How much do Republicans love tax cuts for rich people? Other than cruelty, they are their favorite thing in the whole world, and can trump every other principle they claim to hold dear. At the moment, the GOP is trying to figure out how to extend the tax cuts that they passed in 2017. Because they knew those tax cuts were very expensive and would never come within trillions of dollars of paying for themselves, they had to hide their true cost by making them sunset after ten years. As a result, for almost a decade, whenever someone projected the country’s fiscal condition out into the future, they were allowed to assume that taxes for rich people would go way up in 2026 and we would have a lot more revenue coming into the Treasury. But the Republicans always had every intention of preventing that from happening, and certainly Trump campaigned in 2024 on preventing that from happening. The question is how.

The short answer is that they plan to use the budget reconciliation process, about which I have written so much going all the way back to the Obama administration’s successful effort to enact the Affordable Care Act. The process is complicated, but it permits the Senate to act without the need to overcome a filibuster, which means they only need 50 votes (plus the vice-president’s tiebreaker) instead of 60 votes. It doesn’t change the math in the House of Representatives, however, and the Republicans have the slimmest of margins there. That’s a problem because there are many budget hawks in the House Republican caucus who recognize that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that extending the Trump tax cuts will cost $4.6 trillion over a decade.

The budget hawks definitely want to extend the tax cuts. In fact, they want to make them permanent rather than having them sunset after ten years. The problem is that they want to pay for it by reducing spending, and reducing spending by that much would require cutting massively into popular programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

At first, the hawks insisted on offsetting the $4.6 trillion price tag with $2.5 trillion in cuts, which was already a concession that they’re okay with adding more than $2 trillion to the deficit. But when it came time to pass the budget outline, all but one of the hawks (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky) caved and voted for a budget that seeks only $2 trillion in cuts. Getting them to sign off on this was a heavy lift requiring a ton of pressure, including phone calls from Trump himself. And it was no guarantee that they’d all vote for the final product or that a final product requiring huge cuts to popular programs can even be produced at all.

Now, I said that the budget reconciliation process is complicated, and it is. It has a bunch of built-in constraints, including that they’re not allowed to make changes to Social Security or include things that will have only an incidental impact on the budget. It cannot be used “to enact or rescind “discretionary” funding, which is controlled through the annual appropriations process.” That means it’s mainly restricted to cutting “Medicare, Medicaid, federal civilian and military retirement, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), and farm programs.” The process is also not immune to the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act, “which essentially requires that all legislation enacted during a session of Congress or the prior nine years, taken together, not produce a net increase in the budget deficit.” There are many workarounds to this last constraint, but one of them is to have the increased costs sunset after ten years. When you combine all these constraints, it makes it near impossible to produce a bill that is both in compliance with the rules and that can get near unanimous support from the House Republicans.

As I’ve been thinking about this process, I have kept coming back to the idea that it cannot be done unless the rules are broken. I’ve spent a lot of mental energy trying to envision which rules are most likely to get the axe. But I didn’t consider that they might simply decide that they can pretend that extending the tax cuts won’t cost a single dime.

There’s a reason for my lack of imagination. To pull this off, it will require the budget hawks to abandon every principle they’ve espoused and surrender most of the leverage to control government spending for all time.

So, how would this scheme work?

Remember, the Congressional Budget Office scores bills over a ten-year window. Even if they know that the likelihood is that a bill will be renewed rather than allowed to expire, they assume there will be no more costs after the scheduled expiration. This is already a bit of a scam, but it’s defensible accounting. But what if the CBO instead scored that costs of things not by what they actually cost but instead by how different they are from “current policy”?

So, for example, the current tax policy is the one enacted in 2017 that is set to expire. Extending those cuts won’t add any costs to what we already have.

Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper.

That’s under the “current law” metric that has traditionally been used, as the tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year. But Senate Republicans want to use a different scoring method called the “current policy” baseline, which would assume that extending tax cuts costs $0 because they’re already law.

When we say “current law,” we take into account that the cost of these tax cuts will go away if the tax cuts go away. When we say “current policy,” we ignore this and argue that extending an existing government policy is always cost-free. I’ll let Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Crapo of Idaho explain:

“It’s a really important principle, and I hope that we can employ that, because it makes a big difference in the calculations. And I think it also makes good logical sense,” Johnson told reporters. “We’re extending the existing law. And by definition, that’s what current policy means.”

…Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., backed the idea, arguing that continuing tax cuts shouldn’t score as adding any new red ink.

“We should be using ‘current policy.’ We need to avoid a massive, automatic tax increase,” he said. “That seems like a perfectly rational thing to do, and there shouldn’t be a score.”

…The chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, endorsed the “current policy” approach, telling reporters that it “recognizes that extending current law does not change the tax policy, does not reduce tax revenue.”

This is basically like saying you had planned to cancel your Netflix subscription to save money but that you changed your mind and since you aren’t actually changing your subscription status Netflix will henceforth by free. The proposed “current policy” change is actually precisely this cynical and absurd, but it’s driven by their inability to pass Trump’s agenda through the reconciliation process if they’re honest about the costs and have to make politically suicidal cuts.

Now, if you’re expecting the deficit hawks, like Rep. Chip Roy of  Texas,  to reject this fraud out of hand because it would go against everything they’ve been saying and negotiating for in terms of deficit reduction, you’ll be disappointed.  He’s enticed by the idea that this scam might allow the Trump tax cuts not only to be extended for another ten years but permanently, because it will get around restraints in the budget reconciliation rules.

“We should be careful with things like that, that can get kind of gimmicky,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said. “I’m intrigued by the possibility of permanence. I think that’s a good thing. I think permanent tax rates are good for the country. … However, I don’t like gimmicks, so I’m trying to wrestle with that.”

That’s one of the most understated statements I’ve ever seen. One moment, he’s acting as a royal pain in the ass who uses the catastrophic economic risks associated with a failure raise the debt ceiling to force massive cuts in federal spending, and the next he is signing off on a system that will treat every existing government spending program as “free” in perpetuity so long as it continues at current rates.

Mind you, making this accounting change would do a lot more than making tax cuts easier to pass. It would enable a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a spending bill for one year and then extend it for “free.” It would take away Roy’s leverage to restrain spending whether he’s in the majority or the minority, and render the whole idea of controlling costs hopeless.

So, the next question is what is more important to Roy. Would he rather keep his promise to spend his time in Congress cutting spending and getting the deficit under control, or would he prefer a permanent tax cut for the rich? We can ask this question to all the so-called Republican deficit hawks who will be “wrestling” with this decision.

I have one last observation about all this. The reason the reconciliation process was created in the first place was to create a means to enact deficit-reduction legislation that could get around a filibuster. The spirit of the thing was violated when President George W. Bush twice used it to pass massive tax cuts that exploded the deficit. It was violated again by Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 and Biden’s American Rescue Plan in 2021. Reconciliation has become a way for a narrow majority to enact its agenda and spend more money than it raises in taxes, and I don’t necessarily see a better way for DC to operate in a functional manner so long as the legislative filibuster is in place. But what the Republicans are discussing takes the violation of the spirit of the rules far beyond eleven.

This is the most staggering cynicism and hypocrisy that I’ve yet encountered in politics, and it doesn’t even make any long-term sense of the Republicans. If they pull it off, it will confirm that tax cuts for rich people is the the entire purpose of the party and that everything else is subordinate and ultimately negotiable.

The last time I saw such clear evidence of this was in 2002 when the Bush administration was gearing up to pass their second round of tax cuts through reconciliation.

Shortly before he was fired, [Treasury Secretary Paul O’neill] confronted [Vice-President Dick] Cheney about the Administration’s latest proposal to cut taxes by another six hundred and seventy-four billion dollars over ten years, pointing out that the country was “moving toward a fiscal crisis.” The Vice-President stopped him. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. “We won the midterms. This is our due.”

But that cavalier attitude toward deficits went out the window once Barack Obama was elected president and the GOP responded by creating the deficit-obsessed Tea Party movement. And even that was shockingly cynical because “Tea” stood for “Taxed Enough Already,” which seemed to be in line with Cheney’s main goal.

Will this proposal work? I’d be more confident in saying ‘no,’ if I saw a stronger objection from people like Chip Roy.

I think the main thing working in this idea’s favor is that the entire legislative agenda of the fascist regime will be dead in the water if the Republicans cannot figure out a way to pass it through reconciliation. Since I cannot see any way the GOP can get enough unanimity do this under the current rules, I have long assumed they’d have to change the rules. But this is a more desperate and radical attempt at a solution than I had contemplated.

Remember, also, nothing is permanent in Congress. They can say the tax cuts are permanent but that won’t be any truer than saying that they will cost $0. Will the deficit hawks give up their principles and their leverage to get a fake sense of permanence for the tax cuts for rich folks?

Incredibly, it’s possible.

Now I have to go cancel/not-cancel my Netflix account.