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March 29, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:23
Ep. 276 - Begun, The War On Conservatives Has
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After President Trump's devastating political defeat over Trumpcare, and his vow not to return to healthcare in its wake, Trump allies say that he will move next on tax reform.
That was an open question, actually, since Trump has also talked in sterling terms about a huge infrastructure bill that would dump a trillion bucks into public works.
But, given the Trumpcare political circular firing squad, will tax reform be any easier for Trump to ram through Congress?
Here are five things you need to know.
First, deficit matters.
One of the first prominent Republican talking points during the Obama era was that Obama had blown out the deficit, which of course he had.
The national debt was $10.6 trillion when Obama took office.
It was almost $20 trillion when Obama left office.
Tax reform, lowering the tax rate, will increase the deficit in the short term, even if the supply-side logic that economic growth will increase tax revenues pays off in the long term.
That means Republicans are going to have to contend with the slew of headlines that they're blowing out spending, even if they're just letting people keep their own money.
And that's if they don't use budget reconciliation.
If they do use the process known as budget reconciliation, they'll have to demonstrate that their plan won't increase the deficit over the next 10 years to only need 51 votes.
And the projected savings from Trumpcare, $1 trillion over 10 years supposedly, won't be available as an excuse to cut taxes since Trumpcare didn't pass, and since that estimate wasn't actually true.
Tax reform advocate Grover Norquist says Trumpcare's failure will only allow the top marginal tax rate to drop to 28% rather than 20% on this basis.
Second, Trump has sent mixed messages on taxes.
During the campaign, Trump's tax plan was one of the best among all Republican candidates.
He called for dramatic lowering of all of the top tax brackets.
But, in 2011, Trump said, quote, I don't mind sacrificing for the country, to be honest with you.
Before he rolled out his campaign plan, he talked openly about raising taxes on the highest income earners.
He said, I would let people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year pay some tax.
I don't mind paying a little more in taxes.
In May 2016, he dumped on his own tax plan after it came out.
He told CNBC he wasn't a fan of tax breaks for high earners.
He said, quote, I am so much more into the middle class who have just been absolutely forgotten in our country.
He said that his original tax plan was merely a negotiation starting point.
Trump said of tax rates for the highest earners, on my plan they're going down.
But by the time it's negotiated, they will go up.
Never mind that the top 20% of income earners pay 84% of all federal income taxes and nearly all of the net federal income tax.
Third, Trump loves tariffs.
So Trump thinks trade is a zero-sum game, a mercantilist position that has been debunked repeatedly by economists.
But that means he thinks that American companies can only benefit if we tax imports and subsidize exports.
Trump's plain and simple tariff plan has now been turned into something slightly more acceptable by the Republican Congress, the Border Adjustment Tax, which is essentially a value-added tax all of Europe.
Investment returns aren't tariffed, but all goods sold in the U.S.
are taxed at 20%, including investment goods, while the corporate tax is lowered.
That means a subsidy for exporting companies and a penalty for importers, even importers who buy products to use in exports.
This should raise the value of the dollar and buy an equivalent amount to the tax.
It also punishes importers.
But as William Gale of the Brookings Institution explains, quote, if the theory is correct and the exchange rate fully adjusts, rises by the level of the tax, the border adjustment would have no effect on the trade balance, the level of exports, the level of imports, the domestic price level, or the net profitability of importers and exporters.
Trump may embrace the border adjustment tax as a substitute for his tariff love, particularly since he doesn't seem to understand the intricacies of the border adjustment tax.
But what happens when free traders in Congress object, saying that importing American companies like Walmart shouldn't be penalized?
Or what happens when the World Trade Organization says the border adjustment tax breaks its rules, and Trump tries to ram it through anyway, calling those who oppose him globalists?
Fourth, Trump has very little leverage with Republicans at this point.
Trump threatened Republicans to pass Trumpcare.
Instead, he had to pull his bill because it appeared he'd be short by up to 40 votes in the House.
Trump's desire to rush the bill, his obvious lack of knowledge on the bill, his mixed messaging on its contents, all of it combined to undercut his leverage.
His leverage isn't going to grow on tax reform, particularly given all the interest involved.
Finally, Democrats are not going to work with Trump.
Trump seems to think that if Republicans won't work with him, Democrats will.
That's silly.
Democrats despise Trump.
They think he's weak.
They won't be able to answer to a base with a below 10% approval rating for the president.
So, is tax reform going to go better than health care reform?
Well, it'd be hard for it to go worse.
Some sort of deal is more likely to be hammered out for sure, but it won't be Trump just cutting the Gordian knot.
It will be a knotty, complex thicket.
The biggest question right now is whether Trump has the patience to actually push something through.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Wow.
When last we left our saga, it was totally unclear as to whether the bill would pass.
Whether, in fact, the Republicans would be able to pass Trumpcare.
The answer, it turns out, was no.
And we're going to get to all the ramifications of that, including, most importantly, as Yoda suggests, Except now it's the war on Republicans, the war on conservatives particularly, not the war on Republicans.
The war on conservatives has begun and we'll talk all about that because Trump is actually leading that war.
This is what some of us had feared, but we'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay.
So, again, when last we left our story, it was not clear.
It was Thursday, so we had to leave before the apex of the story, before the climax of the story, and the story climaxed with Trumpcare going down to flaming defeat.
And it went down to flaming defeat because it was a crappy bill.
Let's be frank about this.
There's a lot of blame to go around.
The people who are not to blame, the only people who are not to blame in this whole situation are the people who took seriously the promises that they made to the American people over and over and over again for seven years that they were going to repeal Obamacare.
Not replace it with Obamacare Light, not replace it with Obamacare Part 2.0, not replace it with a new subsidy, not replace it with a new entitlement program, Not replace it with the same central regulations that Obamacare maintained?
No, no, no.
The people who are honest, the people who are not to blame here, are the people who are not lying to you.
Namely, the people in the House Freedom Caucus.
So who's getting blamed?
Any guesses?
That's right.
The House Freedom Caucus, of course.
Because if you have the gall to cross Donald Trump, that means that you must pay the price.
Now, it is worthwhile noting, it was not just the House Freedom Caucus that opposed this bill.
Apparently the reason that it was pulled is it wasn't even close.
So Republicans right now have like a 40-seat majority in the House.
They could have lost 22 votes on this thing and still been able to pass it.
They didn't.
They were losing something close to 50 or 60 votes on this thing.
Not only the Freedom Caucus.
A lot of moderates didn't like it.
The moderates didn't like it because the CBO score on this thing sucked.
It was wildly unpopular.
17% of Americans were approving of Trumpcare.
Okay, that was much less popular than Obamacare, even when Obamacare passed, and that was an unpopular piece of legislation.
When Obamacare passed, it was at 40% in the approval ratings.
Trumpcare was at 17% in the approval ratings.
So it's political suicide for a lot of these members to vote for this crappy bill.
And so it went down.
And naturally, the moderates weren't blamed.
Paul Ryan wasn't really blamed, except by people like me.
Donald Trump wasn't blamed because Donald Trump can never be blamed for anything because we have so much stake in him that we must we must greenlight anything he ever does.
Every excuse must be made for him.
The radically shifting logic about Donald Trump in order to make excuses for the fact that he did a pretty terrible job pushing this bill is it's pretty it's pretty amazing.
I want to go through each player in this drama and explain what they did right and what they did wrong, and who deserves the blame.
But right now, all fire is focused on the conservatives, and Donald Trump and his team are openly saying that they now want to pander to Democrats, that they want to turn to the left.
And we'll get to that in just a little while.
But first, first, what did Trump do wrong?
Here's what Trump did wrong.
Trump had no ass on this.
What I mean by that is that Trump did not have the patience to sit for 13 months and hash out a deal the way Obama did with Obamacare.
Obama was a terrible president.
He was.
But the man at least had ass enough to sit around for 13 months and hash out a deal with his own people for 13 months.
13 months!
Donald Trump gave the sucker about 13 days.
Really, it was like 17 days from inception to failure.
And that was after seven years of planning.
Why was that?
Well, the reason was because Trump signaled to Ryan he didn't have the ass to do this for 17 months or 13 months or 13 minutes.
He signaled to Ryan, you better give me what I want.
We better get this thing through fast.
I don't want to spend political capital on this.
I don't want to be going into the midterm elections talking about this.
I don't want to be going into re-election talking about this.
And I don't want to pay the political price For repealing Obamacare, if it means that my promises that I should never have made about health insurance aren't able to come true.
So Ryan immediately went to the drawing board.
He negotiated with himself, right?
He didn't go and put together a national coalition.
He didn't have time for that.
And he didn't have time to coordinate with McConnell or with the House Freedom Caucus.
Trump didn't bother to actually have these people over for dinner and try and talk with them until the last five minutes before the bill was rammed through.
Even when it was rammed through, he then deployed the absolute rhetorical blunderbuss of Steve Bannon to walk into the room with the House Freedom Caucus and yell at them, which is Steve's preferred mode of communication.
Also, it doesn't hurt Steve in any way to do that, obviously, because he gets to show Donald Trump what a loyal guy he is.
And if the thing goes down, guess who gets blamed?
Reince Priebus, which is what he likes anyway.
In any case, Trump didn't care about this issue.
Trump made a bunch of false promises about this particular issue.
You can't have repeal of Obamacare without a death spiral.
You can't repeal the individual mandate without a death spiral unless you're willing to relieve the central regulations in Obamacare.
Trump was not willing to do that, and so Trump tried to ram through a bill that was bad, and then he disowned the thing.
Tom Cotton got this pretty much right.
The senator from Arkansas.
He said, look, you cannot release a plan in 18 days and hope that this thing is going to go through.
The biggest broken promise in political history.
What's your reaction to that judgment?
Well, John, first I'd say the President is right that the Democrats gave us Obamacare and the failure of this bill this week doesn't solve the problems of Obamacare.
It's continuing to get worse and our health care system is groaning under the weight of Obamacare.
So we have to revisit it.
We now have the time to do it in a more deliberate and careful fashion.
But ultimately I don't think you can lay the defeat of this bill last week on any single faction in the House of Representatives.
Some conservatives opposed it.
Some moderates opposed it.
Even chairmen of powerful committees opposed it.
I just think the problem was with first the bill and then the process.
Healthcare is a very complicated issue.
To release a bill that was written in secret and then expect to pass it in 18 days, I just don't think was feasible.
And so the reason that it had to be passed in 18 days is because of Trump.
Because Trump wanted it now.
He wanted what he wanted now.
And he wasn't going to take no for an answer.
And so Ryan had two choices.
He could either go and do all the hard slogging and ignore Trump and then present Trump with a bill after he did all the hard slogging with Trump pushing against him the entire time, or he could try and do Trump's bidding and become his lackey on this thing.
And then the thing presumably would pass because the idea here was that Ryan would lock down the establishment.
Trump would lock down the Freedom Caucus.
And together, they would be able to ram this thing through.
That didn't happen because the bill itself was garbage.
And now I don't believe what Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget, what He said, oh yeah, the problem here is that Trump just didn't think that D.C.
DC was this broken.
So the president himself pins this on the Freedom Caucus Club for Growth Heritage Foundation, so essentially conservative interest groups and the most conservative caucus in the house, a caucus you were a member of just six months ago.
Yeah, and I think there's probably plenty of blame to go around.
As we sat over the last two days and tried to figure out what happened, I think what happened is that Washington won.
I think the one thing we learned this week is that Washington was a lot more broken than President Trump thought that it was.
This is nonsense.
President Trump ran on the promise that Washington, D.C.
was broken and he could fix it immediately.
He doesn't have the patience to actually fix it.
It's not an easy process.
It's not something where you can come in and just use your big businessman skills and cut the Gordian knot.
That's not how this works.
So that's the blame that Trump bears is really a character flaw with him, which is that he has a lack of attention.
He didn't care about these issues to begin with.
He didn't have the ass to sit there for 13 months and actually just put together a bill that would work.
Now, the other person who's to blame here mostly is Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan absolutely is to blame here.
Paul Ryan is the one who decided to go along with Trump's shortened timeline, his stupid timeline.
It was a dumb timeline.
He's the one who decided that instead of going and negotiating with all the various parties, I mean, Paul Ryan's been there for a while.
He could have spent the past few months going to all the available parties and talking with them about what can pass and what can't, going to the Freedom Caucus and saying what can pass and what can't.
Instead, he didn't.
He waited for Trump to become president, and then he tried to rush this thing through in about five minutes.
That is Paul Ryan's fault.
It is his job to cobble together a bill that people can actually vote for.
Instead, he cobbled together the single most unpopular bill I have ever seen proposed in front of the House Republicans by House Republicans.
It's astonishing.
I mean, do you understand how crazy it is?
I mean, John Boehner did this a couple of times, but you understand how crazy it is that Paul Ryan, who's supposed to be the consensus guy, the guy who had to be begged into being Speaker of the House, couldn't put together a bill better than this?
So, naturally, this led to some controversy.
Everybody has sort of been expecting Trump to dump Paul Ryan under the bus, because Ryan is allied with Reince Priebus in the White House, and Steve Bannon doesn't like Reince Priebus or Paul Ryan, and so there's been a lot of Machiavellian manipulations here.
So over the weekend, Donald Trump tweeted that he wanted everybody to watch Judge Jeanine Pirro.
And people didn't know what he was talking about.
There was one theory that was plausible that suggested that he was talking about Judge Jeanine was supposed to reveal something about the leaks investigation or something.
But Trump saw that because there was like a little chyron on Fox.
The other theory is that he told people to watch Judge Jeanine because he knew Judge Jeanine was going to lead off with this rant.
So here's Judge Jeanine.
Paul Ryan needs to step down as Speaker of the House.
The reason?
He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill.
You know, Americans elected the one man they believed could do it.
A complete outsider.
Someone beholding to no one but them.
Trump's team said that this was all a big coincidence.
They didn't mean to tell people through Jeanine Pirro that Paul Ryan should be fired.
Should Paul Ryan step down?
No, I don't see why Paul Ryan should step down.
I just think that he shouldn't push crappy legislation in the future.
John Boehner should have stepped down because John Boehner actually wanted to negotiate with Democrats to ram through things.
If Paul Ryan starts to do that, if Paul Ryan follows the pattern here, I think that it's going to be a serious problem.
Priebus came out.
He said that the tweet about Ryan was coincidental.
Well, first of all, I will go on record, we do love Judge Jeanine, and so does the President.
I think it was more coincidental, Chris.
Oh, come on.
I did not talk to the President about the tweet.
I'm just telling you the truth.
There was no pre-planning here.
You didn't pre-plan it, but why would he say, watch her, and then that's the first thing out of our minds?
Because he loves Judge Jeanine, and he wanted to do Judge Jeanine a favor.
So does he want Paul Ryan to step down?
No, he doesn't.
Okay, we can stop it there.
Of course, Reince Priebus is going to be saying that.
I'd be more assured if Steve Bannon were saying that, because Steve Bannon actually hates Paul Ryan, whereas Reince Priebus is from Wisconsin and is close friends with Paul Ryan.
Well, I want to get to the House Freedom Caucus and Trump attacking them in just one second.
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Okay, so the reason all of this fighting, infighting has broken out is because President Trump Refuses to let the buck stop with him.
So again, this is one character flaw for Trump.
He never just says, okay, my bad.
We should have done this differently.
Back to the drawing board.
Instead, he issued an ultimatum last Thursday in which he said, if we don't get a vote right now, we're not going to do anything on health care because he didn't want to deal with the problem.
And then he blamed the Freedom Caucus.
So here is what Trump tweeted about the Freedom Caucus.
He tweeted, Democrats are smiling in D.C.
that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club for Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood and Ocare.
This is absolutely galling and disgusting.
The only people who saved Planned Parenthood and the funding for Obamacare and all the rest of it are Donald Trump and Paul Ryan and all the people who wanted to push this crappy bill.
Because the fact is that this crappy bill would have maintained all the central provisions of Obamacare.
The only good thing it did was restructure Medicaid.
Making it into a block grant instead of a need-based program.
Even that would have changed over time because a new Congress would come in from the Democratic side and presumably reinstate it.
It wouldn't make it a permanent change.
This idea that it was the Freedom Caucus that really sunk this, Club for Growth and Heritage, all those people supported him.
I didn't vote for Trump.
I didn't vote for Hillary either.
I didn't vote for either of them because when it came to Trump, I was concerned that Trump would basically just be, he would govern like a Democrat and undercut a lot of conservative values.
That's not true of the Freedom Caucus, or Heritage, or Club for Growth.
All of them openly supported President Trump, and here is Trump slapping them in the face as hard as he possibly can.
And let's just point out, when it comes to Planned Parenthood, when it comes to single-payer healthcare, there's only one person in this entire equation who has come out in favor of those things.
Let's flash back just a few short months ago.
When you get rid of the lines, it brings in competition.
So instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York or Texas, you'll have many.
They'll compete, and it'll be a beautiful thing.
As far as Planned Parenthood is concerned, I'm pro-life.
I'm totally against abortion having to do with Planned Parenthood.
But millions and millions of women Cervical cancer, breast cancer are helped by Planned Parenthood.
So you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly.
As far as single payer, it works in Canada.
It works incredibly well in Scotland.
It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you're talking about here.
What I'd like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state.
Get rid of the artificial lines, and you will have yourself great plans.
And then we have to- We can stop it there, okay.
The artificial lines, guess what wasn't in that bill?
Oh yeah, the artificial lines.
None of that was in the bill.
And this is the only guy on the stage who was talking about single-parent, how wonderful it was in other countries.
So before you start ripping on the Freedom Caucus for saving Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, Couple notes.
Number one, even this bill delayed funding for Planned Parenthood by one year.
One year.
That's it.
It didn't abolish funding for Planned Parenthood.
Second of all, again, Trump talking as though he cares about this stuff is really galling.
The people who truly cared about this stuff weren't willing to enshrine all of this bad policy.
Okay.
So I'm going to get to the Freedom Caucus response and what is obviously a war on conservatives that has now begun.
We may have seen the high watermark of Trump as a conservative, which I certainly hope that's not the case.
I hope that he turns back to the conservatives.
But we'll talk about all of that Over at dailywire.com.
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