Here Come the Tax-Cuts!

On TV tonight, David Brooks labelled "an outbreak of normalcy" the proposed legislation in the Senate salvaging the Affordable Care Act's “cost-sharing reductions” (CSRs), which are federal subsidies to insurers to offset insurance costs for lower-income Americans. What was once the normal business of Congress - legislating according to procedures and making bipartisan compromises - is now so abnormal as to be a story in itself. The bill seems to have a reasonable chance of making it through the Senate, although the House, of course, is an alternative universe. Time will tell.

The Senate meanwhile has passed a budget resolution, which paves the way for proposed tax cuts to be considered under "reconciliation," thus obviating the threat of a filibuster. The only "normalcy" breaking out there is the majority party's perennial obsession with tax cuts for the wealthy.

Such tax cuts can be best described as a kind of theft from the public in order to enrich already overly wealthy private individuals and their corporate allies. Unsurprisingly, that is what the majority is maneuvering to do and so salvage its standing with its ultra-rich donor class.

Besides the specific public policy damage that tax cuts would have on important public expenditures on which citizens depend, there is also the deeper, symbolic harm which would be further inflicted upon our divided society - further confirming that the few rich and the rest of the nation have really nothing in common, no shared common values or sense of social purpose, that our common citizenship has been yet further evacuated of any semblance of its historic meaning. 

I suspect that is a "normalcy" we would do better without!