Examples today of:
- Defunding the IRS, mostly to benefit the wealthy;
- Tax cuts, benefiting mostly the wealthy;
- A party of law & order anxious to pardon its member for crimes against law & order;
- Defenses of Trump that are a master-class of irrational thinking;
- Why long-term threats like climate change are dismissed.
Is there a common theme here?
Why would Republicans defund the IRS, and cut taxes for the wealth (again!), when they know that those actions will increase the deficit, which they are so worried about?
Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 14 Jun 2023: Opinion | How much did Congress lose by defunding the IRS? Way more than we thought.
The White House and Congress recently agreed to claw back more than $20 billion earmarked for the Internal Revenue Service. This deal was, ostensibly, part of a grand bargain to reduce budget deficits.
Unfortunately, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Every dollar available for auditing taxpayers generates many times that amount for government coffers — and the rate of return is especially astonishing for audits of the wealthiest Americans, according to new research shared exclusively with The Post.
More charts in the article. Auditing returns of the wealthy costs more than auditing those of the others, but the return is far greater. Do Republicans not understand this?
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My understanding has always been that reining in the IRS (so that the wealthy are less likely to be audited) is the flip side of doing this:
Salon, Sharon Zhang, 14 Jun 2023: GOP follows debt fight with bill to give $24 billion tax cut to the top 1 percent, subtitled “The average member of the 1 percent would save $16,550 under the plan”
Also, the GOP wants to make it harder to invest in clean energy, and get rid of a tax on dumping in toxic chemical dumping sites. Whose side are they on? The article offers this explanation.
Democrats have blasted the plan, saying that it only represents Republicans’ latest attempt to hand tax breaks to their wealthy benefactors while sapping public resources away from the rest of the public.
“With the predictability of a metronome, Republicans are back doing what they do best: pushing tax giveaways that benefit the wealthy, the large, huge corporations, while telling working families to take a hike,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in remarks on the Senate floor on Monday.
The wealthy being the largest donors to the Republicans, of course. They have the money to do so.
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You also read so often about how Republicans are willing to pardon each other for crimes committed. Aren’t they the part of law and order? Why do they commit so many crimes that need to be pardoned? (Is there any parallel on the Democratic side? I don’t think so.)
The Week, 15 Jun 2023: Trump indictment forces 2024 candidate dilemma: to pardon or not to pardon?, subtitled “Vivek Ramaswamy wants every presidential contender to pledge that they’ll pardon Trump if they win — but will they?”
One explanation is that Republicans truly don’t understand or believe in rules or law and are willing to forgive anyone who’s part of their tribe. The other explanation is… um, I forget.
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Another example. The Republican defenses of Trump consist of a master-class in irrational thinking.
NY Times, Jesse Wegman, 14 Jun 2023: The Impossible Task of Defending Donald Trump
From the moment Donald Trump was indicted last week, top Republican lawmakers and media figures have found themselves in the humiliating position of trying to defend the indefensible. Many of them are lawyers; having seen the overwhelming strength of the evidence in the indictment, they could simply have accepted that Mr. Trump is in big trouble.
Instead, they have burst forth with an embarrassing slurry of misdirection, illogic and non sequiturs explaining why Mr. Trump should not be treated like everyone else in the eyes of the law. They offer legal arguments with no basis in the law or explanations that are nonsensical on their face.
The essay takes apart “the two most common, and most absurd, defenses of [Trump’s] behavior:” Selective Prosecution, and The Presidential Records Act. On the first:
This is the “witch hunt” narrative that has animated the Republican Party for years. In this account, the “deep state” has always had it in for Mr. Trump, targeting him for things that other officials, especially Democrats, get away with. “If you’re Donald Trump, they’re going to come get you for anything,” Byron Donalds, a Florida congressman, said on CNN on Tuesday. “But if you’re Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, they’re going to investigate very, very slowly, and let’s see where it actually ends up.” This is an upside-down way of looking at what’s happened over the past several years.
The essay spells this out for those who haven’t been paying attention, or who’ve heard only one side of the story.
So let’s be clear about who’s being targeted for what. Mr. Trump created this mess entirely by himself. He didn’t simply violate the law by taking documents that didn’t belong to him. He refused to return many of them when asked. Had he done so, as Mr. Biden and Mr. Pence did, he very likely would not have faced any legal consequences. In other words, people who behave like responsible adults are more likely to get the benefit of the doubt.
And on that Records Act:
And this is how the Trump team interprets the records act: “The president can take whatever he wants when he leaves office,” said Kash Patel, a lawyer who served as a high-ranking national security adviser in the Trump administration. When the president takes a document, he went on, “it transitions from being U.S. government property to the personal, private property of the past president.” This is about as wrong as it is possible to be; it is literally the opposite of what the law says, especially when you are talking about the sort of highly sensitive documents — nuclear secrets, military strategies and so forth — that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally keeping in his possession. I would call it gaslighting, except it’s not creative enough.
Again, another dazzling display of logical incoherency, not just black vs. white thinking, but black is white thinking, in full public view. This aligns with my comments recently about how fundamentalist religious belief, where one is required to believe the many contradictory and implausible claims made in holy books, necessarily corrodes the ability think rationally. Here it is again; the essence of conservative thinking.
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And I’d have to say that this is another example:
NY Times, 8 Jun 2023: Where Republican Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change, subtitled “While many of them acknowledge that climate change is real, they largely downplay the issue and reject policies that would slow rising temperatures.”
The print title in the June 9th print edition was “G.O.P. Candidates Mostly Dismiss Climate Risks.” The article describes the reactions to climate change from Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Pence, Scott, Christie, Hutchinson, Ramaswamy, and Burgum (apparently in order of their announcements to run for president).
This is the prime example among conservatives, Republicans, who seem unable to understand any kind long-term risks and take near-term actions to avoid them. This is either a psychological flaw — would the term be blinkerism, perhaps? — or a simple exercise of selfishness, to prioritize the support of near-term business interests, and leave the consequences for future generations to take care of, by those who prefer power to actually solving near- or long-term problems.
