The GOP is living in a fantasy world: Every single
Republican’s economic plan is made of wishes and fairy dust
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After listening
to Republicans lay out their economic "plans," the only
conclusion is they're all barking mad |
By Amanda Marcotte |
Salon |
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A
little more than halfway through what felt like the millionth
Republican primary debate, this time in Wisconsin and run by Fox
Business, Rand Paul had a momentary and clearly unwelcome brush
with reality. After hours of hearing one candidate after another
indulge the childish fantasy that we can cut taxes and balance
the budget, apparently only by cutting food stamps, Paul broke
every rule in the Republican playbook and pointed out that
military spending is a huge sinkhole for taxpayer money.
“How is it conservative to add a trillion dollars in military
expenditures?” Paul sniped at Marco Rubio during one
particularly heated moment in the debate. “You can not be a
conservative if you’re going to keep promoting new programs that
you can’t pay for.”
Rubio, facing a clearly unexpected challenge to the widespread
Republican notion that you can cut taxes and eliminate the debt
without cutting a dime on Republican-cherished budget items like
the military, got flustered and tried to deflect with fifth
grade debating tactics. “We can’t even have an economy if we’re
not safe,” he whined. “There are radical jihadists in the Middle
East beheading people and crucifying Christians.” Luckily, we
were all spared him whipping out an American flag and a cross
and asking us to pray for him, but you could feel it was
probably coming if Paul kept pressing his point.
None of this makes Rand Paul a good guy. Paul is just as much a
delusional fantasist as the rest of the GOP field. He has to be,
to run for President on a dovish platform in front of a
Republican crowd that eats it up when, for instance, Jeb Bush
suggests that “Islamic terrorism” is the greatest threat facing
the country. And he spent of the rest of the debate spinning out
pure nonsense, a bunch of meaningless garbage about how he has a
14.5 percent flat tax that is “revenue neutral” and probably
wipes your butt and does the dishes for you.
Still, in a debate situation where most candidates were climbing
over each other to argue that their tax plan was the flattest,
his point about military spending circled slightly closer to
reality than most candidates dare go. Now wonder he can’t seem
to get any higher than 3 percent in the polls.
One thing seemed certain during this debate: The continued
popularity of Donald Trump and Ben Carson clearly sent a signal
to the rest of the field that primary voters simply hate
reality, particularly when it comes to economics, and will
swiftly punish any candidate who feeds them anything but
soothing, if ridiculous fantasies.
Republicans haven’t changed their economic views over the
decades. They continue to be the party that wants to enrich the
wealthy at the expense of everyone else, economic or social
consequences be damned. But they’ve all clearly read the various
think pieces arguing that Donald Trump is appealing to “white
populists”, so the theme of the night was pretending that
Republicans are here to protect the working Joe against the
decadent elite as well as the vampiric poor.
The attacks on low income people started right off the bat in
the main stage debate, with Donald Trump, in response to a
question about the minimum wage, busting out the line of the
night: “Wages are too high.”
Fox Business moderators only made Trump and Carson—the two
candidates that the party elite is eager to push out of the
campaign so “real” candidates can move forward—go on the record
as opposed to the minimum wage. (Most Americans want a minimum
wage hike.) But Rubio pounced on the question anyway, though the
moderators graciously declined to ask him about it, spinning out
an answer that made it sound like opposing higher wages for
working class people will somehow stick it to the educated
elite: “For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized
vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers.
We need more welders and less philosophers.”
The audience, stoked by years of right wing media telling them
to hate pointy-headed intellectuals, ate it up. But this clearly
practiced talking point really crystallized the strategy that
nearly every candidate employed on stage, implying that the poor
and the wealthy are somehow in cahoots to screw over the middle
class. And so the next two and a half hours were spent listening
to a bunch of rich Republicans who want to cut taxes for even
richer Republicans all pretend that they are fighting for the
little guy against those rich bad guys.
In response to a question about income inequality, for instance,
Rand Paul sneered, “And I think that we ought to look where
income inequality seems to be the worst. It seems to be worst in
cities run by Democrats, governors of states run by Democrats
and countries currently run by Democrats.” God only knows what
countries run by Democrats he’s talking about (two out of three
branches of our federal government are controlled by
Republicans), but he clearly wants you to believe that, say, New
York City has a whole lot of rich people in it and Wichita,
Kansas does not because New York City is somehow stealing from
the working man to give to the rich. As opposed to the likelier
explanation, which is that people who can choose where they want
to live gravitate to big, vibrant, and yes, liberal cities like
New York.
But this was the theme of the night, Republicans all bashing the
rich and the big banks and swiping rhetorical ploys right out of
that hated socialist, Bernie Sanders’s playbook. Nearly every
candidate not named Rubio or Bush touted that perennial right
wing hobbyhorse, the flat tax, and the claim was, repeated well
past the point of tedium, was that it’s somehow a boon to middle
class taxpayers to take away their mortgage interest deductions
and child credits so that the wealthy can see their tax rates
cut in half or more.
But the contortions the candidates had to twist themselves into
got increasingly comical as the night went on, culminating in
Rubio trying to pull of one of the biggest howlers of the night:
Arguing that the best way to break up big banks so they’re not
too big to fail is bank regulation.
“Do you know why the big banks got big? Because big government
made them big,” he said. He had some labored explanation
claiming that it’s because only big banks can afford the lawyers
to deal with regulations, which probably impressed people who
don’t like thinking very hard, or much at all. But for the rest
of us, the notion that banks is a capitalist system would be so
grateful for a low regulatory system that they’d elect to stay
small instead of trying to expand their power and profit margins
by buying each other up is so dumb that I kind of want to slap
myself for even typing that.
The reality is that every single candidate on stage has a tax
plan meant to screw over the entire country so that the already
wealthy can buy bigger yachts, just as it was under Bush and
every Republican before him. Rubio and Bush’s tax plans require
cutting so much federal spending it would tank the economy, all
so that the Donald Trumps of the world can finally start wiping
themselves with gold cloth instead of mere silk sheets. A few
dollars thrown to middle class voters in the short term cannot
hide the fact that it’s a terrible idea to grind our economy to
a halt to make the rich even richer.
The flat taxers are even dumber, which is saying a lot. It is,
as it always was, just about giving a bunch of money to the rich
by gouging working people.
But such is the power of fantasy in this election cycle. The
Republican voters clearly want to believe that they you’re
sticking it to the rich by lowering their taxes and somehow that
you can afford all of this, while also balancing the budget,
while seriously reducing the government’s ability to earn
income. Oh yeah, and while we’re in fantasy land, Ted Cruz even
went so far as to claim he could abolish the IRS. Maybe we can
do this without collecting any income taxes at all!
At this point, there’s no reason for Republicans not to nominate
Donald Trump. You almost have to feel sorry for the guy.
Everyone calls him out for being full of shit, but, sit through
enough Republican debates and you quickly realize he is no more
so than the rest of this sorry field. |
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