Gunster, Trumpster and a batch of U.K. neo-NazisWhile congressional leadership incompetence and Señor Trumpanzee's tweet rages against fellow Republicans will drive down turnout for the 2018 midterms among his supporters and others on the far right, well-funded GOP superPACs are preparing to lure voters to the polls with packages of ballot initiatives that appeal to racists, homophobes, Nazis, xenophobes and other key contingents of the Republican Party base. Yesterday, Alex Isenstadt reported that the West Wing is coordinating the efforts and that the White House thinks "tax reform" is the issue to motivate and invigorate conservatives.I guess the theory is that Republican dog lovers all want to end the estate tax so Paris Hilton can inherit even more money and so that her dogs' can live even more glamorous lives than they already do in their lovely "doggie mansion." Thanks for the tweet, Paris.The shots, reported People Magazine, "show the outside and inside of the luxe doggie digs. Hilton isn’t lying. There is an easy-to-spot chandelier, and several pieces of fancy-looking furniture placed against the house’s pink (of course) walls. The outside photo shows one of Hilton’s small pups enjoying the second-story balcony, while another frolics on the grass below. So while you struggle with the choice of paying a massive energy bill or living as a human sweat blob for the next month, take comfort in the fact that at least Hilton’s dogs are living comfortably." That should help turn out the Trumpanzee base, right?The White House goal is to defeat Jon Tester (D-MT), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Someone, I suppose, figures that right-wing voters (and independents) in Montana, North Dakota and Missouri think billionaires and multimillionaires are being treated unfairly by the tax code. Who could be that stupid?
Spearheading the discussions is Republican strategist Gerry Gunster, a referendum expert who helped to lead the successful 2016, populist-infused campaign for Britain's exit from the European Union. Gunster-- who visited then-president-elect Trump in New York City along with Brexit leader Nigel Farage after the November election-- has spoken about the ballot initiative concept with top administration aides, including political director Bill Stepien and Nick Ayers, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence and a veteran GOP operative.Still, it's an open question whether a White House-backed ballot initiative effort will materialize. Those involved caution that the plans are in a preliminary stage and that the White House, while intrigued, has yet to give final signoff.Complicating matters has been the departure of chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was a leading internal proponent of the idea and thought it should be an administration priority heading into 2018.Yet several people involved raised the prospect that Bannon, now free from the constraints of government, could orchestrate a campaign from the outside. He would have the financial resources: Bannon has a patron in Robert Mercer, the reclusive New York hedge fund billionaire who has long funded his political projects.Neither White House officials nor Bannon would comment on the record. Gunster declined to discuss his talks with administration officials, but noted that his firm “has a well-documented history of managing initiatives and referenda that focus on tax reform and job growth. We do frequently work on state ballot measures that remove barriers to doing business."An administration-led campaign would give conservatives a counterweight to liberals, who have already begun circulating possible initiatives in states aimed at mobilizing supporters in 2018-- some of them centered on marijuana legalization. Several midterm battlegrounds, including Missouri, Florida and Arizona, may see cannabis-related items on the ballot.Some Republicans contend that putting tax cut-related measures on the 2018 ballot could give the party a boost."Probably it has some effect. It never hurts to have Republicans push on issues that are core to the party and that get people motivated," said Steve Linder, a GOP strategist in Michigan who has worked on nearly a dozen ballot measures, including the state’s 2004 anti-gay marriage amendment. "It's a way to reinforce the base, and can it help around the edges? Yes it can."The deliberations come at a sensitive time for senior Republicans. They're increasingly worried that the party’s meager legislative accomplishments so far, the ongoing special counsel investigation of Trump campaign ties to Russia and the president’s intensifying war with GOP leaders will depress the base in 2018....The extent to which the anti-gay marriage amendments boosted Bush in 2004 is the subject of debate. In the immediate aftermath of his reelection, there was general agreement that the 11 amendments, all of which were approved by comfortable margins, jolted turnout in Bush’s favor.But in the following years, some political observers began to question the influence it had on the election results. A 2006 report by the Pew Research Center concluded that while an amendment may have been decisive in the critical state of Ohio, their effect in other states was less clear....Some Republicans are skeptical that running an initiative campaign will do much to help their 2018 prospects. Jeff Flint, a Republican strategist in California who specializes in ballot initiatives, said the party would need to find an issue that tapped into a deep vein of frustration in order to drive turnout. He argued that a tax cut-focused effort wouldn’t do the trick.Absent such a driving issue, voters are bound to be influenced by their opinion of Trump and his performance, Flint said."Nine times out of 10," he said, "turnout is driven by the top of the ticket, or the" president.
This morning Trumpanzee's chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, the multimillionaire who Trumpanzee drafted from Goldman Sachs, was reported to have told a gaggle of Democratic senators that "only morons" pay the estate tax. Another way of putting it is that only criminals don't pay estate taxes. What the real morons-- Republican base voters who can be manipulated by these GOP SuperPAC appeals-- don't understand is that the estate tax is a 40% levy applied to the portion of an estate valued at over $5.49 million for individuals or $10.98 million for couples and that because it's a tax that applies only to the very wealthy, it only affects one out of every 500 taxpayers. The number of people actually paying the tax, and the money it raises have both plunged drastically in recent years. In 2008, the estate tax raised $25 billion; in 2015 that was down to $17 billion. Criminally-minded tax attorneys are the primary culprits. Democratic candidates we asked about the Trumpist plans to run on their version of "tax reform" were unanimous: BRING IT ON!Lamar Smith's progressive opponent for next year (TX-21), Derrick Crowe, is looking forward to debating him on taxes and using the issue to help him win the election and flip the seat red to blue. "Donald Trump's 'enrich the rich' tax plan," he told us confidently, "is as likely to prompt his target voters to pick up pitchforks and torches as it is to help win an election. Inequality is tearing apart the social fabric of this country. If you look at where GOP rhetoric has been translated to tax policy--like, say, Texas-- you find voters on the edge of revolt due to skyrocketing, regressive property taxes and underfunded state services. The rigged economy is already tilted heavily toward the ultra-wealthy, and people know it. Trump is just revealing whose side he's really on-- and it's not the side of the working class. There's no way that translates to electoral victory in 2018 or 2020."James Thompson should only be so lucky to have his election determined by a debate over taxes! "Red state" Kansas has come to know what GOP tax plans mean for ordinary people. "If you want to know what will happen to the rest of the United States as a result of Trump's tax reform," warned Thompson, "just look at Kansas. The so called 'tax reform' being pushed by President Trump and Ron Estes is the nationalization of the same failed trickle down tax experiments of Sam Brownback in Kansas. Our schools and hospitals are underfunded and closing. Our infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is collapsing. Our businesses are leaving our state. Our guards in the prison system are underpaid and overworked in overcrowded prisons. Our police departments don't have the money for proper training and are short staffed. Our mental health care facilities, formerly number one in the country, are now ranked at the bottom. More and more people are falling below the poverty line. These are just a few of the examples of what 'tax reform' did to Kansas. The filthy rich got the tax break goldmine, and the working people of Kansas got the shaft. Supply side economics do not work. Businesses do not hire new employees because of tax breaks. Demand drives business. Rather than trying to get a bigger piece of the pie, how about increasing the size of the pie? Paying a living wage will circulate more money into the economy and create a larger tax base. Finally expanding Medicaid will allow 100,000 additional Kansans to get medical care, again pumping more money into our local economy. We have lost more than 2 billion dollars in the last couple of years as a result of failing to expand Medicaid. Using targeted trade agreements to allow farmers to sell their products internationally while also protecting the wages of our working class people at home will bring more money into our state. Republicans don't want to do this though, they want the pie all for themselves. In Kansas, we say 'pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.' The Republicans are all greedy hogs lined up at the 2018 trough gorging themselves on the slop Trump is feeding them."Tom Guild, another example of a "red state" Democrat not afraid of Trump's hollow threats, is running for a seat in Oklahoma that Trump won 53.2% to 39.8%. And he's not shying away from a very progressive approach to taxes that emphasizes fairness for working families and the middle class. "The Oklahoma GOP," he told us today, "has all the political marbles in Oklahoma. They control the state House of Representatives by a 3 to 1 margin and the state Senate by a 5 to 1 margin. They have the governor’s office and all statewide state offices to boot. If you look at their supply side tax policy, you would likely conclude that they didn’t have all their marbles when they adopted their trickle down tax plans. Because of the failure of trickledown economics in Oklahoma, our state is a fiscal basket case. We have had a revenue failure a number of years in a row and the gap widens as time goes on. This is due to their string of state income tax cuts for the wealthy, and their lowering of the oil and gas gross production tax from 7% (the lowest in the nation at the time) to 2% (by a country mile the lowest in the nation). They sold both types of regressive tax cuts as a way to produce more revenue for the state. Well, their theory is an accountant’s nightmare. Teachers, who are at the bottom of the barrel nationally in salaries are fleeing the state in droves. This leads to emergency certification of replacements who aren’t quite qualified to teach. The number of emergency certifications has increased exponentially over the past few years. We can’t fund public health, including Medicaid and mental health programs. We are slashing senior nutrition programs and cutting child welfare workers in the face of a court order that demands we go in the other direction and increase state employees checking in on our vulnerable children. Our gaping potholes and chasms in our state and local roadways cost the average Oklahoman a pretty penny every year in damage to their vehicles. The GOP legislature outlawed raising the minimum wage at the local level as we were petitioning to raise the wage in Oklahoma City. Many Okies are working multiple jobs and still not able to keep their households above water. College students graduate with a bachelor’s degree and more than $30,000 in student loan debt and the shortfall increases every year because of cuts to the higher education budget. Lax regulation of the fossil fuels industry in Oklahoma has led to an unimaginable increase in human induced earthquakes, that are shaking many Oklahoma families to their core and causing many huge increases in out of pocket expenses. If Trump and his Billionaire’s Club Cabinet do for the U.S. what supply side trickledown economics has done for Oklahoma, the whole nation will be economically on its knees. Enough is Enough! We must elect progressives who put working people and the middle class first and attend to the basic necessities of the least among us."North Carolina's Jenny Marshall has a similar perspective. She's running for the seat held;d by Virginia Foxx, who strictly represents the interests of the rich, rather than the middle and working class residents of NC-05. Foxx is a complete rubber stamp for Trump and Ryan. "North Carolina's GOP also gave away millions in tax breaks for the rich while saddling the average person with more taxes on labor costs such as auto and appliance repairs," said Jenny. "This is a typical GOP move. Reduce taxes for the rich with no regard to the fallout. My campaign's main issue is the economy. With 50% of my district living in low income or poverty households, Trump's tax reform falls on deaf ears. My community does not need a tax break. They need good paying, dependable jobs they can raise a family on. Minimum wage just doesn't pay the bills, yet rather than focus on raising wages and creating sustainable jobs, Trump wants to give the ultra wealthy a tax break. It just goes to show that the GOP leadership in Washington is out of touch with the everyday people of our country. I am committed to raising the minimum wage and the creation of jobs that will help the United States rebuild its infrastructure and increase our green energy sector."The DCCC is trying to derail the campaign of young progressive Sam Jammal to help recruit their pathetic and unelectable silly recruit, a lottery winner who literally lies as much as Donald Trump! Sam is eager to debate Ed Royce on how the tax system should be reformed. "I find this whole tax reform conversation to represent everything wrong with Washington," he told us. "Right now, thousands of lobbyists are lining up with their own 'fixes' to our tax system. Everything is centered on how the most wealthy will benefit. None of the conversation is about how we help working families. My Congressman, Ed Royce, is too busy overseas to worry about what families in our community need. I would be shocked if we hear anything from him, other than a solid 'yes' vote for whatever scheme Trump and Ryan come up with. Tax reform should be about making sure the middle class is still a reality for our community. We should scrap corporate tax reform and focus on reforms that help regular people. This includes increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding deductions on child care, student loans and home ownership, and promoting job creation by entrepreneurs and small business-- not paybacks to the uber wealthy. We can't continue to have an economy where so few can get ahead and so many are falling behind. Everything we are hearing on Trump's tax reform looks like a bad deal for our families. We need to stop this 'reform.'"And Randy Bryce, the ironworker and union and veterans' activist, challenging Paul Ryan for the southeast Wisconsin congressional seat, reminded us that "At the recent CNN media event that Paul Ryan had, he let it slip that tax reform really meant 'tax cuts' for the rich. The Banana Republicans aren’t fooling anyone when it comes to who they stand with. People across the country are admitting to having buyer’s remorse due to the 2016 election, and I personally can not wait for November 6, 2018 when we end one chapter that had them trying to bury working people only to find out that we were seeds."
