By Matt O’Brien March 25 at 8:45 AM
But there’s a reason the GOP was pushing a bill that would have taken
everything people don’t like about the healthcare system and made it
worse. That’s the fact that it would have allowed them to pass two
permanent tax cuts for the rich. Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut
that expires after ten years. But if you want to make it last—and you
don’t have 60 votes in the Senate—then you need to find a way to pay for
it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from
poor and sick people would have done that just for the Obamacare taxes,
which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent. Indeed, as you can
see below in the chart from the Urban Institute,
the combination of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor
that was the GOP healthcare plan would have been a reverse Robin Hood
that redistributed income from people making $50,000 or less to
mostly those making $200,000 or more.
Now, the crazy thing is that this first tax cut for the rich (in the
form of Obamacare “repeal and replace”) would have made a second one
(this one coming in the form of “tax reform”) look more affordable.That’s
because, due to parliamentary rules, tax reform can’t lose any revenue
outside the 10-year budget window if it’s going to be permanent. The
question, though, is lose any revenue compared to what. If
Republicans had repealed Obamacare’s $1 trillion worth of taxes before
they did tax reform, that’s $1 trillion less they’d have to come up with
to make it look like tax reform wasn’t losing any money. Now, without
those phantom savings, tax reform, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan admitted, will be “more difficult.”
Analysis | Why Republicans were in such a hurry on health care
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