Fiscal cliffs

Anybody who has been watching the Louisiana budget process these past couple of years kind of knows this drill by now.

Due to the upper chamber’s arcane rules, Republicans can’t get their tax cuts out of the Senate — without Democratic help — unless their bill adds $0 to the deficit in the second decade after it’s passed. As of yesterday afternoon, Mitch McConnell’s tax plan appeared to put roughly $2 trillion on the national credit card between 2028 and 2038. And still, several members of his caucus were complaining that the bill did not cut taxes nearly enough.

So, it was difficult to see how Republicans could possibly solve their math problem without creating a fatal, political one. But last night, Orrin Hatch took a hatchet to his party’s tax legislation, and ended up achieving the seemingly impossible: The Utah senator found a way to keep the plan’s giant corporate tax cuts permanent, make its middle-class tax cuts more generous (in the near term), and cut the overall cost of tax package to $0 in 2028.

Hatch’s trick: Phase out (virtually) every tax cut that doesn’t benefit corporations in 2026, while also throwing 13 million people off of health insurance. The upshot of this is that, next year, almost no middle-income families lose out from the bill, and most upper-middle-class households come out ahead.

But, when the clock strikes midnight on January 1, 2026, the middle-class tax cuts turn into a pumpkin — and President Trump’s tax plan becomes a giveaway to corporations funded by raising taxes on virtually everyone in the United States.

And that's so long from now there will be plenty of time for somebody (not this particular Congress, though) to "fix" it.  And when the time comes, the argument will be all about how we have a "spending problem, not a revenue problem."  Therefore some pragmatic Democrats will have no choice but to scrap Social Security.  If the lemmings read the book, they would know that lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs.  Neither do Republicans.  Instead, like the infamous Disney filmmakers here, they just run everyone else over the side and profit from the result.