No one should take pleasure from all the people being hurt by the Trump Family and Friends Republican Tax Cuts. But there’s some poetic justice in the collateral damage those tax cuts will wreak upon Donald Trump’s supporters in Wisconsin, a key state in electing a self-serving, brazenly corrupt president.
Republicans really didn’t mean to punish Trump supporters like House Speaker Paul Ryan and the four other Wisconsin Republican congressmen who voted for what objective analysts call the worst tax legislation in U.S. history—adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt to give massive tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. But that was the unintended consequence of rushing a sloppy, mean-spirited, immoral piece of legislation through Congress with hardly any public hearings before few who voted for the bill even had a chance to read it. Republicans just handed Democratic challengers to Ryan, Glenn Grothman, Jim Sensenbrenner, Sean Duffy and Mike Gallagher a great, big, gift-wrapped donation for the 2018 elections.
What Republicans had intended to do was itself irredeemably corrupt. They intended to politically distort the federal tax system to reward Republican states that voted for Trump and punish Democratic states that didn’t. They thought a clever way to accomplish that would be to eliminate the deductions federal taxpayers have taken for decades for what they already pay in state and local taxes.
‘Death’ to California and New York
National reporting on the provision correctly called it an attack on Democratic states such as New York and California that were more willing than Republican states to invest in needed community services. Stephen Moore, an economist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation supporting Republican tax cuts, was even more explicit. Moore called eliminating deductibility of local taxes “death to Democrats.”
To get enough Republican support from higher tax states, the final legislation put a cap of $10,000 on the deduction instead of totally eliminating it. That’s what created the rush at the end of 2017 of taxpayers all over the country frantically trying to pay their 2018 property taxes in advance to beat the cap. Trump’s Internal Revenue Service callously told them, “Fuhgeddabout it!”
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But that mad frenzy among owners of large properties everywhere demonstrated how Republicans accidentally savaged some of their own strongest supporters with a nasty little tax provision they were chortling about socking to Democrats. Combine the property tax provision with allowing interest to be deducted on mortgages only up to $750,000 (instead of $1 million as it was before), and wealthy folks in high-end real estate suddenly were prevented from reducing their taxable income by tens of thousands of dollars every year. Here’s looking at you, Waukesha!
Eliminating tens of thousands of dollars in property tax and mortgage interest deductions for suburban and exurban property owners will wipe out the meager, temporary tax cuts all but the super wealthy receive from the Republican tax law—unless you are lucky enough to qualify for the extra-low tax rate added to the law by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson that is available only to owners of special “pass through” businesses—such as those owned by…Trump and Johnson.
Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin still qualifies as a high-tax state despite everything he’s done since 2010 to join the race to the bottom in taxation that, for decades, has left Southern states like Mississippi and Alabama trailing the nation in education, public health and survival benefits. Walker’s failed to completely dismantle public institutions and services created by more progressive past leaders—both Democrat and Republican. We’re not a backwoods, dirt-road state yet.
Punishing Wisconsin
By voting for a tax law punishing Wisconsin, the state’s five Republican congressmen now join newly endangered Republican congressmen from other higher tax states—including three from Minnesota, three from Iowa, nine from New York (five of whom voted against the Republican tax cuts), five from New Jersey (four voting against) and a whopping 14 from California (only three voting against). Since Democrats need to flip only 24 seats to control the House, gains in those five states alone could do it.
Since Ryan was one of the few who actually knew the details of the tax law before it passed, that could explain the report that Ryan might not run for reelection. So, how ethical was it for Ryan to pressure fellow Republicans to vote for an unpopular tax bill when he was considering avoiding the political consequences himself?
No one will be surprised if even more horrors are uncovered in the monstrous, thrown-together Republican tax law before the 2018 elections. But Democrats already know enough about the disastrous consequences for upper-middle class property owners in the suburbs and beyond to speed up the already rapidly growing Democratic vote in many of those areas. That has the power to change political control at both the state and national levels. Gerrymandered voting districts may not be enough to save Republicans in a midterm wave if energized Democrats attract more votes than Republicans statewide.
