A year later, the legislative result of Trump’s first year in office is going to be no border wall and the biggest corporate tax cut in thirty years:

“Senate Republicans early Saturday morning passed a nearly $1.5 trillion tax bill, in a vote of 51-49, marking a significant victory for Republicans and President Donald Trump. It also marks the first major overhaul of the U.S. tax system in thirty years. No Democrat voted in favor of the legislation. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican, joined Democrats in opposing the bill. The bulk of the bill’s tax cuts affect businesses and higher-earning individuals and gives more modest breaks to others. Now that the Senate passed its bill, the next step is for the House to vote on Monday to send the bill to conference committee. At some point next week, the Senate will do the same thing, and then they will begin “conferencing” the two bills. “I commend my Senate colleagues for this historic action,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., said in a statement following the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. “For the first time since 1986, both the House and the Senate have passed a major overhaul of our nation’s tax code. Now we will move quickly to a conference committee so we can get a final bill to President Trump’s desk.” …”

This is MAGA.

This is what the political capital of the 2016 election has been spent on. I’m not sure how others feel about this, but I consider it the worst possible scenario. Now that tax reform is poised to pass Congress, I expect more “wins” on the Ryan agenda while other bills languish and die in committees. The result of “populist nationalism” will just be more conservative policy victories.

There was a point in the fall of 2015 when I backed away from Trump. It was when his Jack Kemp Republican tax plan was released and it was celebrated by The Beltway Boys. I really didn’t like the fact that it was praised by Larry Kudlow and was bigger than John McCain and Mitt Romney’s plans. I wrestled with that down to the Alabama primary on March 1.

I told this to The New Yorker:

“After years of decline, the League has recently acquired a number of younger members, including Brad Griffin, a thirty-four-year-old who writes an influential blog under the name Hunter Wallace. Short and genial, he wore Top-Siders, khaki shorts, and a polo shirt. As we talked, Griffin’s eyes wandered to his two-year-old son, who was roaming nearby. Griffin told me that he embraced white nationalism after reading Patrick Buchanan’s “Death of the West,” which argued, in Griffin’s words, that “all of the European peoples were dying out, their birthrates were low, and you had mass immigration and multiculturalism.” Griffin once had high hopes for the Tea Party. “They channelled all that rage into electing an impressive number of Republicans in the South, but then all they did was try to cut rich Republicans’ taxes and make life easier for billionaires!” he said. “It was all hijacked, and a classic example of how these right-wing movements emerge, and they’re misdirected into supporting the status quo.”

I told this to Politico:

“Brad Griffin, publisher of the white nationalist blog Occidental Dissent, is among Trump’s skeptics. “Do we honestly believe that he’s going to block all the Muslims and deport all the illegals?” he said. “I think he’s doing a lot of this just to signal to people that he’s on their side.” Griffin said that he was most enthusiastic about Trump’s candidacy this summer, but that his fervor has cooled since seeing details of the businessman’s tax and trade policies, which hew more closely to mainstream Republican positions than he had hoped. …”

I’ve always worried about a bait-and-switch scenario.

It has played out with tax reform. The House and Senate versions kept the carried interest loophole to keep the hedge fund guys happy. The border tax also quietly died. In the end, the tax reform that passed the House and Senate contained Jeb Bush’s proposed 20 percent corporate tax rate. We’ve seen a number of positions we heard about in the campaign evolve or disappear.

Economically speaking, I simply don’t believe this bill is going to play out as it has been sold in Congress. The first thing that George W. Bush did was pass a tax cut. The decline in the corporate tax rate hasn’t coincided with any improvement in our standard of living. On the contrary, the opposite is true. Average household income has stagnated as tax rates have come down.

This is where populist voters are at under the two-party system in America: if you vote for the Republicans to get a big, beautiful border wall, you end up getting a corporate tax cut, but if you vote for the Democrats to oppose endless wars, you end up getting gay marriage. We have populist revolts against “the establishment” of both political parties, but the reformers are absorbed by the establishment. In such a way, we seem to gradually become worse off culturally and economically.

They live. We sleep.

1. Tax cut backers say corp rate cut will encourage investment by businesses

2. During interview with Gary Cohn, WSJ asks CEOs to raise hands if they'll boost investment if rates cut

3. Few CEOS raise hands

4. Cohn asks: "Why aren't the other hands up?" pic.twitter.com/aGn8gHPQTh — Chris Manjaro (@ChrisManjaro1) November 15, 2017



