Is the GOP having A Identity Crises

Politico reports, “Republicans’ unified control of Washington is triggering an identity crisis within the party over what it means to be a fiscal conservative in the age of Donald Trump: Do deficits even matter, or do tax cuts trump all?”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) slammed budget director Mick Mulvaney for morphing into a fiscal Judas, telling Politico, “Our OMB guy, I say this with humor, what happened to him? Do you understand what I’m saying? He used to be the fiscal hawk.” Mulvaney responded in kind during an interview last week, accusing Corker of “ignoring reality.”

The war of words among GOP budget hawks and their deficit-loving counterparts is not rooted in whether they want more tax cuts for the rich, which is what the Trump plan is really all about, but whether it should be paid for by slashing spending on things like Social Security, Medicare, and any other We the People programs the GOP can rob from.

There is evidence to suggest that the whole conservative deficit hawk persona has always been a farce.

The Intercept reports,

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch spent much of the eight years of the Obama presidency stoking fears about the budget deficit… Now that Republicans control all levers of power in Washington and the Koch brothers are poised to reap a windfall of billions of dollars through tax cuts, they have a new message: Don’t worry about the deficit.

You don’t need a masters degree in economics to see what’s going on here. The donor class sees Trump as a senile puppet who will sign anything to claim a victory and complete Republican control as their route to bankrupt the country for personal profit.

As for Trump’s claims that his massive tax cuts for corporations will be so ‘amazing’ that they’ll pay for themselves, there is zero historical evidence to support that. The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts blew a hole in the deficit that America still hasn’t fully recovered from, and they did almost nothing to spur economic growth, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

If that were not enough proof that nothing trickles down in trickle-down economics, Kansas is a living laboratory of failure. As the New York Times points out, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback enacted a corporate tax cut scheme similar to Trump’s back in 2012, that quickly devolved into a fiscal disaster that had to be reversed by the Republican controlled state legislature. In just a few short years, the deficit skyrocketed and the state economy tanked, despite massive spending cuts in education and other essential programs.

This is not about fiscal responsibility – or doing anything else intended to help most Americans. It’s about an increasingly corrupt system devoid of any moral standards. As Charles P. Pierce put it in Esquire, “McConnell and his supporters among the country’s ownership classes don’t care if the president* turns up naked one day on the Truman balcony with his body painted blue. They can still get what they want while the madness unfolds. Nothing matters until they have re-established Gilded Age economics married to Jim Crow social policy.”

And we all know how that worked out.

Be part of the solution. Call Congress at (202) 224-3121, or contact your representative online at www.house.gov and www.senate.gov.

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