The Thriller
Well-Known Member
If it’s really so unpopular it should result in a bloodbath for a generation. The GOP should lose bigly the next several election cycles. However, I doubt that’ll be the case as Americans have memories of goldfish, many voters dont Care about policy (just about revenge and tribalism, and the media loves the TeeVee President Reality Show. Democrats are too damn boring. Just look at how concerns over inflation has evaporated since Jan. Suddenly, voters don’t care about it. Yet… has inflation actually improved?
They Didn’t Have to Do This
By passing Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into an incomprehensibly reckless plan.www.theatlantic.com
In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After that, things go as you might expect.
Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors’ sanity. As of today’s 50–50 Senate vote, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie, the House and Senate have passed their own versions of the bill. The final details still have to be negotiated, but the foundational elements are clear enough. Congress is about to impose immense harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.
Given that President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in TheSopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: Why are they doing this?
Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.
Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.
Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” he explained.
Trump was nodding at the claim that cuts to health-care subsidies and food assistance would be limited to fraudulent beneficiaries and other waste. Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.
I’m pretty jaded because my entire adult life has been dominated by corrupt Republican leadership after corrupt Republican leadership. I can’t remember the last time they passed popular legislation. Yet, they keep winning. Democrats keep passing popular legislation and get rat****ed by the electorate. The ACA led to the bloody midterms In 2010. The competent and boring Obama economy and leadership led to Trump in 2016. Biden and his boring no drama leadership and legislation led to the GOP retaking the House in 2022 and retaking the Senate and White House in 2024.
What did the GOP do from 2021 to 2022 to deserve retaking the House? What did they do to retake the senate and White House in 2024? If we aren’t rewarding political parties for their leadership, then what’s the point of self-governance? Just appoint an entertaining dictator and call it good (which is what we’ve essentially done).
I don’t know what the GOP has to do to permanently lose power for a generation. Doesn’t seem like there’s a bottom. Meanwhile, I don’t know what Democrats have got to do to win the public’s favor. All they do is pass good legislation and lead boring and prosperous administrations. Yet, competent leadership isn’t a priority for a country bored to death.
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