Trump's Big CON: He is the Jealous President

UPDATE:  "President Trump hasn't been able to repeal Obamacare, so he might be trying to destroy it instead. He can't seem to decide.

This would be even more spiteful than it sounds. That's because, in the short run, Trump's latest move would actually make the government spend more money to cover fewer people, not to mention everyone else he's done to sabotage individual insurance markets. The point of it all, as Trump can't help but explain 140 characters at a time like some attention-deficit Bond villain, is to force the Democrats to “call me to fix” the health-care system — and, as part of the deal, to get them to pay for the border wall that Mexico won't cover.

Yes, that really might be the plan. Trump is telling us that he's shooting the hostages he's taken — the health-care system — and hoping that people will blame Democrats for it.

Now, the Trump administration is actually taking a three-pronged approach to undermining Obamacare. The first is drastically cutting back on the government's outreach efforts. . .

The second is letting people once again buy bare-bones coverage that doesn't meet Obamacare's minimum standards. The problem with that is that only healthy people would buy those plans, which would eventually mean that those would be the only plans healthy people would buy. Why is that? Well, there would be what's known as a death spiral . . .

The third is pulling the plug on Obamacare's cost-sharing reduction payments, or CSRs."

Read the Washington Post, Trump can’t decide if he wants to sabotage Obamacare.

As noted before, "Legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn once said, 'Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.' Simply put, Trump is about as far from being a good carpenter as one can be in the world of politics."

The Donald is not very intelligent, he has no "ideological principles . . . [or] consistent beliefs", and  "is pushed in different directions by competing impulses, any one of which may dominate at a particular moment. It has become clear that there may be no desire that governs his actions more than his need to destroy and discredit everything Barack Obama did. We can debate why this is; my view is that Trump, who is obviously a deeply insecure man, looks at Obama and sees someone who is his superior in almost every way — smarter, more competent, more admired and respected — and is enraged by the inevitable comparisons. But the fact that Trump is driven to undo anything with Obama’s name on it is undeniable.

That goes a long way toward explaining why Trump is so eager to destroy the individual insurance market, at the cost of enormous anxiety and suffering among the public, when his advisers have surely explained to him that he will be held responsible for whatever happens to American health care on his watch. No matter how much it costs him politically, he wants to be able to say that Obamacare is dead, he killed it, and it was a terrible thing in the first place.

However, at the same time Trump is desperate to show that he can make a deal. The failure of the GOP effort to repeal the ACA plainly weighs on him. Despite his belief that he is the greatest dealmaker in human history, you may have noticed that he has negotiated precisely zero deals of any magnitude since becoming president. The Republican Congress has passed no major legislation this year. Trump’s increasingly desperate and comical insistence that he is piling up an awe-inspiring record of accomplishment — 'in nine months, we have done more, they say, than any president in history,' he said today — only highlights his eagerness to have something he can say he actually got done."

Read the Washington Post, Does Trump want to destroy our health-care system? He can’t seem to decide.

Trump's Big CON: Trump Has No Principles, CONt Part 3

"President Trump's most faithful supporters like to believe he's always a step ahead of the media and the political establishment — that he's playing three-dimensional chess while we're stuck on checkers. Where we see utter discord, they see carefully orchestrated chaos.

This week should disabuse absolutely everybody of that notion.

On two issues — health care and calling the families of dead service members — the White House has shown itself to be clearly unmoored, careening back and forth based upon the unhelpful and impulsive comments and tweets of its captain.

On the more substantial issue of health care, Trump apparently told Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to craft a deal to replace the Affordable Care Act subsidies for insurers covering low-income Americans. Trump then canceled the subsidies and explained that the money was only making insurers rich (it's not). Then he suggested he would support Alexander's deal. Then he apparently realized that those two things were completely inconsistent, and he backed off his support for the deal, leaving Alexander holding the bag and apparently (understandably) puzzled. . . 

On Gold Star families, Trump . .

    Brought this issue up of his own accord even when he hadn't called some of the very few (relative to his predecessors) new Gold Star families he's seen lose loved ones on his watch. While more than 2,500 service members were killed in action during Obama's tenure, only 20 have died in Trump's first nine months.

    Claimed “proof” that his own White House admits he doesn't have.

    Rehashed the death of his own chief of staff's son, suggesting Obama didn't call John F. Kelly when his son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Kelly hasn't commented.

    Put the White House in the position of disputing the accounts of Gold Star families.

If you think any of these things were planned, you are kidding yourself. . .

There is no game plan on any of this; it's Trump simply floating from one controversy to the next and making things worse by flying off the handle and saying untrue things. Trump's controversies are usually at least within the realm of plausible deniability; these examples just seem totally careless and haphazard."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump White House’s utterly unmoored week.

What do you expect from The President Without Principles.

Trump's Big CON: His Peculiar Combination of Malevolence, Overconfidence and Cluelessness

UPDATE:  "If you had hoped that President Trump’s incompetence would save us from his malevolence, here’s some bad news: Trump’s efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act out of pure rage and spite are likely to have a very big impact, harming large numbers of people. . .

And the rot of bad faith and sheer malevolence at the core of Trump’s claim that Obamacare is already 'gone' needs to be fully appreciated. Trump is not only rolling back the last administration’s efforts to reach the uninsured; he is telling America that a government program that is up and running and designed to help people get health coverage they can’t afford no longer exists. This, even as he and Republicans have already confirmed that they are incapable of producing a replacement, despite his promises otherwise.

Trump’s incompetence is a key reason why he and Republicans failed to pass an affirmative plan of their own for the many millions of people currently benefiting from the ACA. But that incompetence isn’t preventing his malevolence from destroying what is already there for them."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s incompetence will not save us from his malevolence.

"President Trump’s peculiar combination of malevolence, certainty in his own negotiating prowess, and cluelessness about the details of policy sometimes leads him to issue fearsome-sounding threats that are rooted in a baffling misread of the distribution of leverage and incentives underlying the situation at hand.

Case in point: The big news of the morning, which is that Trump will cut off paying the 'cost-sharing reductions' in his latest bid to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. Trump just tweeted that if Democrats don’t like this, they should negotiate with him to fix the law, in keeping with his previous suggestions that if he lets the law fail, they will feel pressure to do this:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

The Democrats ObamaCare is imploding. Massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!
4:36 AM - Oct 13, 2017

In reality, this move actually puts more pressure on congressional Republicans than on Democrats to agree to such a 'fix.' . .

House Republicans worry they could have a major political problem on their hands if these payments are stopped, because it could harm large numbers of people in their districts. As it is, millions are enrolled in plans with cost-sharing reductions, which pay money to insurers to subsidize out-of-pocket costs, and if they are halted, insurers could exit the markets, further destabilizing them and leaving millions without coverage options. Tellingly, influential House Republicans such as Reps. Tom Cole and Greg Walden have called for Congress to appropriate the payments. . .

By the way, when Trump says Obamacare is 'imploding,' which will allegedly pressure Dems, he’s lying: The exchanges were stabilizing, and many of their travails are largely attributable to his own multiple efforts to sabotage them. The public understands this: Large majorities say Trump and Republicans will own the ACA’s problems going forward and want them to make the law work. . .

In the end Trump and Republicans are the ones likely to feel more pressure to support such a deal, which will put them in the tough spot of choosing between taking the blame for chaos in the individual markets and weathering the rage from the right that accepting a deal will unleash. Even if Trump doesn’t understand this, congressional Republicans surely do."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s new sabotage of Obamacare actually points a gun at the heads of Republicans.

Trump's Big CON: He Laughs at His Supporters

UPDATE II:  "The only thing today’s Republican Party knows how to do is cut taxes for the very rich.

It’s depressing because the GOP has abandoned roles it once played in our public life: pioneering programs aimed at assisting Americans of modest means in lifting themselves up, and supporting productive government investments that the private sector was unlikely to undertake.

The party of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell has abandoned the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, who championed the Homestead Act and land-grant colleges; Teddy Roosevelt, who protected vast tracts of nature on behalf of future generations; and Dwight Eisenhower, who pushed for student loans and the Interstate Highway System.

The heirs to Honest Abe, TR and Ike seem to believe in only one thing: throwing vast quantities of money at the already wealthy. And they have the nerve to pretend that they aren’t really trying to further enrich the moneyed classes. They claim that comforting the comfortable will someday, really and truly, help working people by creating jobs and economic growth.

They pretend a lot of other things, too. They say their goal is to 'simplify' the tax system, so they reduce the number of individual income-tax brackets to three. Isn’t it funny that in their “simplification,” the tax rate for the richest among us (people earning more than $418,400 a year) would drop from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, but the tax rate for the poorest (those earning less than $9,325 a year) actually would go up , from 10 percent to 12 percent?

The GOP apparently believes that taxing the poor is part of the recipe for growth. Now there is an innovative idea. . .

For eight months, Republicans told us repeatedly that they would enact a tax bill. Yet they still can’t show us the whole thing.

In fact, for a large swath of the middle and upper-middle classes, this is not a tax cut at all, but a tax increase. Using the details available, the Tax Policy Center concluded that nearly a third of taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $150,000 would see their taxes go up, as would a majority of those making between $150,000 and $300,000.

There is much that is very bad here, but perhaps the most insidious aspect of the bill is the part that might be called the Punish Our Opponents Tax Act of 2017.

To pay for their tax cuts for the rich, Republicans propose to make the tax code 'fairer' by getting rid of the deduction that people can take for the taxes they pay to state and local governments. Republicans rail against “double taxation” of income when it comes to capital gains. But they have no problem with double taxation when it hurts taxpayers in states that ask their citizens to pay a bit more to provide decent public services and stronger social safety nets.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the states with the largest deductions for state and local taxes as a percentage of adjusted gross income are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California and Maryland. All voted against Trump. . .

Naturally, a tax proposal designed to pamper the super-rich does exactly that for a man named Donald Trump. The New York Times estimated his savings at about $1 billion. But his refusal to release his tax returns conveniently clouds how much he’ll get.":

Read the Washington Post,

UPDATE: "President Trump and congressional Republicans keep saying their tax plan doesn't help the rich. But that's not true. . .

In fact, in nine pages, The Washington Post counts at least nine ways the wealthy benefit, including Trump himself. Here's our list:

1) A straight-up tax cut for the rich. . .

2) The estate tax goes bye-bye. . .

3) Hedge funds and lawyers get a special tax break. . .

4) The AMT is over. . .

5) The wealthy get to keep deducting mortgage interest. . .

6) Stockholders are going to be very happy. . .

7) The favorite tax break of hedge fund billionaires is still safe. . .

8) Capital gains taxes stay low. . .

9) The Obamacare investment tax goes away. . .

When reporters asked Trump whether the tax plan would help him personally, he quickly said no. . .

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), who was part of the team that worked with the White House to craft the tax-overhaul outline, was asked a similar question on Fox News. He, too, said this plan does little to help the rich.

'I think those who benefit most are middle-class families struggling to keep every dollar they earn,' Brady told Fox News.

But one look at this plan tells a very different story. It gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.

Read the Washington Post, 9 ways Trump’s tax plan is a gift to the rich, including himself.

"The term 'deplorables' survives today in our political lexicon as a kind of sarcastic badge of honor that President Trump’s supporters pin on themselves. When self-applied by the likes of Stephen K. Bannon, it serves as a device to feed the narrative that liberal elite criticism of Trump — including the argument that he is scamming his own voters — signifies nothing but cultural contempt for Trump’s America. Trump supporters won’t let supercilious liberal disdain weaken their conviction that Trump is the one who is really on their side, dammit!

But a host of new developments underscore with fresh clarity that if anyone views Trump supporters with profound contempt, it’s Trump and his advisers — and that liberals are right to point out that he is actively trying to fleece them. Consider:

    Trump’s new tax plan eliminates the estate tax, which he has justified by claiming that it would help 'millions of small businesses and the American farmer.' That’s a paean to his small-business and rural base. But as the Post fact-checking team points out, this is absurd: Because only the very top estates get targeted, a mere 80 such estates that would get hit by the tax in 2017 count as small businesses and farms. However, Trump’s family would benefit bigly, because his estimated net worth is in the billions. . .

    Trump’s new tax plan eliminates the alternative minimum tax. As Linda Qiu explains, this 'largely impacts people making between $200,000 and $1 million. Without this tax, Mr. Trump would have paid $31 million less in taxes in 2005, according to his tax return that year, which was disclosed on the ‘Rachel Maddow Show’ in March.'

    The mere fact that Trump would benefit from his tax plan does not itself mean he is scamming his supporters. Rather, the key here is that Trump is lying to them about this point. Trump says this about his plan: 'It’s not good for me, believe me.' But not only would he benefit, Trump also still won’t release his tax returns, which would actually allow us to evaluate how his plan would affect him and his family. Trump doesn’t want his voters (or any voters) to be able to do this. Trump is simply assuming that his voters will believe him (or he doesn’t care whether they do or not), even though he’s lying to them.

    Trump claims his tax plan will not benefit 'the wealthy and well-connected' and will protect 'low-income and middle-income households.' But a new analysis by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities undercuts both claims. Trump’s plan would also lower the top marginal income tax rate from 39.6 to 35 percent, lower the rate on 'pass-through' businesses to 20 percent and cut the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent. The CBPP analysis concludes that 50 percent of the net tax cuts in his plan’s framework would go to the top 1 percent of earners and that the impact on middle-class families would negligible at best. . . Trump’s empty promise to his working- and middle-class supporters is being used to sell tax cuts that will likely shower large benefits on the wealthy — himself included.

    Trump is sabotaging Obamacare in new ways that will likely hurt untold numbers of his voters. . .

    The Trump administration’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act shows contempt for his supporters in another way. In its statement justifying the latest pullout from enrollment events, HHS did not even attempt to offer an actual policy rationale for the move — there is none — and instead lied robotically about how Obamacare 'continues to collapse.' But the Trump administration’s actions are encouraging chaos in that direction. . .

The point here is not that this should reflect badly on Trump supporters. They of course may disagree that all these things operate against their interests, or they may have plenty of other reasons to continue backing him anyway. Rather, the point is that the arguments that Trump and his administration are making to them on all these fronts are not being made in good faith, as if Trump believes his own supporters can be lied to or betrayed with great ease. Never mind whether they’re 'deplorables' — Trump himself is treating them like a bunch of suckers."

Read the Washington Post, Hey, deplorables: Trump and his advisers are laughing in your faces.

Read also Trump's Big CON: Happy Labor Day Suckers!

Trump's Big CON: Trapped by Lies

UPDATE II:  "The Republican Party has become an unstable and potentially unsustainable coalition. The danger has been apparent from the day President Trump began his quest for the White House. Roy Moore’s victory in the Alabama Republican primary provided the exclamation point.

Moore’s victory was telling for what it showed: that the Trump message has more power at the grass-roots than the president himself. Trump was persuaded to embrace Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP runoff against Moore. But it was the anti-Washington, anti-establishment message of the twice-removed state Supreme Court justice that prevailed Tuesday.

That this is a period of turmoil and flux in American politics states the obvious. Tribal voting has become the norm, with the country divided into red and blue camps. . .

Yet the red-blue alliances and the left-right differences are no longer sufficient to explain the tensions and divisions that mark the politics of the Trump era. They still shape political debates and policy differences; they still help predict general-election voting patterns. But alone, they do not provide the fuller framework for such an unusual time. Neither party is offering answers.

For establishment Republicans in Washington, Tuesday was perhaps the worst day among many bad days. It was a trifecta of disappointment and rejection. The failure of the party that controls so many levers of power to govern effectively and the consequences of that inaction rarely have been on such public display.

The day started with the Senate leadership’s capitulation on health care. . .

There then was the announcement by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that he plans to retire at the end of his term in 2018. . .

Finally, on Tuesday night, there was Moore’s victory, though it was hardly a surprise. . .

The larger challenge for Republicans is trying to find a way to govern in the midst of a civil war. The party establishment proved powerless in its efforts to deny Trump the GOP nomination last year, then assumed he could not be elected, then tried to make peace with the fact that he had won. GOP leaders nonetheless held out hope that Trump would be a somewhat malleable president, that he would follow their lead on policy and use the unique megaphone that he has developed to advance the cause.

But that assumption turned out to be incorrect for at least two reasons. First, that Trump’s agenda was their agenda, that he was as interested in party success as in personal success. Second, that the divisions that had immobilized congressional Republicans long before Trump became a candidate would somehow disappear if the party controlled the White House. They didn’t.

The GOP today is an awkward combination of establishment Republicans who have embraced the president out of what they consider necessity; grass-roots citizens only partially attached to the Republican Party and for whom Trump’s populist, 'America first,' anti-Washington rhetoric strikes a chord; and 'Never Trump' Republicans who formed an important part of the party before Trump came on the scene and who are looking for a home and don’t know what to do.

This is a conflict with no certain outcome and no clear timeline. It reflects instability across the political spectrum and the shifting sensibilities of many voters. Above all, it reflects politics in the age of Trump and all that has come to mean."

Read the Washington Post, Can the GOP ever finesse the contradictions in their coalition?

UPDATE:  "Two in three Americans believe that large corporations pay too little in taxes. Only 11 percent of U.S. adults think these businesses pay too much, while 17 percent think they pay their fair share. Even half of Republicans believe big businesses pay too little in taxes, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Overwhelmingly, across party lines, people feel that the current tax system is rigged in favor of the wealthy. Over 7 in 10 Americans think the tax system favors the rich. Just five percent think the current code favors the middle class.

But the more details that leak out about President Trump’s plan, the clearer it becomes that the wealthiest are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries. Top White House negotiators and key GOP leaders have reportedly agreed on two targets: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and cutting the top income tax rate — for those who make more than $418,000 a year — from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. . .

This is part of a pattern: Trump campaigns like a populist. He governs like a plutocrat. The dichotomy between what the president promises his tax plan will do and what’s he’s likely to unveil on Wednesday is just the latest example of the president’s actions not backing up his rhetoric.

As a candidate, Trump said hedge fund managers weren’t supporting his campaign because they were 'getting away with murder' when it came to avoiding taxes. He said he would stop them and argued during the debates that he was well suited to close loopholes in the tax code because he had taken advantage of them.

Then, as president-elect, he was caught on a cellphone camera reassuring patrons at one of Manhattan’s poshest restaurants. 'We’ll get your taxes down, don’t worry about it,' he said at the 21 Club.

With the Trump administration, always watch what they do — not what they say. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s plutocracy problem complicates push for tax cuts. 

Republi-CONs "have spent years routinely lying for the sake of political advantage. And now — not just on health care, but across the board — they are trapped by their own lies, forced into trying to enact policies they know won’t work.

Reporting on why the G.O.P. plowed ahead with Graham-Cassidy makes it clear that many Republicans supporting it are well aware that it’s a bad bill, although they may not appreciate just how bad. 'You know, I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered,' said Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. 'But,' he continued, 'Republicans have campaigned on this,' meaning repeal-and-replace, and had to fulfill their promise. . .

But repealing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the only thing Republicans promised; they also promised to replace it with something better and cheaper, doing away with all the things people don’t like about Obamacare without creating any new problems. Remember, it was Bill Cassidy, not Jimmy Kimmel, who came up with the 'Jimmy Kimmel test,' the pledge that nobody would be denied health care because of expense.

Yet Republicans never had any idea how to fulfill that promise and meet that test, or indeed how to repeal the A.C.A. without taking insurance away from tens of millions. That is, they were lying about health care all along. . .

The thing is, health care isn’t the only issue on which lies are coming back to bite the liars. The same story is playing out on other issues — in fact, on almost every substantive policy issue the U.S. faces. [including tax 'reform' and foreign affairs]. . .

As with health care, the party has masked its lack of good ideas on [tax reform] with lies, claiming that it would offset lower tax rates and even reduce the deficit by eliminating unnamed loopholes and slashing unnamed wasteful spending. But as with health care, these lies will be revealed once actual legislation is unveiled. It’s telling that Republicans are already invoking voodoo economics to justify their as-yet-unspecified tax plans, insisting that tax cuts will pay for themselves by leading to higher economic growth.

At this point, however, few people believe them. The Bush tax cuts didn’t create a boom; neither did the Kansas tax-cut 'experiment.' Conversely, the U.S. economy did fine after the 2013 Obama tax hike, as has the California economy since Jerry Brown raised state taxes. Party apparatchiks will no doubt engage in an orgy of Reaganolatry, but the broader public probably won’t be moved by (false) claims about the wondrous results of tax cuts 36 years ago.

So tax policy, like health care, will be hobbled by a legacy of lies.

Wait, there’s more.

Foreign policy isn’t usually a central concern for voters. Still, past lies have put the Trump administration in a box over things like the Iran nuclear deal: Canceling the deal would create huge problems, yet not canceling it would amount to an admission that the criticisms were dishonest.

And soon the G.O.P. may even start to pay a price for lying about climate change.

The bottom line is that the bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern."

Read The New York Times, Trapped by Their Own Lies.

Trump's Big CON: Obamacare Was the Republi-CON Health Care Plan

"[F]or seven years, Republicans have attacked Obamacare with the same solemnity and frequency that they typically reserve for praising Ronald Reagan. They held symbolic votes against it. Then they held some more. They challenged it in court. Then they did it again over a typo. They shut the government down over it. And, now that he's in office, Trump has even threatened to withhold some of the law's subsidies in a not-so-veiled attempt to make the whole thing “implode.”

Throughout it all, though, Republicans haven't been able to agree on what they want to do, only what they don't. Which, of course, is anything like Obamacare's alleged 'big government takeover' of health care. The only problem with that is that Obamacare is not, in fact, a big government takeover. The opposite, actually. It's just about the most market-friendly way to cover poor and sick people. Indeed, the conservative Heritage Foundation supported something a lot like it back in 1989. As did former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1993. And former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2006. So by vilifying their old plan as unconstitutional socialism, Republicans haven't left themselves a lot of leeway to come up with a new one. . .

Republicans, then, haven't been able to come up with a conservative alternative to Obamacare, because Obamacare is the conservative alternative. And they won't be able to unless they're willing to make the case that the government shouldn't help the poor and sick get covered — or just lie about their plan. In the meantime, though, you can bet that they think they're getting closer and closer.

Republican health-care policy is like tomorrow. It's always a day away." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, Trump is clueless about health care. Republicans are worse.

It can be said enough: Obamacare Was the Republi-CON Health Care Plan.

Trump's Big CON: His Supporters Love the CON, CONt. (AKA Broken Campaign Promises, Health Care Edition)

UPDATE:  "A large segment of Republican voters should try turning off Fox News and allowing reality to permeate the shell they’ve constructed to keep out ideas that interfere with their prejudices and abject ignorance. Unfair? Take a look at the latest poll to suggest that Trump voters like their cult hero feel compelled to label inconvenient facts “fake news.' .  .

[As reported on Morning Consult:] . .

Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American, said in an email Tuesday that Trump has 'perfected the technique of the Big Lie' — which, as he wrote in an op-ed last fall, is to 'repeat a lie loudly, over and over until people come to believe it.'

'These results show that again that like ‘Birtherism,’ which launched Trump’s political career, the Big Lie continues to work, at least among those who want to believe it,' noted Lichtman, a professor who won professional acclaim last year after correctly predicting Trump’s victory. . .

I’m sure all this makes the Trump staff and surrogates laugh uproariously as they admire their handiwork in bamboozling the angry mob. But they and the network of right-wing enablers have done real damage to our society and politics, making differences impossible to bridge and reasoned debate nearly impossible. . .

And here’s where the executives at Fox News, the 'serious' conservative media, elected GOP officials and even self-identified conservative pundits need to be held to account. They know much of the rubric of the Trump cult is absolutely false, yet they repeat, propagate or just tolerate it. It’s a game in which the only rule is to beat 'liberal elites' or run a successful money-making operation where gullible donors can be fleeced with an appeal to stop perceived enemies (i.e., those who won’t drink the Kool-Aid).

Democracy presupposes a minimally informed, responsible adult electorate. Right now it is clear the GOP is dominated by fact-deniers and willfully ignorant folk. Whether they got that way because sleazy politicians conned them and Fox News lulled them into a stupor or whether spineless pols are simply filling a niche remains a matter of debate. But here’s the thing: The rest of the country should empathize with their economic plight and sense of alienation, but that does not mean we should coddle them in their ignorance nor defer to judgments based on fabrication. They feel 'disrespected' when fellow Americans point to reality? Trumpkins think elites are condescending when they call them 'low information' voters? (It should be non-information voters.) Sorry, economic hardship does not bestow moral authority to lie, invent facts, smear opponents, blame foreigners or support lawlessness. And for elected Republicans to defer to the ignorant, beguiled voters is an abdication of their role and oaths.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) bellowed at his colleagues to 'stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet.' Here’s a better idea: Stop deferring to a horde of know-nothings."

Read the Washington Post, The frightful state of the GOP.

"As Republicans struggle to figure out which spectacularly unpopular, viciously cruel, and perfunctorily considered version of their health care bill they want to become law, one former member of the House leadership has come out with an extraordinary admission about what a scam the whole project is. In an interview with Elaina Plott of Washingtonian magazine, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who was defeated in a primary in 2014 by a Tea Party extremist, explains that Republicans knew they were lying to their base about their ability to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they just couldn’t help themselves . . .

What’s truly remarkable isn’t that a bunch of cynical politicians thought they could ride their base voters’ anger into control of Congress by lying to them about what they could actually accomplish, it’s that their voters actually believed it. And then those voters got even angrier when it turned out that the president had the ability to veto bills passed by a Congress controlled by the other party. Who knew! So instead of looking for a presidential candidate who would treat them like adults, they elected Donald Trump, a man who would pander to their gullibility even more.

Which brings us to where we are today. Republicans couldn’t be bothered for seven years to actually think about what repealing and replacing the ACA might involve, or whether there would be tradeoffs and choices to make, or whether setting up a system that accorded with their conservative philosophy might not actually solve the problems of the health care system. They thought it would be enough to tell their voters to get mad, and worry later about what it would take to keep the promises they made.

So now they find themselves with a bill that nearly everyone hates. If it passes (in whatever form), it will be a disaster for the health care system, and will be a political disaster for them as well. But they’ve convinced themselves that the only thing worse politically would be to not pass anything, because that would incur the wrath of those same base voters. In other words, their current position is, “We know how catastrophic this bill would be. But we got here by lying to these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers for years, and if we don’t follow through, they’ll punish us.” They believe that their voters will say, 'Okay, so I lost my health coverage because of you, but you’ll get my vote again because you kept your promise.' . .

That was just one of the many lies they were told, and they ate it up. Now we’ll all have to pay the price."

Read the Washington Post, Trump and Republicans treat their voters like morons.

Read also Trump's Big CON: His Supporters Love the CON.

Trump's Big CON: He Is Clueless, Health Care Edition

UPDATE: "It’s fitting that President Trump reacted to the epic collapse of the GOP repeal-and-replace push by vowing to keep up his campaign to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. 'Let Obamacare implode, then deal,' Trump tweeted, meaning the administration should continue undermining the law, to force Democrats to the table to…well, it’s not clear what he wants from them, but it is clear is that he will continue sabotaging the ACA out of sheer rage and spite.

For Trump, this has never been about improving our health care system. Trump, who visibly had no idea how the ACA works or what was in the various GOP replacements, and who openly said he would sign whatever Republicans put in front of him, just wanted to boast of a 'win' while triumphantly using Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement as his own personal toilet paper roll.

Trump has not yet secured that opportunity for himself. The 'skinny repeal' bill failed . . .

Republicans spent years voting to repeal the law, secure in the knowledge that Obama would veto those attempts and spare them from owning the consequences."

Read the Washington Post, Now that Trumpcare has failed, it’s time to drop all the lies.

Why do you never hear The Donald try to explain his positions or policies?

Because he is incredibly ignorant.

Read the Washington Post, What was Trump talking about with $12-a-year health insurance?

Trump's Big CON: The TrumpDon'tCare (© NoBullU.com) Health Care Vote

UPDATE: "Republicans’ desperation to pass something, anything, that they can call “Obamacare repeal” and their total lack of concern for the health-care insurance that millions of Americans depend upon have never been more vivid. All Republicans but Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) voted to advance a bill — some kind of bill — that, from what we have seen, would dump millions off the Medicaid rolls, raise insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs for many of President Trump’s voters and return millions in tax cuts to the rich. But we don’t know, and neither does any senator know, where this is going or what consequences might flow. . .

In sum, the consolation for a meltdown in legislative order, rationality and responsible government is that we now know just how incapable the GOP is of governing. Years of antagonism toward government have made them cavalier about the harm they can do to ordinary citizens in their quest to avoid blame. What a shabby group they are. Let’s hope they don’t do real damage before they lose their majority."

Read the Washington Post, A defensive vote on an offensive bill.

"We are hurtling toward a health-care disaster in the next 36 hours or so, for the worst possible reason. Cynicism is seldom completely absent from the operation of politics, but this is truly a unique situation. Republicans are set to remake one-sixth of the American economy, threaten the economic and health security of every one of us and deprive tens of millions of people of health-care coverage, all with a bill they haven’t seen, couldn’t explain and don’t even bother to defend on its merits.

Why? Because they made a promise to their base and now they say they have to keep it — regardless of what form keeping the promise might take and how much misery it might cause.

Tomorrow, the Senate is set to vote on a Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. . .

I’ve often argued that Republicans in Congress aren’t serious about policy, but this is taking their unseriousness to the level of farce. After complaining for years that the ACA was 'rammed through' Congress — in a process that involved a full year of debate, dozens of hearings in both houses and 188 Republican amendments to the bill debated and accepted — they’re going to vote on a sweeping bill that had zero hearings and that they saw only hours before, because who cares what’s in it? It’s only the fate of the country at stake. If taking away health-care coverage from 20 million or 30 million Americans is what it takes to stave off a primary challenge from some nutball tea partier, then that’s what they’ll do.

No one would argue that keeping promises isn’t important. But Republicans have elevated the idea of keeping their promise to repeal the ACA to the point where it’s drained of all substance. You can see it in the way they talk about the various iterations of their bill. You seldom hear a Republican defend it on the terms of the bill itself. They don’t say, 'Here’s how this bill will bring down deductibles' or 'Here’s how the bill will take care of those who lose their insurance' or 'Here’s how the bill will lower costs.' That’s partly because their bills won’t do any of those things, but mostly because they just don’t care.

Instead, what they say is, 'We made a promise, and we’re going to keep it.' If Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) handed them a bill saying that all children on Medicaid would be taken to the desert, buried up to their necks in the sand, and covered in fire ants, at least 40 of them would say, 'It may not be perfect, but we have to keep the promise we made to repeal Obamacare, so I’m voting yes.'"

Read the Washington Post, Senate Republicans take cynicism to a horrifying new level.

Trump's Big CON: Ha Ha Ha, the Repeal Obamacare Joke's On You , CONt.

"The whole thing was a scam all along — Republicans promised to repeal the ACA and replace it with something that did all the good things in it (the coverage expansion; the consumer protections) without the bad (the taxes; the mandates), but they never had any way of doing anything like that."

Read the Washington Post, Raging over the health bill’s failure, Trump will soon make an even crueler move.

And read Politico, Trump blindsided by implosion of GOP health care bill, which noted that:

"To Trump, the Obamacare fight has always been about scoring a win. He doesn’t care nearly as much about the specifics . .

He [even] praised the conservative version of the law passed through the House in a Rose Garden fête before trashing it as 'mean' in a meeting with moderate senators."

Read also Trump's Big CON: Ha Ha Ha, the Repeal Obamacare Joke's On You.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show (The Trump Family Show)

UPDATE VIII: It's all about building the family brand, and dynasty.

"Though Trump's oldest daughter has repeatedly said she tries to steer clear of politics, she found herself thrust into a political maelstrom Saturday when she briefly filled in for her father at a table of world leaders when he left the room for other meetings.

A grainy photo of Ivanka, taken by a member of Russia's delegation, showed the president's daughter seated between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a massive table during a G-20 working session on 'Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump defends his daughter Ivanka’s breach of diplomatic protocol.

As stated below: To the con man, it not whether it is actually true, or good, or works, it is the show that is most important, style and form over substance.

The essence of Trump is the show.

So why does Ivanka have an office in the White House, or take her Dad's seat at a table during a G-20 working session of world leaders?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good in the Trump family show.

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

UPDATE VII:  And what's wrong with keeping it all in the family?

Nepotism "is, in fact, 'a beautiful thing.' . .

But calling nepotism “a beautiful thing” and saying it's actually beneficial is really testing the bounds of what's been politically and socially acceptable."

Read the Washington Post, The Trumps’ war for nepotism.

UPDATE VI:  Trump is like his many voter, a man of pictures, not words.

"The man is a TV viewer, not known to be interested in books. "

Read the Washington Post, The president of visuals.

UPDATE V:  "Why don’t we just stitch him a red cape, put him in spandex, affix a stylized “S” to his chest and be done with it?

SuperJared has taken flight.

He’s President Trump’s point man with the Chinese, having finalized the details of the big meeting at Mar-a-Loco later this week. . .

Kushner’s to-do list, not Tillerson’s, contains the small, pesky item of brokering a durable truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Trump said to the 36-year-old real estate scion, who has absolutely no background in diplomacy, from the stage of an inaugural party.

The precise strategy is under wraps. . .

Mere details! Just leave things to Kushner. He’ll figure it out in those down moments when he’s not supervising the brand new Office of American Innovation, whose modest ambition is a full-scale reorganization of the federal government that makes it more efficient.

But Kushner’s many mandates aren’t a laughing matter. They’re a reflection of some of Trump’s most unsettling traits as president, and Kushner is a symbol of his delusions.

Trump’s overreliance on Kushner illustrates the extraordinary premium he places on loyalty. Kushner’s status as a visionary is entirely disputable: His real-estate company was a birthright, not a start-up, and as an article by Charles Bagli in The Times this week demonstrated, one of Kushner’s key acquisitions, the skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, turned into an albatross. . .

The president seems to see certain people as exempt from the laws of gravity, and he has accorded Kushner a place snug beside him in that pantheon. He keeps telling us that he can predict the future, and he keeps telling himself that Kushner can juggle more than even the most seasoned, brilliant White House aides of yesteryear pulled off. Kushner doesn’t seem to be quibbling.

I’m told by insiders that when Trump’s long-shot campaign led to victory, he and Kushner became convinced not only that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about America, but that they’d tapped into something that everybody was missing about the two of them.

Kushner was reborn with new powers, and to the heavens he ascended.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

It’s ridiculous."

Read The New York Times, Jared Kushner, Man of Steel. 

UPDATE IV: "Kushner hadn’t served a day on a school board before Trump put him in charge of, you know, America. Near as I can tell, his sole achievement in his young life — much like his wife’s — is to have spent his parents’ money on cool stuff, like some buildings and a once trendy newspaper you’ve never read. . .

I’d be willing to give Jared and Ivanka the benefit of the doubt — even absent any obvious humility or aptitude for their jobs — if they were willing to entirely divest themselves from competing interests, as Cabinet secretaries do. They won’t, because it’s not their way to sacrifice for any greater good, and because they have an evident disdain for those who devote their lives to bettering the country.

To the Trump-Kushner axis, those people are just suckers who don’t have what it takes to get rich, or at least to be born that way.

The privileges they inherited are theirs to keep while they meddle around with policies that affect the rest of us. The honor, I guess, is all ours.

Read Yahoo, Jared and Ivanka ask what their country can do for them.

UPDATE III:  Trump is creating a dynastic, insular White House.

There is his daughter, who is now an 'official' employee.

Read the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump to become official White House employee.

As noted below, why is Ivanka  an 'official' employee in the White House?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good.

Now his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was given a 'new office and several vanity projects, mant that exist' "primarily to put Kushner in the same room with people he admires whom he wouldn’t have had access to before, glossing government agencies in the process with a thin veneer of what appears to be capitalism but is really just nihilistic cost-cutting designed to project the optics of efficiency. If the outside experts have good advice, it will be heeded only where it reinforces what the administration would do anyway. And anyone who volunteers to carry out the administration’s agenda may be handed wholesale control of an area of government where their domain expertise isn’t just low, but nonexistent."

Read the Washington Post, I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

Read also the Washington Post, How President Trump could use the White House to enrich himself and his family and Jared Kushner’s White House job may be legal. But history shows it’s a bad idea.

UPDATE II:  "Even if Trump 'wins' and the bill passes, this whole process has been an utter disaster from start to finish. The media analysis is already being framed in a way that will obscure this from view. And Trump himself is determined not to learn the right lessons from the whole mess — no matter what happens."

Read the Washington Post, Even if Trump ‘wins,’ this health-care mess has been a horrendous disaster.

UPDATE:  You must read this great anlysis about Trump winning the election and now having to fulfill his promise to save us from Obamacare.

Read the Washington Post, Trumpcare: How we got from ‘wonderful’ to widely panned, which in part notes;

"After Thursday’s embarrassing failure to round up enough votes for passage of the GOP-sponsored American Health Care Act, the White House insists the House vote on a bill that:

    Knocks 24 million people off coverage
    Increases the costs for many older, rural voters
    Removes requirements to include 10 basic items (e.g. pediatric care)
    Cuts Medicaid by $880 billion
    Is silent on selling insurance across state lines

How did this happen? How did the populist president who appealed to 'the forgotten' men and women wind up with a bill that’s so harmful to his base, something that is aimed at cutting and de-federalizing Medicaid and giving huge tax cuts to the rich?

One is tempted to say Trump never intended to make good on his promises. Perhaps he always planned on betraying his base and was interested only in big tax cuts for the rich. The man who conned customers into buying inferior products (a 'university' education, vodka, steaks) may simply have said whatever he thought people wanted to hear — with no intention of following through.

There is, however, a more nuanced explanation. Trump, he admits, never thought he would win the presidency. He never cared for nor developed detailed policies, because he saw the race as a giant media show in which substance was irrelevant. He never dreamed he would actually have to figure out what 'terrific' insurance looked like. He was candid when he said recently that “nobody [i.e. Trump] knew health care could be so complicated.” He really had no idea what he was doing."

Let me repeat that most important point; "He really had no idea what he was doing."

Trump is the dog who caught his tail, now what!

To the con man, it not whether it is actually true, or good, or works, it is the show that is most important, style and form over substance.

The essence of Trump is the show.

So why does Ivanka have an office in the White House?  Not because of her qualifications, because she looks good.

Don't believe me, watch as she poses in the video from the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump’s West Wing job isn’t just unethical. It’s also dangerous.:



I especially like her thinking man pose at 0:58 seconds in the video.

The Donald also knows how to put on a show, see him "behind the wheel of a truck at the White House on Thursday, as he met with truckers during a health-care event":



The truck has to do with health care, but it big and powerful, an image that the Donald love to cultivate.

So is the GOP health care plan good or bad, does it work and do what Trump, promised?

No, but Trump doesn't care, The Donald wants a "win".

Read The New York Times, Trump the Dealmaker Projects Bravado, but Behind the Scenes, Faces Rare Self-Doubt, which notes that:

"A president who prefers unilateral executive action and takes intense pride in his ability to cut deals finds himself in a humbling negotiation unlike any other in his career, pinned between moderates who believe the health care measure is too harsh, and a larger group of fiscal conservatives adept at using their leverage to scuttle big deals cut by other Republican leaders. . .

Crashing on the shoals of Congress marks Mr. Trump’s first true encounter with legislative realities and the realization that a president’s power is less limitless than it appears, particularly in the face of an intransigent voting bloc. Mr. Trump is not used to a hard no — but that was the word of the week. . .

If Mr. Trump has any advantage in the negotiations, it is his ideological flexibility: He is more interested in a win, or avoiding a loss, than any of the arcane policy specifics of the complicated measure, according to a dozen aides and allies interviewed over the past week who described his mood as impatient and jittery. Already, he has shown that flexibility by going back on campaign promises that no one would lose coverage when the Affordable Care Act was replaced and he would not cut Medicaid."

Read also the Washington Post, Trump’s health care ultimatum is straight out of ‘The Art of the Deal.’ It just might work.

Read also Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Threatre.

Trump's Big CON: As the 'Repeal and Replace Fraud Shows, Life Is Not All Dessert, No Vegetables

UPDATE:  "With the Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act now set to enter its final, frenzied push, the Indianopolis Star reports that the Indiana GOP attempted a stunt that was supposed to provide Republicans with more ammunition against the law. But the stunt went awry:

    The Indiana Republican Party posed a question to Facebook on Monday: 'What’s your Obamacare horror story? Let us know.'

    The responses were unexpected.

    'My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes.'

    'My father’s small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama'

    'Love Obamacare!'

    'The only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away.'…

    By 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Indiana GOP’s post collected more than 1,500 comments, the vast majority in support of Obamacare. . .

[W]hile the rate of pro-ACA postings should obviously not be taken as a scientific indicator of public opinion, this episode also neatly captures another larger truth about why it is proving so hard for Republicans to repeal the law: It has helped untold numbers of people, and the GOP bill would largely reverse that.

This is admittedly a simple and obvious point, yet the extraordinary lengths to which Republicans are going to obscure this basic reality continue to elude sufficient recognition. If you think about it, pretty much every major lie that President Trump and Republicans are telling right now to get their repeal-and-replace bill passed is designed to cover it up."

Read the Washington Post, A GOP stunt backfires, and accidentally reveals a truth Republicans want hidden.

"'Cutting taxes' is a perpetually appealing prospect for voters, but taking away the things those taxes pay for is far more fraught. And as Republicans consider whether their health-care bill puts their anti-tax philosophy into practice, the route they take will say a lot about who’s really in control of their party. . .

It’s an [situation for the] party that used Obamacare repeal as its unifying standard for years, but there's a gap between campaigning and governance. 'Getting government out of people’s lives' is a popular piece of rhetoric, but “getting government benefits out of people’s hands” is far harder."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans face a moment of truth on taxes.

Trump's Big CON: His Win Will Make You Sick

UPDATE II:  "The basics of Republican health legislation, which haven’t changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.

Donald Trump may not get this — reporting by The Times and others, combined with his own tweets, suggests that he has no idea what’s in his party’s legislation. But everyone in Congress understands what it’s all about.

The puzzle — and it is a puzzle, even for those who have long since concluded that something is terribly wrong with the modern G.O.P. — is why the party is pushing this harsh, morally indefensible agenda.

Think about it. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if you’re older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And since Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation effectively targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves living this nightmare.

Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms, but because the rich are already so rich, the savings would make very little difference to their lives. . .

Why would anyone want to do this? . .

[O]ne way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.

Yet that’s surely not the whole story, because Obamacare isn’t the only social insurance program that does great good yet faces incessant right-wing attack. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits all get the same treatment. Why?

As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.

Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern G.O.P. basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.

Or to put it another way, Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe.

In this sense there’s nothing new about their health plan. What it does — punish the poor and working class, cut taxes on the rich — is what every major G.O.P. policy proposal does. The only difference is that this time it’s all out in the open."

Read The New York Times, Understanding Republican Cruelty.

UPDATE:  The Donald just wants another party in the Rose Garden.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s latest idea: Senate could repeal Obamacare now and replace it later.

Who cares if people get sick and die, it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

"President Trump has said his health-care plan will be 'something terrific' that will 'lower premiums and deductibles' and have 'insurance for everybody' without cutting Medicaid.

Senate Republicans, though, apparently didn't get the memo, given that that their health-care bill would break every one of these promises — not that Trump seems to have noticed. 

The big picture is that the Senate plan would, over the next decade, cut nearly $1.2 trillion of health- care spending for the poor and middle class to pay for $700 billion in tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The slightly more detailed one being that $408 billion of these cuts would come out of the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies and $772 billion out of Medicaid. In any case, though, the unsurprising result is that spending $1.2 trillion less on health insurance for people would, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, lead to 22 million fewer people having it in 10 years' time.

But even the people who managed to keep their coverage would in a lot of cases end up paying more to get less of it. . .

Trump, though, seems blissfully unaware of all this. He reportedly didn't realize that this plan would be a big tax cut for the rich when a moderate Republican senator worried about getting attacked for it. And he still doesn't seem to grasp that it would be a massive cut to Medicaid. When he was asked about that on Wednesday, all he had to say was that it would be "great for everybody”— something the 15 million people the CBO says would lose their coverage as a result of these cuts would probably disagree with. Instead, he has insisted that these $772 billion in cuts aren't cuts at all. That taking money out of a future budget isn't really taking it out as long as the budget is still getting bigger. That Medicaid will still grow, just by 36 percent less than it would have. It's not a very convincing argument.

At some point, Trump may realize that he is endorsing a health-care plan that may be even harsher than the House one he said was "mean.” But he may not care. Even though this bill wouldn't keep any of his promises, it would give him an excuse to hold another victory party in the Rose Garden. Which may be enough for him.

Trump is going to win so much, you'll get sick from it.

Read the Washington Post, Trump loves the Senate health-care plan. It would break all of his promises.

But who cares, it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition,

Trump's Big CON: "Making Ignorance Great Again",

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition, Cont., and

Trump's Big CON: It's Not a Health Care Plan, It's a 'Yuge' Tax Cut for the Wealthy.

Trump's Big CON: It's Not a Health Care Plan, It's a 'Yuge' Tax Cut for the Wealthy

UPDATE III:  "[S]urprised the GOP crashed and burned."

You should be.

Read the Washington Post, 20 reasons the GOP crashed and burned on health care, which lists as one of the reasons: "You cannot pass major legislation with a policy-illiterate president who cannot explain what’s in it and therefore cannot persuade voters and lawmakers of its merits."

UPDATE II:  Read also the Washington Post, ‘Repeal and replace’ was once a unifier for the GOP. Now it’s an albatross.

And next election, after millions have lost their health care, remember the many lies Trump and the Republi-CONs made about health care before, during and since the election, then Trump complained that: "nobody knew that health care could be so complicated".

UPDATE:  "The Senate's health-care bill might be too much for even Marie Antoinette.

After all, about the only way it could be more regressive is if it took the cake a certain French queen wanted the poor to eat for dinner and gave it to the rich for dessert. Or, say, cut Medicaid and middle-class health insurance subsidies so much that 22 million fewer people have health insurance -- all so that the government could afford to cut the capital gains tax for households making $250,000 or more.

Oh, wait. That last one is actually what the Senate bill would do. . .

It's really pretty simple. The Senate bill would, over the course of the next decade, cut Obamacare's health insurance subsidies by $408 billion and Medicaid by $772 billion all to pay for $700 billion of tax cuts, nearly half of which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says would go to the top 1 percent of households. Not only that, but the fact that it would only peg the value of its remaining subsidies to higher-deductible plans means that a lot of people would be pushed into them. They couldn't afford anything else. On an apples-to-apples basis, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the Senate bill would increase the cost of a "silver" plan that covers 70 percent of expected medical costs by an average of 74 percent over the next three years—and more for the type of older, poorer people who overwhelmingly went for Trump.

Although it's actually even worse than that. A 64 year-old making $26,500 would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, see their premiums for a silver plan go from $1,700 under Obamacare to $6,500 under the Senate bill—but it'd be for a silver plan that covered 17 percent fewer of their expected medical expenses. So they'd be paying more to get less. How much more? Well, the Kaiser Family Foundation calculates that, in the case of our hypothetical 64 year-old, their deductible would go from $809 to $6,105. And it'd be an even bigger jump for people a little bit lower on the income ladder. Someone making just $18,090 would see their deductibles increase from $255 to the same $6,105. The Senate bill, then, would leave a lot of people with a choice between plans they couldn't afford to buy and couldn't afford to use.

Or, as the Republicans would call it, freedom! And if you lived in a red state, you would probably get more of it. That's because the Senate bill would let them opt out of so-called "essential health benefits" like mental health, maternity care, and prescription drugs—and in the process, the Brookings Institution's Matthew Fiedler points out, bring back annual and lifetime limits on benefits. The result would be a system where healthy people would mostly buy cheaper plans that didn't cover much, and mostly sick people would buy ones that did, you know, cover things—which would only make those more comprehensive plans so expensive that hardly anybody would be able to buy them at all. People would be forced to buy skimpy insurance that might not even insure you if you use too much of it."

This isn't a health-care plan that helps you if you need health-care. Not when it would give you higher premiums, higher deductibles, and worse coverage. No, this is a health-care plan that only helps you if you're wealthy and have a lot of investment income.

Read the Washington Post, The Senate health care bill is proof: Trumpism isn’t populism.

Trump voters are real suckers, aren't they.

"That's clear enough from how little thought it puts into actually stabilizing insurance markets versus how much it does into showering the rich with as much money as possible. Indeed, it would go so far as to retroactively cut the capital gains tax — something, remember, that's supposed to be about incentivizing future investment — in an apparent bid to get people to create jobs six months ago. The way it would slash Medicaid to pay for this tax-cutting largesse, though, is even more important. It would be more than just a transfer of wealth from the poor and sick to the rich and healthy. It would be a transfer of financial risk from the government to individuals.

This isn't about keeping taxes low for our time. This is about keeping taxes low for all time. . .

So if you think the problem with Obamacare is that deductibles aren't high enough, markets aren't wobbly enough, and sick people aren't on their own enough, well, the Senate bill is for you. . .

It's an inspiring piece of legislation for everyone who thought Robin Hood was picking on the wrong people."

Read the Washington Post, The real reason Republicans want to pass this Obamacare bill so much.

Trump's Big CON: Don't Ask About the Republi-CON Health Care Plan, Or You'll Be Needing Health Care

UPDATE III:  Read also the Washington Post:

Republicans’ Obamacare repeal would be one of the biggest cuts to the social safety net in history, and

The Republicans’ Obamacare repeal is one big lie.

UPDATE II:  Read the Washington Post, Here comes the Senate GOP’s health bill. It’s a cruel and cynical shell game., which explains that "[i]t's all about cutting health spending on poor people, and cutting taxes on rich people."

UPDATE:  "Here's what we know right now about the health-care plan Senate Republicans are working on: They want to pass it next week.

That's just about it, and all we can say for sure. While there have been some leaks and rumors about what might be in it, that's all they are. There haven't been any hearings or legislative text for anyone to analyze. It's been a backroom process that, whether there's any cigar smoke or not, has been more secretive, according to the Senate's historian emeritus, than any other in the past 100 years.

If you think this is a good way to restructure 18 percent of the American economy, well, then you must be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the exclusive group of Republicans he's letting in on the project — because it's hard to see how anyone else could. There's been no input from anyone who has anything to do with any part of the health-care system. Why, it's almost as if Republicans weren't acting in good faith when they complained that Obamacare, which actually did go through months of hearings and amendments, had, as the Senate's now-No. 2 Republican John Cornyn put it at the time, happened “behind closed doors with secret [health-care] negotiations.”

Despite this lack of transparency, there are still a few things we can guess about. Whatever else it does, it seems like a good bet that the Senate GOP's bill will have the same basic structure as the House GOP's: a trillion-dollar tax cut for wealthy investors that's paid for by slashing Medicaid for the poor  and Obamacare subsidies for the middle class. . .

You just can't cut taxes the way Republicans want and have 'insurance for everybody' like Trump promised. Heck, you can't even have cheaper insurance. On an apples-to-apples basis, the House Republican plan, at least, would probably increase premiums and deductibles, according to the center-left Brookings Institution and the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. To the extent that people would pay less, it would only be because they were getting less and people who needed more had been priced out of the market. None of this is going to change in the Senate version unless the GOP changes its commitment to cutting taxes for the rich.

So I guess that makes it two things we know about the Senate GOP's health-care plan: they want to pass it next week, and it will be something Trump thinks is mean.

Read the Washington Post, The simple reason the Senate has been keeping its health-care plan a secret.

Read also the Washington Post, Republicans who decried Obamacare secrecy now writing legislation in secret, which states:

"Hypocrisy has always been a vital lubricant to making the gears turn in Washington. Give politicians some power and a job to get done, and they quickly forget their righteous critiques of the seamy practices they denounced when the other side was running things.

Rarely, however, has the double standard been so flagrant as now, when Republicans are scrambling to keep their promise to 'repeal and replace Obamacare.'" 

Speaking of bullies:

"The GOP candidate in the Montana special House election was charged with misdemeanor assault late Wednesday night, after allegedly body-slamming Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the Guardian. The candidate, Greg Gianforte, grew incensed after being asked an impertinent question about whether he supports the GOP’s brutalization of our health-care system — and rather than answer, he allegedly brutalized the reporter. . .

In a sense, Gianforte was employing a version of the evasion that many Republicans have performed on Obamacare for years. They have consistently said that of course they want to repeal the disastrous Affordable Care Act, but don’t worry, they will replace it with something that offers all the good stuff in it (the protections for consumers and people with preexisting conditions, the expansion of coverage to the poor) without any of the bad (the taxes, the regulations, the mandates). This worked beautifully, as long as Republicans could demand the repeal of Obamacare, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to deal with the actual consequences of it happening, or explain how their alternative would do what they said it would.

The CBO score has upended this tidy little arrangement as brutally as Gianforte allegedly upended Jacobs. Even after the GOP bill was written and passed the House, Republicans continued to employ a variation on that evasion, falsely claiming that no low-income people would be worse off (they would have access to coverage) or that the bill would increase protections for the sick. But the CBO now projects that it would leave 23 million fewer insured after 10 years; that 14 million of those people, the poorer ones, would lose coverage due to a staggering $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid; and that its deregulatory provisions could cause premiums to soar for people with preexisting conditions in large swaths of the country, pricing some out of the market entirely.

Gianforte had suggested in early May that he would declare whether he supports the GOP bill once he hears from the CBO. This month, he was caught on audio praising the bill during a phone call with lobbyists, and his campaign again declined to say publicly whether he backs it (pending the CBO analysis), suggesting it is politically too radioactive even for Montana. Yet now that we do have the CBO score, as best as I can determine, Gianforte still has not answered Jacobs’s question. . .

Can a Republican get elected to the House of Representatives after being charged with assault and despite refusing to say whether he will vote for a bill that would impact many millions of people and one-sixth of the U.S. economy? We’ll soon find out."

Read the Washington Post, Asked about GOP assault on health system, GOP candidate allegedly assaults reporter.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition, Cont.

UPDATE III: What did they expect. Trump is "loyal to no one and believes in nothing, so whenever their actions draw criticism, Trump will be among the first to cut and run, decrying the very action he demanded his party take.

Ironically, as Republicans refuse to distance themselves from Trump’s egregious behavior, scandals and ethical shortcomings, he repays them — by creating the perfect soundbite for Democratic ads in 2018.

The House GOP threw the American Health Care Act together with little regard to its impact on ordinary Americans and was willing to slash health care for the poor and middle class while shoveling tax cuts into the coffers of the richest Americans. Trump insisted they pass something and then threw a celebration in the Rose Garden. So much for that.

Trump, of course, cares not even a tiny bit about substance — and we have yet to see him demonstrate even a rudimentary knowledge of what is in the bill. Having made a bargain with a policy know-nothing who lacks any interest in anything but his own winning, Republicans now find themselves excoriated for the very same reason Democrats lambasted the bill.

We have observed frequently that Trump’s rotten character and flightiness makes legislation nearly impossible. Ryan made precisely the opposite bet, namely that Trump’s character and intellectual deficits hardly mattered because he could help Republicans get what they wanted. In fact, Trump’s defects make it nearly impossible for Ryan to achieve his aims. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump predictably abandons the AHCA — and Democrats’ 2018 gift comes early.

UPDATE II: To "note how contemptibly dishonest" Republi-CONs are regarding Obamacare,

Read the AP, Obamacare ‘death spiral’ is a half-told tale, which notes 23 million more people will be uninsured  under the Republi-CON so-called health care plan.

UPDATE:  Not just 'mean', a "source said Trump called the House bill 'mean, mean, mean'".

Read the AP, Trump tells senators House health bill ‘mean’.

Trump says whatever necessary for praise and adulation.

Then: For months Trump called the the Affordable Care Act "'great' and urged GOP lawmakers to vote for it. Following the House vote, Trump hosted an event in the Rose Garden to celebrate its passage."

Now: "President Trump told Republican senators Tuesday that the House GOP health-care bill was 'mean' and he expects the Senate to 'improve' the legislation considerably, according to several Republicans familiar with the gathering."

Read the Washington Post, Trump calls House health bill that he celebrated in the Rose Garden ‘mean’.

But who cares, it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

Trump's Big CON: "Making Ignorance Great Again"

"Donald Trump just took us out of the Paris climate accord for no good reason. I don’t mean that his decision was wrong. I mean, literally, that he didn’t offer any substantive justification for that decision. Oh, he threw around a few numbers about supposed job losses, but nobody believes that he knows or cares where those numbers came from. It was just what he felt like doing.

And here’s the thing: What just happened on climate isn’t an unusual case — and Trump isn’t especially unusual for a modern Republican. For today’s G.O.P. doesn’t do substance; it doesn’t assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking aren’t wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy.

Consider another huge policy area, health care. . .

[Republicans] don’t study issues, they just decide, and attack the motives of anyone who questions their decisions. . .

On climate change, influential conservatives have for years clung to what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory — that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world. And at this point this is effectively the mainstream Republican position.

Do G.O.P. leaders really think this conspiracy theory is true? The answer, surely, is that they don’t care. Truth, as something that exists apart from and in possible opposition to political convenience, is no longer part of their philosophical universe. . .

And as health care and climate go, so goes everything else. Can you think of any major policy area where the G.O.P. hasn’t gone post-truth? Take budgeting, . . .

The president, backed by his party, is talking nonsense, destroying American credibility day by day. But hey, stocks are up, so what’s the problem?

Well, bear in mind that so far Trump hasn’t faced a single crisis not of his own making. As George Orwell noted many years ago in his essay 'In Front of Your Nose,' people can indeed talk nonsense for a very long time, without paying an obvious price. But 'sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.' Now there’s a happy thought."

Read The New York Times, Making Ignorance Great Again.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Health Care Edition

UPDATE II:  "Republicans have fanned across the talk shows to defend the bill, but what they have really revealed is that they can’t defend it without spewing all sorts of lies and distortions about what’s actually in it. . .

Republicans are broadly sidestepping any defense of what their bill actually does. . .

Untold numbers of people with preexisting conditions will be more vulnerable to losing coverage, financial ruin and, in certain cases, possibly death. Millions of lower-income people will lose coverage. Instead of arguing that these things are worth the trade-off of doing away with the mandate and the high-end taxes, Republicans who support the bill continue to deny that those things will happen at all, in the face of all evidence and expert analysis to the contrary."

Read the Washington Post, The health bill is a total disaster. That’s why Republicans keep lying about it.

Read also The New York Times, Republicans Party Like It’s 1984, which notes:

"[T]he Orwell-level dishonesty of the whole effort. As far as I can tell, every word Republicans, from Trump on down, have said about their bill — about why they want to replace Obamacare, about what their replacement would do, and about how it would work — is a lie . .

Trumpcare breaks every promise Republicans ever made about health. Deductibles will rise, not fall, as insurers are set free to offer lower-quality coverage. Premiums may fall for a handful of young, healthy, affluent people, but will rise and in many cases soar for those who are older (because age spreads will rise), sicker (because protection against discrimination based on medical history will be taken away), and poorer (because subsidies will go down).

Many people with pre-existing conditions will find insurance either completely unavailable or totally out of their financial reach.

And Medicaid will be cut back, with the damage worsening over time.

The really important thing, however, is not just to realize that Republicans are breaking their promises, but to realize that they are doing so with intent. This isn’t one of those cases where people try to do what they said they would, but fall short in the execution. This is an act of deliberate betrayal: Everything about Trumpcare is specifically designed to do exactly the opposite of what Trump, Paul Ryan and other Republicans said it would." 

UPDATE:  "House Republicans have been so fixated on passing anything that they now find it hard to defend their handiwork without resort to exaggeration, deflection and flat-out dishonesty. There is a surefire way to tell they are not accurately representing the bill: Fellow GOP senators want no part of it."

Read the Washington Post, GOP grownups debunk fake AHCA defenses. 

"There have been a slew of stories about Trump’s indifference to what was in the health-care bill. What he said he wanted repeatedly on the campaign trail isn’t what was passed, but that didn’t keep Trump from telling a Rose Garden audience on Thursday afternoon that the legislation would do things that outside analysis made clear that it wouldn’t. Of all the things we should have foreseen from a Trump presidency, this, in hindsight, is among the most obvious: Trump was more consistent about his desire to win than he was about what those wins would entail. His policy specifics are generally things championed by others: immigration by Stephen K. Bannon, child-care by Ivanka Trump. The thing Trump wanted to accomplish was to win. . .

There seems to have been a collective sense among the caucus, powered in no small part by the White House, that the win was the important thing. The New York Times reports that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was twisting every arm in sight in an effort to secure a passing majority, so much so that his famously warm relationship with fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan was strained. Kane reports that the positions of the House speaker and other Republican leaders were perceived as being in jeopardy if they couldn’t close the deal. With stakes like that, 217 becomes more important than 24 million — 217 votes was a stronger motivation than the 24 million people who would be uninsured in 2026 thanks to the bill’s passage. . .

It’s certainly not a coincidence that this episode occurred in a moment of unprecedented partisanship. A lot of Republicans across the country likely shared Trump’s attitude: The win was more important than what was won, especially since the win was a victory over the hated Obamacare.

The broader point can be made more simply. Why did Republicans have a Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate a bill moving out of one of the two chambers of Congress? Because the bill wasn’t the point. The passage was."

Read the Washington Post, It’s easy to win if you don’t care what you’ve won. 

Trump's Big CON: Trumpcare is a Mirage

UPDATE:  "President Trump claimed a victory Thursday after the House approved a more free-market approach to health care.

Then he capped it off by praising a country with government-run, universal health care.

Alongside Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at an event in New York, Trump reflected on what the House had just done. He took the occasion to bash Obamacare as being terrible, and then he turned to Turnbull.

'We have a failing health care — I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia,' Trump said, as The Post's Abby Phillip reports, "because you have better health care than we do."

Australia's health-care system is run by the government. It's essentially a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system that is available to everyone, with private insurance also available. (They even call it 'Medicare.')

Consider this merely the latest evidence that Trump, in his heart of hearts, wants single-payer health care.  . .

And some see the current debate eventually winding up with single-payer."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s forbidden love: Single-payer health care.

The Donald's comments caused Bernie Sanders, an staunch advocate of single-payer systems, to erupt in laughter.

"Trumpcare's two big mirages. The first is that it absolutely covers people with preexisting conditions. It doesn't. It lets states opt out of the Obamacare rules protecting the sick and then lets them set up high-risk pools that wouldn't have enough money. It's hard to say how much worse off people with preexisting conditions would be, but it seems pretty clear that they would be. The health-care consultancy Avalere, for one, estimates that even in the best-case scenario, only 25 percent of people with preexisting conditions would be covered under this Republican plan.

The second is that Trumpcare is a health-care bill. It's not. It's a trillion dollar tax cut for the top 2 percent that's paid for with a trillion dollars of health-care cuts for the poor and middle class. Or, as Trump would call it, “something terrific.” He just left out that that's only for people making $200,000 or more.

Not being rich is the ultimate preexisting condition."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ plan to protect sick people has a long history of not protecting sick people.

Read also  the Washington Post, How being a mom could become a ‘preexisting condition’, which notes that the "Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that a woman seeking maternity care under the GOP’s current plan could face surcharges up to $17,000."