Trump & The Repuli-CON's Big CON: Fiscal Responsibility

"Republicans finally seem to be figuring out that taking health care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich isn’t exactly popular.

Indeed, less than 20 percent of people support the Senate’s plan, which would do just that. It has been enough to make some Republicans start considering what for them is the ultimate heresy: What if they didn't cut taxes as much as possible for wealthy investors? What if, instead, they used some of that money to cover a couple million more people and keep costs down a little more for everybody else — kind of, you know, like Obamacare does?

Now, as big a positional shift as that would be on health care, it actually wouldn't be one on taxes. That's because whatever taxes Republicans don't cut in their health-care bill, they can cut in their tax reform one.   . .

Why would they do that when it would mean their tax cuts would have to be temporary? Because it turns out that they can change the definition of 'temporary' to something that's a lot closer to permanent. The trick is that although their tax cuts have to be paid for past the budget window, there's nothing that dictates the length of that budget window. It's 10 years now, but it could be 15 or 20 or even 30 years if they wanted it to be — and some of them, like Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), do.

Not paying for their tax cuts would really solve their problem for how to pay for their tax cuts. Republicans could stop trying to throw 15 million people off Medicaid to cover the cost of cutting the tax on investment income from 23.8 to 20 percent for people making $250,000 or more. Or trying to come up with any tax loopholes they'd be willing to close — something that has eluded them so far — let alone a few trillion dollars' worth of them. Instead, they could get back to their Bush-era basics: passing a deficit-financed tax cut and then announcing how much they hate deficits whenever Democrats win back the White House. After all, why go through the unpleasant business of paying for things when you could skip all that and still get tax cuts that would last until almost the middle of the century?

Or, as Republicans call it, fiscal responsibility."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans say they might not cut taxes for the rich. Don’t believe them.