Trump

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Budget Fog and Budget Clarity

On a clear day we can dream of being free from the farce and incompetence that is Trump. Meanhwile back in reality …

The Trump budget released this week is both indescribably foggy and clear as a bright spring day. It is a perfect statement of ‘Trumpism’ from its devastation of the poor, through its privilege for the rich, and its arrogance towards and ignorance of process. Let’s not get carried away though: this budget, like all presidential budgets is symbolic. It has no meaning other than as an indication of Trump’s personal priorities, which, apparently, are entirely plutocratic in tenor. The American budgetary process is convoluted and ultimate authority resides in Congress. So while a future Federal budget might ultimately embody many of Trump’s ideas, the document released this week is simply a starting point.

Further, given the arcane bureaucracy that is Congress, the budget will be subject to obscure procedural rules, particularly in the Senate where the much discussed reconciliation process will come into play. The Republicans are in a rush to slash taxes for the rich, and they want to destroy health care for the poor, both of which efforts are using up slots in the reconciliation calendar. This means that Congress will be very slow to take up a budget debate and will have to wait for the Congressional Budget Office to score those other efforts before it can start in earnest on budget matters.

With that all said, let’s take a look at Trump’s wish list.

First the clarity.

He wants to slash spending on the poor. And I mean slash. His budget aims at eliminating the deficit in ten years. To do that he takes sharp aim at Medicaid, which he wants to halve; he hammers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka Food Stamps); and, contrary to his campaign promises, he reduces parts of Medicare. These programs combine to be the backbone of support for tens of millions of low income Americans. Attacking them in this way will heighten poverty, increase insecurity, and cost the lives of many who no longer will receive health care of any kind. This part of his program is pure right wing callousness unadorned and direct.

He also wants to slash government. He proposes cuts in the departmental budgets of most, if not all, government departments. Some, like the Environmental Protection Agency, will be cut by upwards of 30%. The State Department, too, gets gutted. Neither of these is a surprise. Two of Trump’s major supporters have been lobbying hard for the cuts. The big oil and coal producers want to gut environmental laws, and Russia simply hates the State Department and all that ‘soft power’ money it slops around the world to entice nations into falling for the allure of democracy. At least Trump is being honest about how much in thrall to Putin he is.

Then, this being a pretty straightforward Republican budget, comes the obligatory increase in offense spending and in national security generally. This includes a big dollop of money for Trump’s wall along the Mexican border. There is no indication as yet about how he intends to get Mexico to pay for this. I guess we will have to wait on that.

That’s the clarity: you will notice that the goal for a balanced budget has no reference to the part the rich will play. Presumably they will benefit but not have to sacrifice. As I said: pure plutocracy.

Next comes the fog:

Given that the Republicans want to cut taxes for the rich, even theses draconian cuts in social programs don’t balance the budget in the desired timeframe. So Trump’s budget assumes a 3% annual growth rate in the economy. This is absurd. In an era of slowing population growth, weak productivity growth, and demographic shifts such as the massive wave of baby-boomer retirement, annual growth of 3% is a pipe dream. It is a fantasy. To add to the stupidity of the assumption is the realization that the Trump team began with it as a foundation for their budget process. It wasn’t an outcome of their budget priorities, it was an input from the very beginning. So the minions putting the budget together had to take the fantasy into account no matter how ridiculous it is.

Now for the good bit: the budget includes the impact of the tax reform Trump has already announced. In the budget those tax cuts, which cut a swathe out of Federal revenues, are treated as revenue neutral. In other words whilst they cut revenues because they are tax cuts, they are assumed to ‘pay for themselves’ by stimulating growth sufficiently for the government to earn extra tax revenues. The government, Trump argues, will make the loss up in volume. This is laughable, but is accepted amongst Republican policy makers who all want to deny blowing the deficit wide open.

Wait for it …

Then, when these tax cuts are included in the budget they are assumed to work this miracle all over again. Yes, you read that correctly. The tax cuts not only ‘pay for themselves’ as tax cuts, but they then repeat the process and stimulate growth to allow the budget to arrive at a balance ten years out.

I have never seen anything so brazenly stupid. Nor as plain dumb. This isn’t the sort of double entry bookkeeping I was taught way back in my accounting days. This is way more imaginativetive. It is a triple entry at a minimum, with more entries to come as the Trump administration flounders about in a mess of its own making.

Trump is inventing growth to cover the brutal insanity of his budget. Even the Republicans are repulsed at his plans. Not that they are much better.

Just as a brief indicator of how the Republican’s various policy goals are contradictory, think about the impact of population growth on the budget. Trump is virulently anti-immigrant. By slowing down the influx of immigrants he is, coincidentally, reducing the increase in the working age population. That acts as a significant drag on growth. Yet this is ignored by the Republican hierarchy. Where is the workforce needed to get growth up to 3% to come from? Are they building a time machine to go back to the 1990’s and boost the birthrate?

As I said fog!

One last thing: normal presidents have decent enough relationships with Congress that their budget proposals conform closely with Congressional political possibilities. This is especially true when the president is lucky enough to have a Congress dominated by his (or her?) own party. In Trump’s case he seems not to care. He has simply dumped this budget without any fanfare in the lap of Congress and walked away. Doubtless he will brag about it when he returns from abroad, but his total disregard for the niceties of political relationship building could not be on more public display. He simply doesn’t give a damn about Congress. Like most want-to-be autocrats he has nothing but disdain for the democratic process. But democracy is a pain. It bites back.

Which is why Trump’s budget will go nowhere.

Fortunately. Because it’s horrendous.

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That’s a Tax Plan?

Well, no, it isn’t. It’s a draft of a sketch of an outline of a synopsis of what a tax plan might look like were it designed exclusively to serve the interests of the drafter/sketcher/outliner.

With great fanfare and pomp the White House rolled out its “huge”tax plan. As predicted it is not a plan, it is a tax cut for the wealthy.  And, also as predicted, it is more ghost than real. The entire thing fits onto one side of a piece of paper. It is a typically bureaucratic bullet-point presentation of suggestions that Congress might, or might not, want to take into consideration as it works on its own tax plan.

The entire thing is a farce. It is yet further confirmation that Trump has no clue about governance, or about legislation, or about anything much to do with being president. Oh well, he’s what we’re stuck with.

But, what the piece of paper tells us is interesting. It gives us insight into the minds of the plutocrats that now control the country. Let’s be honest: neither Gary Cohn nor Steve Mnuchin, the two ex-Goldman Sachs financiers who make up Trump’s economic team, are so stupid as to believe that massive tax cuts will lead to extraordinary economic growth. They know better. It’s just that after four decades of selling tax cuts to voters the Republicans have discovered that most people are sufficiently blinded by the prospect of a sliver of gain for themselves that they will happily ignore the torrent of gold that floods into the coffers of the wealthy.

The moral bankruptcy of the sales pitch is breathtaking. It ignores the recent example of the state of Kansas under the leadership of Governor Brownback. Kansas became a test bed for the more virulent form of conservative tax theory that Trump’s erstwhile plan embodies. And the Kansas experiment has been an unmitigated disaster.

Not only did Kansas not benefit from a surge in employment when it slashed taxes — it has seen weaker employment growth than most other states — but its budget was thrown into chaos. The state’s credit rating has been cut. It has had to undergo crisis financial management that includes cuts to popular services like education. And it still is in fiscal turmoil. None of the promised benefits from the tax cuts turned up. On the contrary: Kansas has become a fiscal basket case and a premier example of why far right tax plans are to be avoided at all costs.

Yet here we are with Trump trying to turn the entire US into Kansas.

Why?

It isn’t because he is clueless. Nor is it because he is ill-informed. Cohn and Mnuchin are too smart for that. It is because he is a plutocrat. It’s as simple as that. Trump himself will get a tax cut of around $30 million a year from his own plan. On any other planet that would smell of corruption, but in planet-USA it is positioned as a pro-growth strategy to generate jobs for the plebes.

Now, I could support a thorough revision of the US tax code. It is so ridiculous and riddled through with special interest driven exceptions that it needs tossing out and totally re-inventing. At one point in his presentation Cohn mentioned that the intention was to produce a radically reduced and simplified tax code. Great, but the one page we were given didn’t get us there. Instead it featured a breathtaking giveaway to the wealthy and to business.

Republicans are always telling us that the US tax rate for corporations is the highest in the western world. That’s true, it is. But corporations don’t pay the nominal rate, they pay a much lower rate after taking all sorts of deductions that lobbyists have managed to insert into the tax code. That’s why the code is so complicated. Most large companies pay a very low actual rate of tax. Many pay nothing at all, even after making enormous profits. The same is true of wealthy taxpayers who can exploit all sorts of loopholes to minimize their tax rates.

Most people know this. Yet the Republicans keep up with the special pleading anyway.

Trump’s suggestions do include a few things for the average voter: the old seven tax brackets are condensed into three, although we have no idea at what income levels these brackets kick in; and the standard deduction would be doubled, meaning there would be virtually no tax below an income of $24,000. The plan is decidedly partisan in one way at the individual level: it would do away with a whole host of popular deductions that have particular impact in typically Democratic states like California and New York. Those states tend to have higher local taxes to pay for their higher quality education systems and public services. Eliminating the ability to use those local taxes as a Federal deduction would put huge pressure in those states to cut services like education. The Republicans apparently want to turn the entire country into Alabama or Mississippi. The want to initiate a race to the bottom in public service. Right now low quality service tastes benefit from an inflow of residents who have been educated in higher quality service states. Their workforces do not reflect their own service levels but those elsewhere. Once we have squeezed quality down everywhere, those inflows will cease.

Worse: since the higher quality service states are typically those where the economy is strongest, they have sent to Washington tax revenues far in excess of any subsidies they receive back. In effect the blue states pay into and the red states draw out from the Federal Budget. Trump’s tax plan will exaggerate the subsidy the blue states pump into the red states. At some point this will have to become an explosive political issue. Right now most taxpayers are blissfully unaware of it.

Fortunately, none of this matters much.

This meager beginning is just a start in what will be a long and drawn out battle. Most of what we saw yesterday will not make it into the final package that emerges from the arcane processes of Congress.

Oh, and we will now see just how committed the Republicans are to their fiscal conservatism. After years of bleating about the deficit during the Obama years will they simply “do a Cheney” and suddenly argue that deficits don’t matter? The Trump plan would blow hole of up to  $7 trillion in the budget over the next ten years. Either the Republicans have to let that happen or they need to find ways to cover the gap. Current Senate rules forces any tax legislation with a life beyond ten years to be “revenue neutral” — they must not add to the deficit —  this is why the Bush tax cuts were phased out after ten years, or they would have been had they not been re-upped. So do the Republicans go for another ten year deal? Or do they tackle the tax code once and for all?

The Trump plan gives us no insight. It isn’t worth the paper it is written on. So it’s a good job there wasn’t much paper involved.

One last thing, for all of you who thought a vote for Trump was a vote for fair trade: the Trump tax plan has abandoned his much ballyhooed tax on importers. He caved to pressure from the retailing industry.

What a negotiator!

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Tax Reform – Maybe Not

I have a friend here who is an ardent Republican, It has been fun watching as he adapts to the reality of Trump, and is now a partisan cheerleader for someone who, a few months back, was anathema to him. Such is the power of tribal politics.

In any case, not to depress him, I ought to note quickly that the much vaunted tax reform proposed by Paul Ryan is almost certainly dead. This is not to argue that tax reform won’t happen. I think it might. It just won’t bear much resemblance to what Paul Ryan was looking for.

This failure, coming so soon after his abject defeat over health care might be the death knell of Ryan’s short leadership of the House Republican caucus.

Yes, I know that the media is full of hushed talk about the re-vitalization of health care reform. But that looks more aspirational than fact. The essential problem that scuppered the Ryan/Trump plan still remains: there are a large number of Republicans in the House that object to all and every government involvement in health care insurance. They see it as a massive invasion of individual freedoms — how Friedman-like of them — and would prefer to rely on the magic of private markets to do the dirty work. In other words they see health care as just another commodity up for sale and not anything deserving of special status. If you aren’t covered by health care insurance then that’s your choice. If you can’t afford coverage, they argue, then stop buying other stuff, like food for instance. In this stance they are fully supported by mainstream economics in which everything is a commodity and consumers always optimize their purchases. According to economic theory if you aren’t covered by insurance its because you chose not to be. Don’t forget this is the same crowd that tells you that if you are unemployed its because you want to be. Employment is, after all, a choice like everything else.

The problem for the House freedom fighters is that they represent only a small part of the overall Republican party. The rest have, begrudgingly, taken on board the reality that Obamacare has re-shaped the discussion on health care. Getting rid of it would be an enormous political risk. So the party is deeply divided and can only legislate on health care with Democratic cooperation. Since that would come at a price — as in keeping Obamacare and fixing it rather than abolishing it and starting over — Ryan led reform is dead.

Now: about tax reform.

The Republicans are deeply divided over this too. Who could have guessed it? And, once again, Ryan seems to be out on a limb.

The core of his much talked about plan is the adoption of a Destination Based Cash Flow Tax [DBCFT]. Such a tax is designed to turn the US into a massive tax shelter. Companies based in the US could export products and deduct the value of the cost of those products for tax purposes. Conversely, companies importing goods would be unable to deduct the cost of those goods for tax purposes. The whole idea being to protect and encourage exports and penalize imports.

The issue is that an enormous amount of American end-sales are sourced from abroad. Most retailers are huge importers and would face extraordinary increases in their tax bills. They would be forced to pass that increase in cost on to customers causing a huge rise in retail prices. Unsurprisingly, companies like Walmart and Target have come out strongly against such a tax.

The fun fact here is that the tax is a liberal idea developed by academic economists who argue that the radical rise in retail prices would be precisely offset by a change in the value of the dollar. This is because of the shift in the US trade balance brought about, presumably, by the tax. So Ryan is pushing something that has its origins in a leftish academic setting.

Funnier still is that plenty of Republican opposition to the tax centers on the entirely academic idea that the exchange rate will, indeed, adjust enough to offset the enormous profit hit taken by the likes of Walmart, which is, lest we forget, the largest employer in the country. The academics, naturally, think this cleverness based on their theories is nothing to worry about.

What’s not to like?

Well, a lot.

It seems as if several Republicans have cottoned onto the fact that academic economics is sufficiently disconnected from reality that it cannot be trusted when we are thinking of tampering with hundreds of thousands of jobs. And, yes, I am aware of my pun: some of the loudest opposition is coming from Senator Cotton of Arkansas, a state which, just coincidentally I am sure, is home base for Walmart. Apparently many politicians are as skeptical of academic economics as I am. They ought to be. Who knew I would have something in common with Senator Cotton?

The problem for Ryan is that he was relying on a DBCFT to finance the rest of his tax reform. It was projected to generate about $1 trillion over its first ten years, which was sufficient to allow a major reduction in the corporate tax rate, from 35% to 20%, and since its cost effects were supposed to be offset by that rise in the dollar he had hoped its effects would be invisible to the general public. He had, he thought, found a perfect tax reduction technique for his corporate sponsors. Unfortunately the realities both of politics and the weakness of academic economics unmasked his scheme. Without that $1 trillion his entire tax reform plan unravels and he is left with nothing.

Hence the current inaction and evasion in the House.

Meanwhile Trump has promised us a big and beautiful tax reform of his own and keeps promising that it is being worked on. Any day now we will learn its wonderful details. Any day now.

Having flubbed his opening lines on health care — he had no plan so he relied on Ryan which turned out to be a political disaster — Trump is under pressure to introduce his own policy. Up until now we have no idea of what a Trump plan might look like. Other than, that is, its undoubted wondrousness. He has hinted he likes a Value Added tax [VAT], but traditional Republicans hate VAT because they see it a as stealth method for paying for social programs like health care. Reagan said as much.

Given that he hasn’t staffed up the Treasury Department it seems unlikely that his Treasury Secretary will be of much use. So he is relying on Gary Cohn, his economic advisor, as architect. No one knows what will arrive, or when. The Trump administration is in its infancy and seems chaotic. It is yet to settle into anything resembling governance. So something like tax reform, which needs careful construction and lots of political selling in Congress looks like a long shot. At least for now. Maybe later? Any day now …

The Republican jubilation at their surprise victory last November and their total control of Congress led them to announce a massive and rapid legislative revolution. Health care and tax reform were the centerpieces of this program, along with, if you believe Trump,  an infrastructure plan. So far nothing has turned up, time is going by, and muddle along with defeat is the order of the day.

What this means for Ryan is anyone’s guess, but even his most ardent supporters must be getting tired of him by now. And he must be, surely, getting tired of his extremist freedom fighting colleagues. Maybe he’ll quit?

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Infrastructure? Not So Much

In the aftermath of the health care debacle Trump has been busying himself, so we are told, with other big projects. Tax reform is one. A huge infrastructure effort is another. Well, count me as skeptical. There are reasons to question whether either is going to see the light of day any time soon.

One is that Trump has no grasp of complex issues.

Let that settle in for a moment.

The Trump campaign was saturated with bombast, politically charged nonsense, venality of various sorts, and plenty of extravagant promises. The health care disaster gives us into insight into how to think about those promises. They have no content. It appears that none of those promises had any substance beyond being clever voter catchers. We best treat them as placeholders taking up space on a shelf of potential policy ideas that need bringing to life at a later date. They do not represent a currently existing policy, or even the skeleton of one.

This became obvious during the health care defeat. Trump left a long and very public trail of comments littered throughout the election campaign. He promised all sorts of things, sometimes in such general language that listeners with contradictory interpretations could be equally accurate in their portrayal of what he said. Nonetheless there was a general shape of a “Trump” policy discernible: low cost, universal coverage, more choice and so on. That there was no actual Trump policy became clear when, during the defeat, Trump outsourced the development of a plan to the House Republicans led by Paul Ryan. Then, when the House GOP plan was launched Trump simply advocated it as if it reflected and embodied his election promises even though it manifestly did not. Indeed in some circumstances it was a flat out rejection of those promises.

What do we make of this when we relate it to infrastructure?

First: we can conclude that Trump has no plan or policy to back up his promises. He simply threw out a lot of commentary that could have been easily overheard in any public place where voters were complaining about their commute, the state of the roads, yet another power outage, or the cancellation of their train. He was playing back to his audience well known grievances. He was not providing a solution. And he still isn’t.

Second: we can also conclude that the emergence of an actual infrastructure plan depends not on Trump but on other people. That might be someone within his administration, although who we are not sure. Or it might be someone in the Republican party, although with their longstanding opposition to government involvement in thee economy  it isn’t clear which GOP official would summon up the courage to take the lead on something like infrastructure which is most likely going to need lots of Federal spending to get it done.

Third: we can also expect lots of continued vaporware. Trump specializes in making vacuous comments that exist only to fill spaces. He has no intention of acting on all theses comments, but he fills the space nonetheless in order to reserve it for future use. This, I suspect, is a strategy he has used frequently in business: make a bold announcement about a project, wait to see what blows back, and then, only under propitious circumstances, explore the possibility of action. Action is, in other words, not contingent on his announcement, but on his subsequent analysis of the criticism of the content of that announcement. In Trump’s mind making a slew of announcements during an election is the equivalent of lining up an inventory of possible things to do. It is not a promise to do any of them.

Fourth: we can expect to hear about all the specialists and experts in the private sector Trump will somehow involve in getting infrastructure projects done. He has already mentioned two: Richard Le Frak and Steve Roth, both of whom have similar profiles to Trump. They are both scions of New York real estate development families with experience primarily in the completion of middle class housing projects. People driving into Manhattan from Queens will no doubt recognize ‘Le Frak City’. These two are supposed to be the first of a group of about twenty such developers, drawn from all over the country, who will advise on infrastructure projects. The problem is that there is no evidence at all of any others being added to the group. Nor is there any evidence of any projects being identified for such a group to consider or offer advice about.

Fifth: as elsewhere in the Trump administration, the infrastructure message is decidedly muddled. The Trump budget proposal actually reduced infrastructure spending, it did not include any allocation for spending on new and large projects, and nowhere is there any formal sign of activity of a parallel effort to consider how to fund anything. We have been told that a huge infrastructure plan might be used as an inducement to get Democratic support for a renewed health care plan — because, as we all know and according to Trump, Democrats are big about infrastructure. There has been no outreach to the Democrats to suggest this is anything but a thought. We have also been told that the original idea of involving the private sector — because as we all know developers get stuff done — is being sidelined because Trump has suddenly realized that the Federal government’s borrowing rate is very low. This must make him jealous. Imagine being Trump and seeing that the entire world is willing to lend you money at rates as low as 1% – 2%. Trump’s private businesses are unable to borrow at any rate here in the US due to his repeated use of default as a bargaining tactic. Banks learn eventually. In any case those low borrowing rates make it more attractive for Trump to use the Federal government as the agent in development, so the public/private partnership is now reduced to the private side being advisory and not actively executing development.

Lastly, and possibly most important, is Trump’s inability to process things in parallel. He has a plateful of issues each of which will consume his attention. North Korea, Syria, ISIS, and so on are all more urgent calls on his time. He will be forced to move on.

I have not mentioned that the administration is woefully undermanned, not because of Congressional opposition to proposed candidates, but due to a lack of any candidates being proposed. Only about 10% of all political appointments have been filled. Most positions remain empty. So this is not an administration equipped for any large scale policy making, let alone getting such a policy through a Congress controlled by a fractious and fractured Republican party.

All this speaks to a reality empty of infrastructure policy. At least for now.

Maybe tax reform?

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How’s That?

Well, there we are. It took less than three weeks for us all to realize that neither the Republican party nor Trump are ready to govern. Their health care fiasco was the talk of the weekend, and fingers are being pointed every which way as culprits are sought and blame assigned. Naturally, Trump doesn’t take any of the blame onto himself. That’s just not his way: he hasn’t nurtured that TV persona of perpetual winning and ace deal making for nothing. Even though it is, apparently, patently absurd. Trump’s image as dealmaker in chief now lies in that dust alongside Ryan’s reputation as a wizard policy wonk and Congressional consensus builder.

Reality is a very difficult thing, especially so if, as the Republicans have done for years now, you can ignore it and succeed only in a world of pretense.

Perhaps most baffling is that the Republicans had no thought through policy in their arsenal as they went into the health care battle. A battle that they chose and that they began. They were remarkably unprepared to confront the realities of both legislation and of the details of health care policy making. Instead they trumpeted their alternative to Obamacare as being a lean and mean example of unbureaucratic planning. It weighed in at only sixty-six pages, of which about ten percent were devoted to the precise ways in which lottery winners were to be denied public assistance in their health care. Compared with the six to seven hundred pages of Obamacare the Republican plan was supposed to be a triumph of direct business like language and no nonsense decision making. Instead it was revealed to be a botched together ensemble of unrelated ideas that anyone could have cobbled together over a drink with friends at the local pub. It wasn’t a plan at all, it was a wish list that had no real central purpose, no coherence, and no constituency. It was doomed to fail from the outset as an orphan with no advocate. Amidst its rubble the Republicans are now revealed as a party under-prepared and poorly led. And, more the point deeply divided.

This point will loom large in the next few weeks as the Republicans seek to recover from this self-inflicted defeat. There is an extreme wing in the GOP party caucus that values ideological purity above action. It abhors compromise and believes that it was sent to Congress to lead the nation away from the corrosive effects of the “nanny” state back to some pristine and efficient market-driven world where each citizen genuinely gets the rewards he or she deserves. In such a world poverty is something you bring upon yourself through idleness, indolence, and the like. It is not a consequence of a systemic failure. Nor is it an outcome of upbringing, luck of birth, or lack of opportunity.

This hard line small government rump of politicians burnished its reputation in those opposition years by constantly haranguing Obama and by forcing votes along hard right lines. It never mattered whether those votes led to legislation, what mattered was only that the purity of ideological temperament was demonstrated and preened before radical voters. This is a great way to oppose. It is a shambolic way to govern. As we now know.

Worse for the Republicans, though, is that the ideological schism between that hard right group and a softer right  — I won’t call it centrist — group now casts a long shadow over the governing party. As they move on from last week’s debacle and seek to undertake tax reform that sharp divide looms larger. How can Ryan, himself a member of the hard right at heart, produce a tax plan that caters to the two sides?

Already we have been given a glimpse of a possible rapprochement. One of the hard right leaders, Mike Meadows, has already signaled that he is not as opposed to “budget busting” tax reform as he might have been before. His hard line has hitherto been to enforce budget “neutrality” meaning that any new spending has to be offset by cuts elsewhere to ensure that the Federal deficit is not increased.  Apparently he is now willing to back away from that requirement in the interests of party solidarity. He is thus channeling Dick Cheney from the Reagan years who famously argued that deficits don’t matter. Well, not at least when they are created by Republican tax giveaways to big business and the wealthy.

There are some elements of Ryan’s tax proposal that are already being heavily opposed by loyal Republican outside interest groups. The so-called border adjustment tax is especially reviled by a large and well-funded coalition of businesses all of whom fear a major tax increase because they are so import dependent. This group, plus any wavering deficit hawks, are likely to cause as much of a problem for Ryan as he tries to get his tax bill through Congress, as the hard right did during the health care disaster. So the odds are that whatever tax reform gets passed into law, if it gets that far, will be a hollow shell of an effort. It will most probably simply be a large tax cut for business and well off taxpayers. It will have little to no effect on the economy, despite the probable cheerleading from the White House, and will almost certainly contain nothing for Trump’s loyal voters.

But they ought to be getting used to being ignored by now.

How’s that for leadership and dealmaking?

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