What makes this worst is?
Then Senate Majority Leader did this by DROPPING the filibuster rule in the Senate for this….
And?
The Democrats have swallowed this with NO legislative response for FIVE YEARS…..
Again….. As I have pointed out here….
Democrats do NOT have the ability to row together like Republicans do….
Right as the Trump tax cuts were being finalized in December 2017, I wrote a piece for The New Republic about the silver lining that accompanied this large giveaway to the wealthy and well-connected. Democrats had put themselves in a straitjacket for years, with self-imposed “paygo” laws that they offset all new spending with revenue. That was fairly absurd in and of itself, but suddenly it was no longer a problem. The Trump tax cuts rolled back the estate tax, eliminated the alternative minimum tax, slashed the corporate tax rate, and created a new loophole, used mostly by the rich, for “pass-through” businesses.
Repealing those measures alone could net you around $3 trillion—and all you would have to do is go back to the pre-Trump tax code circa fall 2017. Every Democrat in office at the time opposed the Trump tax cuts: Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Josh Gottheimer, and Kurt Schrader; every single one of the cast of characters that has become so familiar today. They all opposed it, and presumably would all be satisfied with a 2017-era tax code.
In the next presidential election, I surmised, all Democratic candidates would have to do is to say “I will repeal the Trump tax cuts,” and that could finance most if not all of their ambitions for their first term. There were $3 trillion in unpopular giveaways to the wealthy just waiting to be re-channeled into important priorities on energy and environment, health and family care, housing and transit, and more….
…
The Democratic Party, however, was not. There are many implications to the failure of talks on what was once the Build Back Better Act and what is now the Negotiate Prices on Ten Drugs Starting in 2026 Act of 2022 (working title). But one of the biggest is that the Trump tax cuts will make it through the first two years of the Biden administration unscathed—and could very well become permanent, a symbol of the one-way ratchet in favor of the top 1 percent that characterizes U.S. policymaking.
As I wrote last October, within months of Biden taking office, a pro-Trump tax cuts caucus took shape. Suddenly, the likes of Sinema, Gottheimer and Schrader and others were uninterested in raising taxes on corporations, capital gains, inheritances, pass-through businesses, wealthy households, or really anything or anyone else. The Biden administration and Senate leaders kept bargaining for other ideas. If the pro-tax cut caucus didn’t like raising marginal rates, how about a tax just on billionaires? If they didn’t like new corporate rates, how about a global minimum tax for large corporations, negotiated with the entire world, that would prevent evasion? How about just beefing up IRS enforcement so that the taxes actually owed under the current structure are actually collected?
One by one, the pro-Trump tax cuts caucus rejected these. The only part of the Trump tax cuts they really wanted to change was to reverse the repeal of the state and local tax deduction, practically the only non-giveaway to the rich in the whole package.
Manchin finally became a full-fledged member of the pro-Trump tax cuts caucus last week, when he rejected any tax increases in reconciliation. The entire premise of Democratic policy for the last two years—use the rollbacks of the most unpopular (the only unpopular?) tax cut maybe in history to offset a new round of deeply needed public investment—was dead….