How a GOP Tax Cut Plan Became a Gift to Democrats

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 30, 2023

They’re also expected to work it into their continuing theme that Republicans are endangering Medicare and Social Security and, more generally, are out of touch with regular Americans.

The bumpy launch of the proposed Fair Tax Act reveals another troubling trend for the Republicans. The small-government “party of ideas” GOP that we saw in the 1980s and ‘90s under President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Newt Gingrich lost its intellectual steam in Trump’s MAGA era.

Instead, it has become more dominated by hard-right extremist culture warriors and Trump wannabes, rejecting old-school bipartisan gestures across the aisle as some form of ideological treason.

The result is such sights as McCarthy campaigning through 15 feverish rounds of voting and deal-making to cobble together enough votes to become speaker, during which he promised Republicans that he would hold a hearing on the national sales tax measure, among other promises. More recently, he appears to be backpedaling away from it.

When he was questioned, for example, by CNN’s Manu Raju in a hallway as to whether he supported the Fair Tax Act, he responded simply, “No” and kept on walking, swiftly away.

That may not matter much in the long run, since the Fair Tax idea has only spotty support among Republicans and virtually no chance of passing in the Senate. Even anti-tax hawks such as Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, wrote recently in the Atlantic that the bill was “a free gift to the Democrats.”

I don’t have to be an economic wizard to see how tacking a 30% — or even 23% — tax or surcharge onto the price of goods or services puts a drag on consumer sales and wallets. As the late Republican congressman and policy wonk Jack Kemp used to say, “If you want less of something, tax it,” he said. “If you want more of something, subsidize it.”

The same might also be said of those who want more votes.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)