance from hardliners in his conference could easily slow the timeline down.
Several Senate Democrats pointed out the irony in the Republicans’ fuzzy math, telling TPM that many Republicans for years have claimed to be worked up about austerity, typically, conveniently when they’re not in power.
“Now they’ve done a 180 degree move the other way and said, ‘all we care about is our tax breaks for billionaires, and somehow the money is just going to pour in and we will have a land of milk and honey,” Wyden said.
The play on numbers that help Republicans claim that the tax cuts will not add to the country’s debt is also a calculated political move. If the numbers point to a no or small increase in the deficit, Republican leadership can pretend the deficit won’t grow as much as it will, helping them to ease the concerns of many of the hardliners in Congress.
Warnock told TPM that the so-called deficit hawks have “waxed eloquently for years about the debt we’re leaving on the backs of our children, and we’re discovering in real time that they didn’t really mean it.”
“But it speaks to something else,” he continued. “Democracy is broken. It’s not destroyed, but it’s broken. It means that the voices of the people are being squeezed out of their democracy, and politicians are responding to the well heeled interests of corporate power. They work for somebody else, other than the people who pull those levers.”
Democrats, of course, are in the minority and largely locked out of power. But they are trying to be as loud as they can around this issue to make it clear that the Republican plan will “strip hard-working Americans of essential services and explode the deficit with a second round of Trump tax giveaways to the wealthy” ranking members of the Senate Budget Committee said in a statement this week.
When asked about Republicans’ push to use the budget gimmick, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told TPM, “it would be unprecedented, in my view, and it would be highly problematic.”
“I think a number of Republicans understand that, and they know it would probably come back to bite them, so we’re not going to allow them to do that quietly,” Kaine, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, added. “We are in a minority, not a majority, but we will do everything we can to point it out for what it is and stop it.”
Kaine added that the consequences of ignoring the fact that tax breaks without equal offsets will increase the deficit will catch up to Republicans.
“You can play funny math with the scoring of a reconciliation, but you can’t play funny math with the debt ceiling,” Kaine told TPM. “And so they would make their problem on the debt ceiling worse.”
“There is a day of reckoning so they can run but they can’t hide.”
As with all the other “features” of this mal-administration, wishing it was true makes it true.
Actual truth be damned.
It appears that one of the things that people are fed up with is the tax breaks being handed out to billionaires and Corporations. It has finally dawned on most of us that there is no “innovation” and no creation of good paying jobs by any of these Corporations or Billionaires. They are just getting a damn fine free ride at our expense.
The whole fiction that the fat cats have been putting out is just that: fiction.
Time to make it clear that the time has come that we are not having it. Eat the rich.
The tax trick only works if you move quickly. Unfortunately, my brother’s MS broker already explained this to him this morning before Warnock’s comments. If retail brokerages know the deal, it ain’t much of a trick. On the Finnish news, this same discussed motivation of further shifting wealth is seen as the clearest explanation, but the good news is that 87% of global trade does not involve the US. The US is becoming a regional power with more oligarchs.
In any case, why now? The global economy has been growing. The China and EU trade surpluses with the US have been fairly stable in recent years. It’s cover for the coming domestic crime of transferring more wealth to the wealthy, much like causing a plane crash to cover up the criminal intent of murdering one of the passengers. There is no economic rationale beyond promoting corruption.
Don’t let them hide, Dem senators! Kaine and Warnock are showing you how it’s done!
But Democrats already showed their cards on the debt ceiling. I can’t stand negotiating, but even I would call their bluff.