The Republican con on the debt ceiling

For generations, Republicans in Washington have relentlessly driven up the national debt by shoveling tax breaks to the rich. The cumulative impact has been staggering. In the 1950s, corporations paid 6 percent of the cost of running our country; today, that number has fallen to 1 percent. The 2017 Republican tax cuts were the latest blow — a $1.9 trillion giveaway to wealthy individuals and multinational corporations. And, as icing on the billionaire cake, decades of Republican attacks on the Internal Revenue Service have cut the risk of an audit in half for multimillionaires and corporate tax cheats.

Republicans don’t really care about the national debt. In fact, the first bill that House Republicans advanced would increase budget deficits in order to protect wealthy tax cheats. And new House rules say that additional tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations don’t need to be paid for. It seems that more debt is fine with Republicans in Congress, so long as it profits the wealthy and well-connected.

But that’s not enough. Republicans have committed to vote on a MAGA tax plan to slash total taxes for the wealthy and corporations, while hiking overall rates for everyone else. The Republicans’ 30 percent national sales tax will increase the cost of everything that families need, from food to diapers to gasoline — a hard punch in the gut for families already living on a…

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