According
to Politico, a Trump confidante says that the man in the Oval Office —
or more often at Mar-a-Lago — is “tired of everyone thinking his
presidency is screwed up.” Pro tip: The best way to combat perceptions that you’re screwing up is, you know, to stop screwing up.
But he can’t, of course. And it’s not just a personal problem.
It
goes without saying that Donald Trump is the least qualified
individual, temperamentally or intellectually, ever installed in the
White House. As he veers from wild accusations against President Obama
to snide remarks about Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s doing a very good
imitation of someone experiencing a personal breakdown — even though he
has yet to confront a crisis not of his own making. Thanks, Comey.
But
the broader Republican quagmire — the party’s failure so far to make
significant progress toward any of its policy promises — isn’t just
about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been
faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea
how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never
bothered to understand how anything important works.
Take
the two lead items in the congressional G.O.P.’s agenda: undoing the
Affordable Care Act and reforming corporate taxes. In each case
Republicans seem utterly shocked to find themselves facing reality.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
The
story of Obamacare repeal would be funny if the health care — and, in
many cases, the lives — of millions of Americans weren’t at stake.
First
we had seven — seven! — years during which Republicans kept promising
to offer an alternative to Obamacare any day now, but never did. Then
came the months after the election, with more promises of details just
around the corner.
Now there’s apparently a plan hidden somewhere in the Capitol basement.
Why the secrecy? Because the Republicans have belatedly discovered what
some of us tried to tell them all along: The only way to maintain
coverage for the 20 million people who gained insurance thanks to
Obamacare is with a plan that, surprise, looks a lot like Obamacare.
Sure enough, the new plan reportedly does look like a sort of half-baked version
of the Affordable Care Act. Politically, it seems to embody the worst
of both worlds: It’s enough like Obamacare to infuriate hard-line
conservatives, but it weakens key aspects of the law enough to deprive
millions of Americans — many of them white working-class voters who
backed Donald Trump — of essential health care.
The
idea, apparently, is to deal with these problems by passing the plan
before anyone gets a chance to really see or think about what’s in it.
Good luck with that.
Then
there’s corporate tax reform — an issue where the plan being advanced
by Paul Ryan, the House speaker, is actually not too bad, at least in
principle. Even some Democratic-leaning economists support a shift to a “destination-based cash flow tax,” which is best thought of as a sales tax plus a payroll subsidy. (Trust me.)
But
Mr. Ryan has failed spectacularly to make his case either to colleagues
or to powerful interest groups. Why? As best I can tell, it’s because
he himself doesn’t understand the point of the reform.
The
case for the cash flow tax is quite technical; among other things, it
would remove the incentives the current tax system creates for
corporations to load up on debt and to engage in certain kinds of tax
avoidance. But that’s not the kind of thing Republicans talk about — if
anything, they’re in favor of tax avoidance, hence the Trump proposal to
slash funding for the I.R.S.
No,
in G.O.P. world, tax ideas always have to be presented as ways to
remove the shackles from oppressed job creators. So Mr. Ryan has framed his proposal,
basically falsely, as a measure to make American industry more
competitive, focusing on the “border tax adjustment” which is part of
the sales-tax component of the reform.
This
misrepresentation seems, however, to be backfiring: it sounds like a
Trumpist tariff, and has both conservatives and retailers like WalMart
up in arms.
At
this point, then, major Republican initiatives are bogged down for
reasons that have nothing to do with the personality flaws of the
tweeter in chief, and everything to do with the broader, more
fundamental fecklessness of his party.
Does
this mean that nothing substantive will happen on the policy front? Not
necessarily. Republicans may decide to ram through a health plan that
causes mass suffering, and hope to blame it on Mr. Obama. They may give
up on anything resembling a principled tax reform, and just throw a few
trillion dollars at rich people instead.
But
whatever the eventual outcome, what we’re witnessing is what happens
when a party that gave up hard thinking in favor of empty sloganeering
ends up in charge of actual policy. And it’s not a pretty sight.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment