Business as usual

Kind of interesting that the CAT died in Baton Rouge at about the same time that the BAT died in Washington.

As of late Tuesday, the plan did not include Mr. Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure program, two of the people said, and it jettisoned a House Republican proposal to impose a substantial tax on imports, known as a border adjustment tax, which would have raised billions of dollars to help offset the cost of the cuts.

I often wonder if our friends in the performative liberal #Resistance would be better served to emphasize the ways in which the Trump Presidency is actually pretty normal.  Which is to say it's everything you would expect from a normal Republican administration. Which, again, is to say it's a horror show.

In fact the pretense that it isn't a normal horror show actually normalizes the horror that much more.  When Democrats pretend that supply side "voodoo economics" hasn't been alive and well throughout their own reign of business tax credits, welfare-to-work incentives and "public-private partnerships" they only obscure the nature of the abuses they've enabled.  When they rally to the defense of still more Wall Street cronyism  they cause one to wonder just what it is they're even fighting Trump for in the first place. You even hear more than a few pining for the good ol' Bush years these days.

But there's very little the current Republican administration is actually delivering that distinguishes it at all from the previous one. Trump's travel ban has been struck down repeatedly by the courts. His border wall isn't going to be funded by Congress. The only thing he's really come through on as far as his right wing base is concerned is the Gorsuch appointment. (And even that is as much Mitch McConnell's win as it is Trump's.)

Where the rubber meets the road, though, this is really just Bush all over again. There is an aggressive, reckless foreign policy. There are federal regulatory agencies captured by Big Oil and international finance. And, of course, there are big tax breaks for rich people.

Republicans are likely to embrace the plan’s centerpiece, substantial tax reductions for businesses large and small, even as they push back against the jettisoning of their border adjustment tax. The 15 percent rate would apply both to corporations, which now pay 35 percent, and to a broad range of firms known as pass-through entities — including hedge funds, real estate concerns like Mr. Trump’s and large partnerships — that currently pay taxes at individual rates, which top off at 39.6 percent. That hews closely to the proposal Mr. Trump championed during his campaign.

And, yeah, that's pretty darn infuriating. You can tell because it's helping the DNC sell #Resist^TM T-Shirts and stickers by the truckload.  But if they were actually interested in maybe making it stop, they might try being more honest about how deeply ingrained  and insidious the regime really is and has been.