Should I take these as words of reason, or a repug ploy or deception??
“Maybe they will forget or forgive us the ‘Tax Reform’ ?”
There is nothing to be tackled, except for raising the top income withholding for both, you fucking hillbilly.
Well, Mitch is evil but not stupid. He won’t want to take on Medicare or Social Security (old people vote) at least until he sees what happens in the midterms.
Why pretend that anything he says can be taken at face value? His default mode is lying.
He knows that licking the third rail of American politics would end what little chance they have of holding onto control of Congress.
bingo
Perhaps Yertle doesn’t expect to tackle entitlements reform in 2018 but I bet he does!
Like I said the other day, this ain’t happening in an election year. The GOP base skews much older and much more likely to vote in midterms. They’re already facing a big blue tsunami (anyone see that CNN poll with Democrats up 18% in the generic congressional ballot?). After passing a big tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations, it would be devastating to then use that the very next year to justify safety net cuts. It’s just not politically tenable no matter how desperately Ryan wants to fulfill his lifelong fantasy.
And because they’d need Democrats to pass anything, which they wouldn’t get, they’d just be laying yet another gift at the feet of the Democratic Party. Any legislation to gut the safety net would not only fail, but would then be used by every Dem challenger all over the country.
That said, this zombie will come back kicking and screaming, fighting and biting in 2019 if Democrats don’t take at least one house of Congress.
Correction: The CNN generic congressional ballot poll has Dems up 18%.
I’ll bet $100 he doesn’t even go near it. Mitch is evil not stupid.
You notice that he isn’t saying he is against cutting Social Security and Medicare, he just doesn’t think he can do it without Democratic support.
If he does, its on account of either unforeseen circumstances (ex: the receipt from the tax act coming early) or the other two members of ‘the triumvirate’ (Ryan and Trump) forcing his hand.
Ryan is out next year. Mitch has until 2020 and I bet he won’t run again. Avoiding this headache and kicking the can makes sense for him.
Just coast and do more for himself and cronies.
They are all for it but they can’t do it without dems and the dems won’t go for that especially since the gop just gave rich folk a massive tax cut
Then he’s waiting to see if he can get at least four (or more) new senators from the states that Trump won.
I wonder how long Ryan is going to go before letting the cat out the bag he isn’t running for reelection
Ah, but will the House let them? Now that they’ve taken their big blue pill of tax reform, they’ll all be hot and bothered to finally kill those programs too. They’ve been desperate to kill it for 80+ years. They’re not going to stop now when it’s so close they can taste it.
Hell, I’m pessimistic enough to think they’d kill it even if they thought they’d lose big in the mid terms. They’d just go back to Obama era strategy and stonewall any democratic efforts to fix it. They’d have to get crushed in successive elections for that to end.
Definitely deception.
This tax bill is going to explode the deficit. That means two things.
First, Ryan and many other republicans are already lining up to hack at the social net to deal with the deficits they have just caused. They couldn’t do it together, because cutting spending is unpopular. But look for lots of “hey, we have this deficit problem now, nothing we can do about past bills…we have to cut spending, and entitlements is the only place we can go”
Second, because there will be burgeoning deficits, there will be even less desire from republicans to engage in infrastructure spending. They are going to start pushing back hard on things like disaster relief in the coming years.
Third, they know all of this, but because they expect to lose the House, and maybe the Senate, they aren’t going to deal with it. Why clean up a mess when you know the other side is going to have to suffer through the pain it causes?