Opinion: The GOP’s accidental grift gift

Republican willingness to blow up the deficit to give corporations and the super wealthy bigger tax cuts removes any remaining credibility of criticizing Americans’ basic needs as unaffordable.

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Great news, everybody! Price tags don’t matter anymore in Congress! All that talk about liberal “wish lists” being unaffordable was just talk. It turns out there’s plenty of room for adequately funding education, health care for everyone, infrastructure improvements, and more.

And we have President Donald Trump’s MAGA GOP to thank for this landmark revelation, this brand new chapter of US government budgeting.

What did Republicans discover? A credit card—with your name on it. (Unless you’re a billionaire.)

Most of the attention on the Trump budget plan that passed in the US House last week is rightly focused on the approximately $1 trillion in cuts that would be levied on vital programs like Medicaid, the child tax credit, and SNAP food assistance. There’s also more being learned about the other right-wing goodies snuck into the bill, like killing your ability to file your taxes electronically with the IRS for free, making it easier for politicians to rip away a group’s nonprofit status for no reason other than disagreeing with their work, and ending a tax on gun silencers. (Really?)

But with the focus on cuts and special favors, a lot of folks might not be aware that the bill’s total price tag is about $4 trillion. So, after $1 trillion in cuts, where’s the other $3 trillion coming from? Republicans simply punted it to the national debt. 

You remember the national debt, right? It’s that thing Republicans have been preaching about for 40 years, even as they work year after year to take it to higher levels through budget deficits. (In recent memory, there’s only been one budget that ran a surplus—and that honor goes to President Clinton in the dot-com boom of the late 90s.)

And let’s be clear, the “fiscal conservative” talk was always just talk. Sen. Ron Johnson is criticizing the current House bill as “stealing from our grandchildren.” But this was the same senator who led the charge on the first Trump tax bill that added a whopping $2 trillion to the deficit and made sure it included a special tax favor for pass-through corporations that personally benefited his personal finances. 

So the charade has finally ended. The “deficit hawks” have been replaced with baby birds, always hungry for more of your money to dish out in tax breaks to corporations and the super-wealthy. Every Wisconsin Republican voted for this budget buster. 

Never again —and allow me to repeat this for emphasis, never again— can a Republican who voted yes last week use this line about a Democratic proposal: “We can’t afford it.”

They may not like a proposal. They may want to actually hurt rather than help the people who’d benefit from a proposal. But attacking the “affordability” of a proposal has lost all of its credibility. It’s clear they believe America’s taxpayers can afford anything, as long as the bill comes due later on.

I’d wager that most Americans would rather see their tax dollars go in a different direction: making sure everyone has affordable healthcare and no longer makes poverty-level wages, addressing the childcare crisis, improving the stock of affordable housing, replacing crumbling bridges, cleaning up our drinking water, and strengthening our public schools, universities, technical colleges, and job training programs.

In no way am I advocating for limitless spending and perpetual deficits. There’s always room for the fiscally prudent. But this current plan was best described last week by veteran conservative columnist Matt Lewis who said, “It seems like their definition of limited government is spending like a drunken sailor who just won the lottery.“

For now, the GOP budget and tax plan is best seen as one more grift to Trump and his billionaire buddies. But in time, I think more people will see it as a gift of sorts—proof that voters can one day get more of the basic things they expect from their leaders, without the caterwauling about spending concerns that was never genuine in the first place.