The Republican Party's top priority is to raise taxes on the poor. Literally. [View all]

[YoungDemCA]

A few takeaways from this. First, it's yet another reminder that Republicans don't care about the national debt. Conservative carping about the debt is 100 percent of the time a rhetorical cudgel deployed with utter cynicism against programs they dislike for other reasons. When the topic is food stamps or unemployment insurance, they demand offsets to pay for them. (Because "we're broke," as Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put it in a similar context.) But when it comes to dropping planeloads of money on corporations and rich people, Republicans will casually blow a half-trillion hole in the 10-year budget without blinking.

We can safely assume that should Republicans win in 2016, they'll take all the reduction in the budget deficit accomplished over the Obama years (at great cost and for no benefit, but that's another story) and do the same thing that George W. Bush did: hand it immediately to the rich.

That's not all, though. Unlike Bush, who gave his eye-wateringly regressive tax cuts a patina of democratic legitimacy by cutting the non-rich in on a small fraction of the spoils, Republicans are now firmly committed to the idea that poor people don't pay enough in taxes. The Earned Income Tax Credit was originally a conservative alternative to the welfare state, but increasingly only Democrats support it. Republicans are convinced that the EITC is riddled with fraud, and that voting for it means giving welfare to unauthorized immigrants. (In reality, the EITC results in quite a lot of technically improper payments, but mostly as a result of unnecessary complexity.)

Massive transfers of money to the rich are one half of the Republican economic policy agenda; massive transfers of money away from poor are the other half. And the cuts would be cruel indeed:


For example, a single mother with two children working full time in a nursing home for the minimum wage and earning
$14,500 would lose her entire Child Tax Credit of $1,725 if the CTC provision expires.

-CBPP

Apparently, cutting the income of a poor working single mother by 12 percent is good and proper conservative policymaking in 2014. Because immigration.

http://theweek.com/article/index/272922/the-republican-partys-top-priority-is-to-raise-taxes-on-the-poor-literally

They get off on their cruelty. Being the anti-Robin Hood is enjoyable for them.

Why are these people in power again?