Some things never change.

Maybe I’m overthinking this again. Maybe Marco Rubio really is just a feather in the evening breeze, a politician without principles, not because he’s a bad person, but because developing any is just too damn much trouble. He’s now had a chat with The Economist in which he backs over his own feet on the Republican tax bill over which he chewed his cud, flipped, and flopped last December. For that matter, he may have backed himself over nearly 40 years of Reagan-nostalgia economic policy.

"There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they're going to take the money they're saving and reinvest it in American workers," Rubio said. "In fact, they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there's no evidence whatsoever that the money's been massively poured back into the American worker."

The gob, she is smacked.

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Last December, when the bill was staggering through the Senate, Rubio threatened to withhold his support if the bill did not contain an expanded child tax credit. He got a piece of one and pronounced himself satisfied enough to vote for the bill. Now that the bill is doing precisely what it was designed to do—which is to shove more of the country’s wealth upwards through the various devices that Rubio called out to The Economist—Rubio has come to sound like he’s trying to outflank the Republican Party on the left by about 300 parsecs.

"If we basically say everyone is on their own and the market's going to take care of it, we will rip the country apart, because millions of good hardworking people lack the means to adapt."

There’s absolutely no telling what Rubio will feel next month, next year, or a week from this Thursday, for that matter. His flea-on-a-griddle political persona is completely exhausting, especially for those of us who still suspect that, if he could settle on a set of beliefs for longer than an hour, Marco Rubio could be the person who pulls the Republican Party out of its 40-year demented tango with stupidity, vandalism, splinter religion, and crackpot economics.

I can’t see myself ever voting for him, but there’s been a path laid out for him since he spoke to the Republican convention in Tampa in 2012. He’s stepped gingerly onto it a number of times, only to dive into the ditch every time there was a rustle in the shrubbery. This may just be another one of those episodes, but it’s more than any other Republican has said in years concerning the repeated failures of modern conservative economic dogma. That’s not much, but it’s not nothing, either.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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