WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Retiring U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Monday launched a whirlwind tour of a dozen states, where he aims to pump up the campaigns of 25 embattled Republican members of Congress as the party fights to keep control of Congress.
With three weeks until the Nov. 6 congressional elections, most projections show Democrats holding a strong chance of gaining the 23 seats they would need to take a majority of that chamber and more effectively counter President Donald Trump.
Ryan will begin campaigning in the northeast, where he will appear with Representatives John Faso in New York and Leonard Lance in New Jersey, then go on to the Midwest next week to back Erik Paulsen in Minnesota and Rod Blum of Iowa and later return to the East Coast to campaign with Dave Brat of Virginia and Ted Budd of North Carolina.
In response to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying the budget deficit increase is “disturbing” and suggesting cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs were the only way to pay for it, DNC spokesperson Daniel Wessel released the following statement:
“The deficit increase is ‘disturbing’ because of the trillion-dollar tax break Trump and Republicans gave to the rich and big corporations. The Trump tax law was always a scam, and now Republicans are suggesting taking seniors and middle-class families to the cleaners by gutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to help pay for it.
“Make no mistake: These vital programs are on the ballot this November. The only thing left for Americans to do is vote.”
‘At the end of the day, this is a question of priorities. The GOP continues to make it painfully clear that their first priority is to make the rich even richer, at the expense of the middle class.’
This morning, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Bloomberg News what we’ve long suspected: the GOP’s only plan to address the ballooning federal deficit is to make deep and painful cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. His statement comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement that the deficit has reached a six-year high of $779 billion, due largely to the trillion dollar tax cut for billionaires and wealthy corporations the GOP pushed through earlier this year.
The federal deficit swelled by nearly 17 percent largely because of a sharp decline in corporate tax revenues after the Trump tax law. Trump said his tax law would pay for itself, and he claimed he would quickly eliminate the national debt and balance the budget. We now know those were all lies.
LIE: The Trump administration claimed the tax law would “pay for itself” and even suggested it already has.
Secretary Mnuchin: “‘This will be the most significant change to the tax code since Reagan,’ he said, adding that the plan ‘will pay for itself’ by boosting economic growth.”
A new poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans say they have not seen their take-home pay increase as a result of the Trump tax law. The truth about the Trump tax law is that it’s not benefiting working families — it has only increased the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.
Americans have not benefited from the Trump tax law. It’s clear why more Americans still disapprove than approve of the law.
64% of Americans say they have not seen an increase in their take-home pay from the Trump tax law.
A majority of Americans say the Trump tax law has not helped their family financially.
Richard Lattanzi, mayor of Clairton, Pa., and a safety inspector for a nearby U.S. Steel plant, poses for a portrait Tuesday. Credit: Michael Henninger, The Washington Post
Clairton, PA — When President Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports in June, Richard Lattanzi thought of dozens of his fellow steelworkers who have for years put off badly needed repairs of their cars and homes.
“There was a lot of excitement here; there were a lot of us saying, ‘It’s about time someone is looking out for us,’ ” said Lattanzi, the mayor of this town of 7,000 and a safety inspector at the U.S. Steel plant in nearby West Mifflin. “A lot of people around here were saying, ‘We’re going to be okay.’ ”
Four months later, Lattanzi is less optimistic. Production at U.S. Steel’s facilities have ramped up, and the company announced this summer that, thanks in part to the tariffs, its profits will surge. But in interviews in recent weeks, Lattanzi and other steelworkers said they’re no longer confident they’ll take part in the tariff bounty.
Republicans left middle-class families behind with a tax scam aimed at making the rich richer.
Credit: Greg Nash
Mountains of evidence continue to expose the the Republican tax scam as terrible deal for working-class families but a boon for rich corporations.
Case in point: Some 99 percent of companies said the tax scam was not prompting them to increase minimum wages for employees, according to Aon, a human resources consulting firm.
Aon’s survey of 1,000 companies was reported by the Wall Street Journal, and is consistent with other surveys of how companies are using the massive giveaway orchestrated by Trump and Republicans in Congress.
Later this week, the House of Representatives will vote on a second round of tax cuts once again favoring the rich. This new tax plan is a sequel to the tax law that the Republican-led Congress enacted in December, which is informally known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The TCJA was badly skewed to wealthy Americans, exacerbating the decades-long trend toward greater inequality of income and wealth. The law created new loopholes for well-heeled taxpayers to exploit. Moreover, its massive cost was financed by higher budget deficits that will put even more pressure on vital programs that serve all Americans. The newly proposed tax plan shares each of these failings. Congress should reject it. Instead, federal lawmakers should work toward real tax reform, beginning with undoing the damage caused by the TCJA.
Tax Scam 2 is just more of the same
During the week of September 24, Republican leaders plan to bring up a package of three bills that they call “Tax Reform 2.0”—that critics rightly call Tax Scam 2—for a vote in the House. The centerpiece of this package is H.R. 6760, a bill to permanently extend the individual and estate tax provisions of the TCJA beyond their scheduled expiration at the end of 2025. The reason these provisions were made temporary was that congressional leaders chose to move the TCJA through Congress using the process known as budget reconciliation, which enables bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority but only if they are not estimated to increase deficits over the long term. Under these procedural constraints, the TCJA’s authors chose to make the legislation’s corporate tax provisions permanent and its individual and estate tax provisions temporary (with some exceptions). H.R. 6760 would permanently extend both the provisions of the TCJA that cut individual taxes, including the reductions in individual tax rates and higher standard deduction, and the TCJA’s tax increasing provisions, including the elimination of personal exemptions and the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes (the SALT deduction).
The House Ways and Means Committee reported H.R. 6760 along straight party lines on September 13. The bill has been scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to increase deficits by $631 billion over 10 years. As discussed below, the cost over a longer time horizon would be much greater.
An internal RNC poll shows voters know the GOP tax scam overwhelmingly benefits the rich — not middle-class families.
Mitch McConnell, R-KY., 2018. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite, AP
The Republican tax scam was always set up to favor wealthy corporations at the expense of middle-class families. And now Republicans are learning most voters see through their spin and understand the tax scam for exactly what it is.
Bloomberg obtained a private, internal poll from the Republican National Committee (RNC) showing “By a 2-to-1 margin — 61 percent to 30 percent — respondents said the law benefits ‘large corporations and rich Americans’ over ‘middle class families.’”
In response to the data, the pollsters wrote “we’ve lost the messaging battle on the issue.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Retiring U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Monday launched a whirlwind tour of a dozen states, where he aims to pump up the campaigns of 25 embattled Republican members of Congress as the party fights to keep control of Congress.
