Friday Talking Points (455) -- Price Break!

[ChrisWeigant]

As we sat down to write this, the news broke that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price has resigned. So, of course, we immediately had to come up with a snappy "price" pun for our title. We could have gone with the Rolls Royce slogan ("If You Have To Ask The Price, You Can't Afford It" ), or maybe "The High Price Of Airfare These Days," but both are kind of wordy. So we had to settle for "Price Break!" (we did consider "Price Cut," but that would have been more appropriate if he had actually been fired). The news of Price's resignation came immediately following the news that President Donald Trump was going to decide -- tonight -- whether to fire him or not. So, one way or another, the Price would have been lowered, so to speak.

But enough silliness. Tom Price is one of an increasing number of high-ranking Trump officials who are getting shamed for their use of extremely expensive private charter jets and military aircraft to move around -- travel that most such officials are supposed to use commercial airlines to accomplish. Price was the worst so far, having spent over a million taxpayer bucks on both charters and military flights so far (about half of the total, for each). Of this princely sum, he announced this week he would be reimbursing the Treasury for a little under $52,000. The optics, as even Trump admitted, were pretty bad and getting worse.

From the Politico story which broke the news of Price's military flights, came the following reminder of Price's rampant hypocrisy:

In June, Price defended a proposed budget for H.H.S. that included a $663,000 cut to the agency's $4.9 million annual spending on travel, or roughly 15 percent. "The budgeting process is an exercise in reforming our federal programs to make sure they actually work -- so they do their job and use tax dollars wisely," Price testified in front of the Senate Finance Committee on June 8.

That wasn't even the worst irony. That prize would have to go to the proposed White House budget, which would have cut billions in necessary federal funding for health needs, including $1.2 billion from the C.D.C. and another billion from the National Cancer Institute. These proposed cuts astonished even Republicans in Congress, and will likely never be enacted, but Price was the point man to make the case for them. How persuasive was he going to be, after all the revelations about his luxurious travel? "Let them eat moldy cake -- maybe they'll get some penicillin that way," perhaps?

Beyond Price, one has to wonder whether other heads might eventually roll. While Price was the worst abuser of private and military travel, he wasn't the only one in Trump's cabinet guilty of doing so:

Price has come under the most intense scrutiny -- President Trump chastised him publicly Wednesday and suggested that his job was no longer secure -- but lawmakers are also demanding probes of travel by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Pruitt has taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, according to congressional oversight records, costing taxpayers more than $58,000, while Mnuchin is under investigation by the Treasury inspector general for his use of a government plane to visit Kentucky as well as one for a trip from New York City to Washington.

And a private plane chartered this summer by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, for a flight from Las Vegas to near his home in Montana, cost taxpayers $12,375, according to a department spokesman. Zinke also used private flights during a trip to the Virgin Islands.

With the way the week has unfolded, we fully expect to hear more of these revelations as reporters dig into all executive branch travel. So there's that to look forward to....

But let's take a look at the week that was. Donald Trump kicked the week off by picking a very public fight with the N.F.L. players who have been "taking a knee," which was nothing short of a gigantic distraction. Trump knew he was going to need such a distraction, because he was heading into a pretty tough week.

On Monday, Senator Susan Collins torpedoed the latest GOP "repeal and replace Obamacare" attempt, by joining John McCain and Rand Paul in stating they'd be voting "No" on the Graham-Cassidy bill. Donald Trump, later in the week, appeared delusional about what had happened (in two separate ways). Here he is, from an interview:

We have the votes, but reconciliation is a disaster. But as you know, it ends on Friday. So we don't have enough time, because we have one senator who's a "Yes" vote, a great person, but he's in the hospital. And he's a "Yes" vote. So we can't do it by Friday.

To begin with, no senator is in the hospital. Thad Cochran of Mississippi is home recuperating, but he had to tweet that he wasn't actually hospitalized after Trump repeated this false claim over and over again. Secondly, Trump seems eternally confused about what "reconciliation" actually is. For Republicans, reconciliation rules are a good thing, currently. It means they only need 51 votes rather than 60. Trump conflates these two numbers all the time, perhaps confused as to what a filibuster actually is. But even ignoring that, Trump cannot add. If one "Yes" vote is at home and three Republicans are voting "No," then the GOP would have 48 votes for the bill. This would increase by one if Cochran returned, making it 49 votes. But 49 votes is not a majority. So Trump did not have the votes. Delusional is the only appropriate word in this instance.

Tuesday night, the candidate Trump backed in the Senate special election GOP primary in Alabama lost badly. Trump had campaigned for Luther Strange (who was apparently named by Stan Lee), but Roy Moore beat him handily. Moore, among other things, is a big fan of conspiracy theories:

Moore has been a birther (though unlike Trump he hasn't renounced it), suggested President Barack Obama was a Muslim, and said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were punishment from God. He has compared a congressman taking the oath of office on a Koran to doing so on Hitler's Mein Kampf. He has also served as a columnist at the conspiracy-theory site World Net Daily. He even said Tuesday that there is Sharia law in the United States right now -- "as I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana." Yes, President Trump has latched on to some of this stuff, but the sum total has no precedent in recent American politics.

What was the most interesting thing about this bizarre election was the way in which Moore used Mitch McConnell as a whipping boy. From the same article: "Trump's advocacy on Strange's behalf basically boiled down to repeated assurances that Strange didn't even really know McConnell -- and thus couldn't be his puppet." So can we expect to see just as many anti-McConnell ads from Republican Senate candidates as we see anti-Pelosi ads from House wannabes? That's a strange thing to even contemplate, but then again Moore did win his primary using this strategy.

Meanwhile, under the radar, Democrats picked up two GOP-held seats in state legislatures, in New Hampshire and Florida:

The two races bring the total number of GOP seats won by the Democratic Party to eight this election cycle -- all of them in special races. The results suggest that the party is on track to make even more significant gains in statewide legislative races in Virginia and New Jersey this November.

The victory in New Hampshire was especially notable, since the party pulled it off in a heavily Republican state House of Representatives district where voters overwhelmingly preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in November's presidential election.

But back to Trump's bad week. News broke during the week that Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Reince Priebus, Steven Miller, and Steve Bannon all have been using private emails to conduct official White House business. "Lock them up! ... Oh, wait a minute...."

During all of this, Trump has been overseeing his own private Katrina, down in Puerto Rico. It took a while for the media to notice, but roughly since Monday they've been leading with the devastation Hurricane Maria caused, and the almost complete lack of effective federal response. It has now been well over a week since the hurricane hit, and this morning CBS had a report from a dock in Virginia with the Navy's hospital ship looming in the background -- which hadn't even left port yet, and wouldn't arrive in Puerto Rico for another four or five days. The most damning report yet pointed out that America's response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake was far better than Trump's response to Maria:

Within two days {of the Haiti quake}, the Pentagon had 8,000 American troops en route. Within two weeks, 33 U.S. military ships and 22,000 troops had arrived. More than 300 military helicopters buzzed overhead, delivering {supplies}. By contrast, eight days after Hurricane Maria … just 4,400 service members were participating {and} about 50 U.S. military helicopters were helping to deliver food and water to the 3.4 million residents of the U.S. territory.

That is shameful, and should embarrass the Trump administration. Instead, Trump keeps repeating the equivalent of "Heck of a job we're doing, Trumpie," while patting himself on the back for his fantastic response -- which is bigger and better than anything anyone has ever seen before, so there. Trump helpfully explained why it was so tough to get aid to Puerto Rico: "This is an island surrounded by water -- big water, ocean water." The biggest, most tremendous water you've ever seen, believe me.

When he wasn't congratulating himself, Trump was busily shaming the victims, tweeting early in the week:

Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble..

...It's old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars....

...owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities - and doing well.

So now Trump is offering advice on what to do when billions are owed to Wall Street and the banks? Previously, he personally "dealt with" this situation by declaring bankruptcy, just to remind everyone. Multiple times.

Trump actually saw his approval ratings inch upwards after FEMA didn't botch their response to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Hey, two out of three ain't bad, right?

And if the Trump administration hadn't been in enough trouble of the subject of military travel, they have been blocking members of Congress from using military flights to get down to Puerto Rico to see for themselves what is going on. If no member of Congress sees it, that means it didn't happen, right?

Trump was supposed to spend this week rolling out his new tax-cutting plan, of course, but that almost got buried (swamped?) by the rest of the bad news he got all week long. Earlier in the year, the Trump White House put out their "tax tweet," which contained fewer than 200 words and no actual numbers. With eight or nine months to work on it, the "Big Six" (first time we've heard such a group called anything but a "Gang," we should point out) from Congress and the White House hammered out... a nine-page list of bullet points. No tax legislation, no complete analysis, instead they just agreed on all the goodies and punted all the hard decisions "to Congress." At this rate, it'll be a decade or so before they actually draft a bill.

This may actually (gasp!) lead to some regular order in Congress (which we wrote about yesterday), but the immediate takeaway (that, sadly, most Democrats have not been properly using as a talking point) is that Trump is trying to cut his own taxes by a minimum of over 80 percent (which we wrote about Wednesday). And if that's not enough, we wrote what is no more, really, than an extended football metaphor on Tuesday, just because we were in the mood. Plus, almost all the talking points this week are on the GOP tax plan, so it's pretty well covered, below.

That's it for political news, although we have to offer up a quick Requiescat In Pace for Hugh Hefner, who hopped off to the great bunnyland in the sky this week. I know this will be hard for any Millennial to comprehend, but there was a time when nude photos were not actually widely available to all who wished to view them. Hef singlehandedly did more to change that than anyone else, and he helped usher in the sexual revolution in his own particular (and oh, so suave) way. So love him or hate him, you've got to admit he was an influential figure of the latter half of 20th century America.





We've got an Honorable Mention to hand out this week, but for continuity's sake we have to announce it after the main Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award presentation.

The Washington Post had an excellent 10-point rundown of what we've learned from the defeat of Graham-Cassidy and all the other "repeal and replace" GOP schemes. Their list ends with one of the most important lessons for Democrats:

Health care is no longer an abstract debate, and citizens still have power. Republicans began thinking they could toss around pleasant words such as "freedom" and "choice" and that would obscure the human consequences of what they were proposing. But up against cancer patients describing how the ACA had enabled them to get life-saving care, or people with disabilities literally putting their bodies on the line to protest getting their Medicaid taken away, those words lost all their power.

While there were many facets to the campaign to stop these bills, what mattered most was ordinary people, people who organized and called and wrote and shouted and protested and through their efforts made just enough politicians understand what was really at stake. That's a lesson that shouldn't be forgotten.

We wholeheartedly agree, which is why -- once again -- we're giving the MIDOTW to everyone who protested the Republican attempt to deny health insurance to tens of millions of people. When you show up in person, it's harder to ignore you. You become not some sort of abstraction, but a real live human being with a real story to tell. More than any Democratic leader, the protesters (including everyone who phoned or contacted their own representative in any way to express their displeasure) were the driving force behind killing all of these very bad bills.

Which brings us to our Honorable Mention footnote:

Democrats, whose relationships with the protest groups have strengthened since the start of the year, encouraged them to get active ahead of the Sept. 30 repeal deadline. As they filled the halls, senators' social media teams shared videos of them talking about their personal coverage or even getting arrested; Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the committee's ranking Democrat, personally delivered pizzas to the people who had been lining up since early morning.

Well done, Senator Wyden! Everyone loves pizza, after all. A classy move indeed!

{Congratulations to everyone who protested or attempted to protest this godawful bill -- we certainly appreciate all your efforts.}





We haven't yet heard the end of Mr. Peter Tweeter, it seems.

Disgraced Democratic politician Anthony Weiner was sentenced this week to 21 months in the slammer, for sexting with an underage girl. This led to a chain of events which culminated in the head of the F.B.I. announcing mere days before the 2018 presidential election that he had some more Hillary Clinton emails to dig through. This most likely contributed to her defeat, so it's an important chain of events in the grand scheme of things.

It's also important to remember that previous to this incident, Weiner had been publicly exposed (so to speak) sexting women not actually married to him twice, which killed both his congressional career and his hope for a political comeback as New York City's mayor.

In the end, Weiner's legal team was resorting to victim-shaming, which didn't help much with the sentencing judge:

"The defendant did far more than exchange typed words on a lifeless cellphone screen with a faceless stranger," prosecutors wrote in sentencing papers. "With full knowledge that he was communicating with a real 15-year-old girl, the defendant asked her to engage in sexually explicit conduct via Skype and Snapchat, where her body was on display, and where she was asked to sexually perform for him."

Weiner's defense attorneys argued for a penalty that did not include jail time. They cast the former congressman as a man with an addiction problem and asserted that the teen had reached out to him hoping to generate material for a book deal.

Sheesh. Enough already. For the eighth time, Anthony Weiner is hereby awarded the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week.

{Anthony Weiner is (thankfully) not currently a politician, so you'll have to search his contact info out yourself to let him know what you think of his actions.}




Volume 455 (9/29/17)

Today we're going to almost completely focus on the Republican tax-cutting plan, except for one parting shot at the Republican "repeal and replace" embarrassment, at the end.

The fight over taxes is first going to be fought among Republicans, if the recent past is any guide. There still are Republicans who care about not adding to the national debt, and who knows what the Tea Partiers will demand? So it'll be a fratricidal battle before Democrats even get involved.

Democrats should, in the meantime, try to undermine Trump's incorrect rationale in every possible way. This is fairly easy to do, because everyone in the Trump administration seems to be just flat-out lying about everything under the sun. We saw one claiming the economy will grow by six percent this week, and we immediately wondered what exactly he had been smoking before the interview (most sane economists consider anything over three percent to be complete fantasy -- even three percent is pretty wildly optimistic).

So Democrats should gather their data and be ready to make the basic case that the GOP tax plan is nothing short of an enormous giveaway to the ultra-wealthy, at the expense of everyone else in the country. Fortunately, as always, Republicans make it pathetically easy to make such a case. So without further ado, let's get right to it.



Trump slashes his own taxes by tens of millions a year

Always lead with this one, because it already seems to bug him no end.

"Donald Trump campaigned on tax cuts for the working class. But the plan he just agreed to would lower his own taxes by 80 percent or more. That is a pretty jaw-dropping amount going to the wealthiest taxpayers, you've got to admit. From the one year we have of his taxes, he would have saved a whopping $47 million if his new tax plan had been in place. Changing how business income is taxed would have saved him $16 million, and one single change to the tax code -- getting rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which closes loopholes wealthy people can use -- would have saved Trump a whopping $31 million in 2005 alone. Trump insists he wouldn't benefit from this tax plan, but he is flat wrong. He'd save tens of millions of dollars each and every single year. He's just lying. And if he takes exception to that, then let him release some more-recent tax returns so we can all see how he'd be affected."



Trump kids get even more

This wouldn't actually affect Trump directly, but it's also well worth pointing out.

"Trump doesn't stop at slashing his own taxes by tens of millions, because one change in the tax code will actually save his children over one billion dollars when he dies. By getting rid of the inheritance tax he will be giving his own children an enormous windfall of money after Trump is gone. Trump falsely claimed this was to save money for 'millions of farmers and small businesses,' but in fact less than 6,000 people ever even pay this tax each year, because up to $11 million of each estate is tax-free. Of that small number, only 80 family farms and small businesses would be affected. That's 80, not the 'millions' Trump claimed. While his own kids save a cool billion."



Making out like bandits

Of course, these numbers will be refined if the Republicans ever actually write legislation (rather than a set of bullet points), but for now Democrats should use the currently-available data.

"Still don't believe this is a tax cut almost entirely slanted to the One Percent? Well, let's take a look at the details. The lowest tax bracket would actually see their tax rate go up, from 10 percent to 12 percent. This led Breitbart to run the headline: 'MORE BETRAYAL -- REPUBLICAN PLAN TO RAISE TAXES!' So while tax rates at the bottom go up, what happens to everyone else? One nonpartisan analysis shows the radically unbalanced effects of the Republican plan. It found that one in every four households will wind up paying more in taxes. For taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $150,000, almost a third will see their taxes go up. For those making between $150,000 and $300,000, half of all families will see their taxes rise. But then as the incomes get bigger, a strange thing happens. Taxpayers making more than $900,000 a year -- the One Percent, in other words -- would get an average $200,000 tax break. And when you look at the 0.1 Percent it gets even worse, because they'll enjoy a giant tax cut of over a million dollars a year. Not exactly the 'middle-class tax cut' Trump's been promising, is it?"



The public is not on board

More hard numbers worth quoting.

"Let's take a look at what the public thinks, as we start the tax-cutting debate. Almost three in every four Americans (73 percent) think the tax system favors the wealthy over the middle class. A full 55 percent feel this 'strongly.' Over half of Americans think the Trump tax plan will favor the wealthy, while only 10 percent think it will mainly benefit the middle class. And how about those corporate rates? While only 11 percent think corporations pay too much in taxes -- the stated reason for why the Republicans are pushing tax cuts now -- a full 65 percent of the public thinks big business pays too little. Even among Republicans, 47 percent think corporations pay too little, while only 17 percent think they pay too much. So it's not like the public is clamoring for this tax cut -- quite the contrary, in fact."



Down the memory hole

Classic Orwellian behavior, really.

"Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been trying to peddle the snake oil that ordinary workers would benefit most from corporate tax cuts. To do so, he had to send a report on his own department's website down the memory hole, though. A 2012 paper from the Office of Tax Analysis 'found that workers pay 18% of the corporate tax while owners of capital pay 82%,' so of course it had to be deleted. It's so much easier to make a bogus case when your own website doesn't massively contradict your fantasy facts, isn't it?"



A Reganite's view

This was the most damning indictment of the Republican fantasy all week, though. It comes from an op-ed written by Bruce Bartlett, a "domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan" who helped write the 1986 tax reform bill. His article is worth reading in full, although the title sums his point up nicely: "I Helped Create The GOP Tax Myth. Trump Is Wrong: Tax Cuts Don't Equal Growth." From someone who knows exactly what he's talking about:

The flip-side of tax cut mythology is the notion that tax increases are an economic disaster -- the reason, in theory, every Republican in Congress voted against the tax increase proposed by Bill Clinton in 1993. Yet the 1990s was the most prosperous decade in recent memory. At 37.3 percent, aggregate real GDP growth in the 1990s exceeded that in the 1980s.

Despite huge tax cuts almost annually during the George W. Bush administration that cost the Treasury trillions in revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office, growth collapsed in the first decade of the 2000s. Real GDP rose just 19.5 percent, well below its '90s rate.

Flipping him the bird

And finally, as promised, a parting shot at the Republican "repeal and replace" nonsense. This was also taken from the Washington Post article listing ten things we've learned over the past nine months, and it is the best description of Republican motives we've yet seen. This was the second point on the list of lessons learned:

The overwhelming majority of Republicans are more than happy to vote for bills with catastrophic consequences. All of the GOP health-care bills that were offered promised upheaval -- tens of millions losing their insurance, skyrocketing premiums, death spirals in the individual markets. Yet there were never more than a few Republicans willing to say no. The rest were ready to set off a tidal wave of human suffering if it meant that they could give the finger to Barack Obama.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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