Democrats Are Trying To Beat Nothing With Nothing

As I mentioned in my previous post, and despite their self-identification as America's tax-cutters, first and foremost, Republicans are having a very hard time trying to come up with any content for their proposed tax-cutting bill.  That's proof enough that people no longer buy the idea of self-financing tax-cuts anymore.  Voters understand, however reluctantly, that any tax cuts will have to be paid for in one or both of two ways:  revenue hikes elsewhere, in the form of user fees or the reduction/elimination of tax breaks, or reduced spending on government programs.

From the looks of things, it appears that we're going to get a mix of both.  The GOP-controlled Congress has already passed a budget blueprint that reduces funding for Medicare and Medicaid by $1.5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.  The rest of the bill for the plutocrats' dream-come-true will apparently be paid for by the middle class, in one form or another.  In particular, blue-state working families will pay through the elimination of the state-and-local-tax-deduction, a purely punitive move designed to punish the states that, in fact, provide the majority of Federal revenues.

Bruce Bartlett, whose interview with Bill Moyers I quoted in my previous post, has been fairly actively lately on Twitter, making several of the points he made in the interview (see here and here, for example).  But he also makes an important point here, regarding the Democratic response to the GOP tax-cut push.

And what is the Democratic response?

As they say in the world of social media:  ,

Well, that may not be entirely fair.  As always, there has been a lot of attitudinizing, along the lines of reverse-Robin-Hood rhetoric of the sort that most Democrats and other progressives have mastered a long time ago.  There has even been this commendable, if politically, unrealistic proposal to reduce the level of child poverty.  But a comprehensive proposal that would reduce taxes where they need to be reduced the most--not only on working families, but also on emerging, "green" industries--and would be paid for by closing loopholes for those who don't need them?  Forget it.  Too risky.  Too hard to defend.

Or so they think.

To borrow a piece of rhetoric from Trump (which I loath to do), why not stand for something?  It's not like Democrats are down in the polls; in fact, the reverse is very much the case.  People are listening to you, Democrats.  They're expecting you to put something on the table other than "I mean, have you seen the other guys?" or "Make Congress Blue Again."  And the other side is making it easy for you:  on their signature issue, they're going to come up with either nothing or disaster.  Hell, they've even got someone on their side who might be willing to work with you.

Get out of your defense crouch, Nancy and Chuck.  Americans want to give you the ball.  For G-d's sake, and for the sake of the rest of us, come up with a plan to run with it.  You can't beat nothing with nothing and, if you don't at least try, nothing is all any of us may have.