The Republican tax bill is an assault on American values
The Republican tax bill is an assault on American values
Ryan Cooper The Week December 2, 2017
In the dead of night, the Republican tax bill passed the Senate on a party-line 51-49 vote, with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) the lone dissenting Republican. It will now either have to be reconciled with the already passed House bill, and passed again by both chambers, or simply passed by the House as is and sent on to President Trump.
But regardless of the coming parliamentary procedural hurdles, the lessons of Friday's vote are clear: Some version of this tax bill is going to become law. And that is very bad for America.
It's almost wrong to call this legislative monstrosity a tax bill at all. It is more a top-to-bottom restructuring of American society — one which is a sharp attack on several bedrock American values: education, homeownership, and entrepreneurship.
American conservatives have routinely supported violently disruptive counterrevolutionary acts to stamp out movements of liberation and force the lower orders back into a coercive hierarchy. That's the story of the Confederacy, it's the story of white supremacist "Redeemers" who overthrew Reconstruction and built Jim Crow, it's the story of the Reagan Republicans who leveraged racial resentment to tear up the New Deal, and it's the story of this bill.
The biggest single goal of this bill is a huge tax cut for the top 1 percent. The bill slashes taxes on corporations, increases tax benefits for foreign dividends, and cuts taxes for "pass-through" corporations (which will immediately become the new hotness in tax shelter legal chicanery). Ultra-wealthy heirs get a particular bonus through the abolishment of the inheritance tax. All that will be partially paid for by jacking up taxes on graduate students by up to 400 percent, limiting homeownership tax benefits, repealing the ObamaCare individual mandate, changing inflation calculations to increase taxes more broadly, and by cutting the deduction for state and local taxes (though Susan Collins got some of it restored). Future deficits created by these cuts will almost certainly require large cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
http://theweek.com/articles/740768/republican-tax-bill-assault-american-values
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