1. Paul Krugman: The Biggest Tax Scam in History

Donald Trump likes to declare that every good thing that happens while he’s in office — job growth, rising stock prices, whatever — is the biggest, greatest, best ever. Then the fact-checkers weigh in and quickly determine that the claim is false.

But what’s happening in the Senate right now really does deserve Trumpian superlatives. The bill Republican leaders are trying to ram through this week without hearings, without time for even a basic analysis of its likely economic impact, is the biggest tax scam in history. It’s such a big scam that it’s not even clear who’s being scammed — middle-class taxpayers, people who care about budget deficits, or both.

One thing is clear, however: One way or another, the bill would hurt most Americans. The only big winners would be the wealthy — especially those who mainly collect income from their assets rather than working for a living — plus tax lawyers and accountants who would have a field day exploiting the many loopholes the legislation creates.

So will they manage to pull off this giant con job? The reason they’re rushing this to the Senate floor without a single hearing, without a full assessment from Congress’s own official scorekeepers, is their hope that they can pass the thing before people figure out what they’re up to.

And the question is whether there are enough Republican senators with principles, who believe that policies should not be sold with lies, to stop this bum’s rush.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/opinion/senate-tax-bill-scam.html

 

2. Jeff Stein: 37 of 38 economists said the GOP tax plans would grow the debt. The 38th misread the question.

An overwhelming majority of academic economists say in a new survey that the Republican tax proposals would cause America's debt to grow by one critical measure.

Thirty-seven of 38 experts surveyed by the University of Chicago's Initiative on Global Markets agreed that the GOP tax bills in Congress would cause U.S. debt to increase "substantially" faster than the economy.

Only one economist — Stanford's Liran Einav — said that he was “uncertain” if the bills would exacerbate America's debt-to-GDP ratio. But after the survey's release, Einav said his response had been a mistake, and that he actually agrees with the economists who expect the debt ratio to soar. (Four other economists in the IGM panel didn't answer the question one way or the other.)

“I did it too fast and didn't read the question properly,” Einav said in an email.

(The survey results mirror an episode in May, in which 35 of 37 economists concluded the tax cuts would not pay for themselves in terms of their impact on the federal budget. The two who disagreed later said they misread the question and had meant to answer with the majority.)

The growing expert consensus that the bills would balloon the deficit — even in the absence of a Congressional Budget Office report — has real implications for the bills' chances of becoming law.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/22/37-of-38-economists-said-the-gop-tax-plans-would-grow-the-debt-the-38th-misread-the-question/

3. Joe Romm: 15,000 scientists warn it will soon be too late to avoid climate catastrophe

More than 15,000 researchers — “the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article” as the article itself notes — want the world to know things are getting worse and time is running out. “Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse.”

The authors do note some promising trends. For instance, “The rapid global decline in ozone-depleting substances shows that we can make positive change when we act decisively. We have also made advancements in reducing extreme poverty and hunger.” In addition we’ve seen “the promising decline in the rate of deforestation in some regions, and the rapid growth in the renewable-energy sector.”

But all of those gains are in the process of being overwhelmed by our inaction on the other key trends. The scientists explain, “Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels, deforestation,and agricultural production” (especially from livestock farming). Also, humanity has “unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

The bottom line is that “To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual.” Of course, the scientists note, this is the same warning scientists issued a quarter-century ago. Now, thanks to our dawdling, “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”

It’s way past time for action, and on our current trajectory, there may well not be a third warning.  https://thinkprogress.org/15000-scientists-warn-humanity-479e950ff929/

4. Jeff Spross: The Republican tax bill is in serious trouble

The centerpieces of the GOP tax plan are a few big tax cuts: the cut to the profits tax paid by C-corporations, cuts to individual tax rates, repealing the alternative minimum tax, and attempts to cut the taxes paid by small businesses and other "pass-through" companies. These all overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. And while the House and Senate might take different approaches, the goals remain the same.

The problem is that Republicans decided to pass this legislation without any help from Democrats. So the Senate GOP is using reconciliation, a procedural tool that lets them avoid the 60-vote threshold of the filibuster. But bills passed by reconciliation can't add to the deficit after a decade and have to remain within a certain threshold before then. And in an earlier debate over future budget blueprints, the Senate GOP pegged that golden number at $1.5 trillion.

So the party needs to raise revenue to offset the massive cuts it wants to make. That means a tax hike on someone, which means clear winners and losers. But those losers are someone's constituents. And the Republican Senate can only afford to lose two votes, putting it in a very, very precarious position.

The math is simply hard to make work.

Basically, the Republican Party appears hellbent on delivering a massive tax cut payday for its big-money donors. The ugly politics and budget math of that means they have to perform the most treacherous of high wire acts.

And the GOP's balance is looking pretty shaky.  http://theweek.com/articles/737792/republican-tax-bill-serious-trouble

5. Tory Newmyer: The Finance 202: There is something very strange about the GOP tax plan

The Republican push to overhaul the code is far enough along that it’s raising alarms from economists across the country. The latest came Tuesday, when only one of 42 top economists surveyed by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business thought the tax proposals moving through Congress would meaningfully expand the economy over a decade (22 disagreed or strongly disagreed, 15 were uncertain and the rest didn't answer). And none of those economists, a sampling spanning the ideological spectrum, disagreed the measures would leave the nation saddled with a substantially heavier debt load relative to the size of the economy. 

Add that verdict by academic economists to those from Washington think tanks and Wall Street banks, chronicled in this space yesterday. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summarized the “crowding out” effect that most expect from all the borrowing that the federal government will need to do to finance the tax cuts: 

Although the legislation would increase incentives to save and invest, it would also substantially increase budget deficits unless offset by spending cuts. Higher deficits would push up interest rates, which would tend to discourage investment. Thus, while the plan would initially increase investment, we estimate that rising interest rates would eventually negate the incentive effects of lower tax rates on capital income and decrease investment below baseline levels in later years.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2017/11/22/the-finance-202-there-is-something-very-strange-about-the-gop-tax-plan/5a1471fd30fb0469e883f730/

6. Charles M. Blow: Thankfully Recommitting to Resistance

Donald Trump, I thought that your presidency would be a disaster. It’s worse than a disaster. I wasn’t sure that resistance to your weakening of the republic, your coarsening of the culture, your assault on truth and honesty, your erosion of our protocols, would feel as urgent today as it felt last year. But if anything, that resistance now feels more urgent.

Nothing about you has changed for the better. You are still a sexist, bigoted, bullying, self-important simpleton. But now all of the worst of you has the force of the American presidency.

The degree to which Russia aided your ascendance, and the degree to which people connected to your campaign were willing and eager to entertain entreaties from Russia, are coming into clearer focus everyday.

The legitimacy of your presidency is in question. The corruption of your administration is not. You are a national stain and an international embarrassment. You are anti-intellectual and pro-impulse. The same fingers with which you compulsively tweet are dangerously close to the nuclear codes. You are historically unpopular and history will not be kind to you. It is all so dizzyingly distressing.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/thanksgiving-trump-resistance.html

7. Charles J. Sykes: Whatever happened to the party of fiscal responsibility?

Not that long ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was freaked out about the national debt.

The "red tidal wave of debt," he told Sean Hannity back in 2012, would trigger what he called the "most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country." Debt would mean nothing less than the "end of the American dream."

In 2012, the debt stood at $15 trillion, and the exploding costs of entitlements, Ryan said, meant that "by the time my grandkids are raising their grandkids, we are taking 80 cents out of every dollar just to pay for this federal government at that time."

Ryan, who was then House Budget Committee chairman and soon to be the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, warned that the debt crisis would be catastrophic to the American way of life, leading to a massive rise in interest rates and — eventually — “bitter austerity” measures including “cuts to current seniors” and “cuts to the safety net.”

For years, conservatives bemoaned the greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. Now it’s all about #winning.

He also said the crisis was imminent: "All the experts are telling us we have about two to three years, is the time frame they tell us."

That was five years ago. Ryan is now speaker of the House, and the national debt now exceeds $20 trillion. But he's pushing ahead with tax cuts that are likely to increase that figure by trillions more. And that's only part of the story.

The GOP retreat from fiscal conservatism is twofold: The tax plan helps balloon federal deficits, and it does nothing to address the rising costs of entitlements as the population grows older and sicker.

So perhaps it's not surprising that, as he touts a massive tax cut, Paul Ryan doesn't talk much about the catastrophic "debt crisis" anymore. But not talking about it doesn't mean that it will go away; only that someone else will have to clean up the mess.  http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-sykes-gop-fiscal-20171110-story.html

8. Chris Cillizza: Donald Trump's secret? There is no secret

Let me remind you: If nothing in the way of government funding passes between now and December 8 -- that's exactly 10 days from now -- the government will shut down. And let me also remind you: A government shutdown -- given historical midterm trends for the President's party, the lack of legislative accomplishments for the Republican Congress and Trump's middling approval numbers -- would almost certainly be a political catastrophe for Republicans.

Trump seems blissfully unaware of that history. "Well, if [a shutdown] happens, I would absolutely blame the Democrats," he said Tuesday afternoon. "If it happens, it's going to be over illegals pouring into the country, crime pouring into the country, no border wall -- which everybody wants."

What explains Trump's decision to provoke Pelosi and Schumer in advance of the meeting? Some of Trump's allies will insist that he is playing a strategic game that people like me are just too dumb to see. That by forcing Democrats to walk away from the table, Trump will improve his party's leverage. Or something.

But the simpler explanation is that Trump is playing -- and has always been playing -- zero-dimensional chess. There is no grand strategy. There is no broad blueprint. There is just impulse, reaction and then reaction to the reaction.

Put more simply: Trump just says stuff. Like calling Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" at an event honoring Native American code talkers for their service during World War II. Or suggesting to people that maybe, just maybe, the "Access Hollywood" tape is a fake. Or one of a thousand other things Trump has said since being elected president.

The arc of his presidency is that there is no arc. There are just a series of dots on a board. You can try to draw a line in between them all but there's really no through line other than ego and personal grievance.
That's it. Remember that Trump declared proudly in the opening passage of his seminal "Art of the Deal" that he liked to sit at his desk every morning with no set plan and no real schedule. As a businessman, Trump liked to let the world come to him and react to it. That's the exact same philosophy he's brought to the White House.

There is no long game at work here. There is no game at all. It's zero-dimensional chess. Which isn't chess at all.  http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/28/politics/trump-shutdown-zero-dimensional/index.html