ICYMI: The Not-So-Secret Republican Plan to Raise Taxes (Opinion) [Bloomberg]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Bloomberg: The Not-So-Secret Republican Plan to Raise Taxes (Opinion)

By Matthew Yglesias

February 27, 2022

Key Points: 

• The fact that a group of people won’t tell you how they plan to govern doesn’t mean they have no plans — it just means they see public discussion of their plans as counterproductive.
  
  
• Last week Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, let the cat out of the bag with the release of an 11-step “Plan to Rescue America.”
  
  
• Perhaps its most obvious blunder is a clarion call to raise taxes on millions of low-income Americans. “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” it says. “Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”
  
  
• This idea that non-rich Americans are undertaxed is a long-held belief of the Republican donor class — recall Mitt Romney telling a crowd of donors in 2012 about his problems with the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax — but it makes very little sense on the merits.
  
  
• In addition to the plan to tax retirees, Scott’s plan proposes to “force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt” — trying to edge entitlement cuts back onto the public agenda.
  
  
• And the hits don’t stop there.
  

• The plan calls for a rule that “no government employee can make more than 5 times the national median individual income,” which sounds like a nice populist talking point until you think it through… This would entail small pay cuts for America’s top-ranking military officers and huge pay cuts for physicians employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  
  
• The chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee laying this agenda out is a clear indication of the direction the party intends to head if it’s empowered.
  

Read more from the DSCC on ‘what they’re saying’ about Senate Republicans’ plan to raise taxes on over half of all Americans here, here, here and here. 

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