Drumpf

From electoral-vote on Monday, 26 August 2019. I figured this out under Reaganomics decades ago.

Trump Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare in His Second Term

The cat is out of the bag. Several Republican senators have leaked the fact that if he is reelected, Donald Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare to try to rein in the exploding deficit caused by his tax cuts. When you look at the big picture, this makes perfect sense.

Many people are wondering what the Republican Party stands for these days. It's clearly not free trade and a balanced budget, as it once was. The (inconvenient) truth is that the people who actually run the Republican Party, starting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the big donors, like the late David Koch (see below), have been completely consistent on the things that really matter to them. What they want are essentially three things:

Lower income and estate taxes for the rich
A reduction or end to all programs that transfer money from the rich to the poor
Reduced regulation of businesses, consumers and the environment be damned

The rest is window dressing. The problem is that running on the above platform is not likely to be a big winner. It was Karl Rove's genius to grab the baton from Pat Buchanan and run with the culture wars as a major part of the Republican platform. What Rove understood was that many older, less-educated, white men saw that the country was changing and their power was slipping away from them as women and minorities (with very different priorities) angrily demanded a place at the table. By making abortion and opposition to gay rights central to the GOP platform, he got these people—who were formerly the core of FDR's coalition—to identify as Republicans so strongly that they didn't notice that the Republicans didn't care a whit about their economic condition. The Party's leaders don't actually give a hoot about abortion or gay rights. If one of them gets his girlfriend pregnant, they can just fly to Toronto or London to solve the problem.

So this is where cutting Social Security and Medicare comes in. That plan aligns well with bullet point two above. Millionaires don't need these programs and would be happy to abolish them in return for not having to pay the corresponding taxes. Poor people desperately need the programs. Once Trump is freed of having to worry about reelection, he could indeed go after Social Security and Medicare with a carving knife and as long as he also kept up a good show about blocking immigration (and thus implicitly telling his base that he will fight to keep anyone from taking their power), he might get away with it. Of course, if Trump wins reelection but the Democrats hold at least one chamber of Congress, then both programs are safe. (V)

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2019/Pres/Maps/Aug26.html#item-3

Tax Bill Looks to Be an Albatross around the Republicans' Neck in 2018 Electoral-vote.com Wed 6 Dec 17
The tax bill hasn't even been formally passed yet, but it is already clear that it will be a big problem for Republicans in 2018. Two polls on it were released yesterday. A Gallup poll shows 29% supporting it and 56% disapproving. A Quinnipiac University poll has 29% approving and 53% disapproving. Generally, Republicans like it and Democrats didn't, but independents don't like it by a margin of 2 to 1. That spells trouble for the Republicans in 2018. To make it worse, few people understand what is in it (and that includes the members of Congress who voted for it). When the final bill is announced and people begin to understand its consequences for them, it is only going to get less popular. Democrats are going to use it like a baseball bat to hit the 35 Republican representatives in California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York over the head.

FiveThirtyEight has looked up the popularity of past tax bills and noted that this tax-cut bill is less popular than previous tax increases. The approve/disapprove for the 1993 Bill Clinton tax increase scored 34%/44% and the George H.W. Bush tax hike of 1990 was 41%/52%. For a tax cut to be less popular than a tax increase is unprecedented. No tax cut in the past 35 years has been underwater, and certainly not under water by 20 points. The Republicans may make their donors happy if the final bill passes, but at the same time they will be giving the Democrats a powerful weapon to use in 2018.

If the Democrats campaign in 2018 by attacking the tax bill, saying the Republicans have raised taxes on the middle class to (partially) pay for big tax cuts for the rich and corporations, the Republicans will scream "class warfare." Veteran Democratic strategist John Lapp said: "Bring it on." J.B. Poersch, president of a Democratic PAC, put it this way: "Republicans have failed to defend working families both in terms of health care and in this awful tax bill. 2018 is about holding them accountable for making the promise." A "class warfare" approach to the midterms is likely to energize the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party without offending the centrists, making it the ideal strategy. (V)