Why the Rethugs HAD to Push Obamacare Repeal First
Because the repeal would have yielded the big pot of money they needed to enact permanent tax cuts.
Check out this must-read analysis from the Washington Post. Oh, and subscribe. At least to the Post and to the Times. We need great journalism now more than ever. Here are a couple of key excerpts:
But there’s a reason the GOP was pushing a bill that would have taken everything people don’t like about the health-care system and made it worse. That’s the fact that it would have allowed them to pass two permanent tax cuts for the rich. Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut that expires after 10 years. But if you want to make it last — and you don’t have 60 votes in the Senate — then you need to find a way to pay for it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from poor and sick people would have done just that for the Obamacare taxes, which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent. Indeed, as you can see below in the chart from the Urban Institute, the combination of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor that was the GOP health-care plan would have been a reverse Robin Hood that redistributed income from people making $50,000 or less to mostly those making $200,000 or more.
Now, the crazy thing is that this first tax cut for the rich (in the form of Obamacare “repeal and replace”) would have made a second one (this one coming in the form of “tax reform”) look more affordable.
That’s because, due to parliamentary rules, tax revisions can’t lose any revenue outside the 10-year budget window if it’s going to be permanent. The question, though, is lose revenue compared to what. If Republicans had repealed the Affordable Care Act’s $1 trillion worth of taxes before they revised taxes, that’s $1 trillion less they’d have to come up with to make it look like money wasn’t being lost. Now, without those phantom savings, tax restructuring, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) admitted, will be “more difficult.”
‘Tax restructuring’. Just another euphemism for rob from the poor, give to the wealthy. Stay focused, my friends.
Perhaps this was the master plan behind the madness, if so it was a rather stupid plan (hence Paul Ryan) that resulted in a rather nasty self inflicted wound. The one thing that all Republican agree on is tax cuts for the rich, on this the far right and ultra far right will come together and worship wealth yet again. Unfunded or not.
The one thing that all Republicans (and moderate Democrats) agree on is tax cuts for the rich, on this the (Democrats), far right (Republicans) and ultra far right (Yahoos)will come together and worship wealth yet again. Unfunded or not.
Fixed.