THE ANNUAL TAX CUT….How do Republicans ensure corporate support for their tax cuts, even the ones that don’t affect corporate taxes much? Nick Confessore interviews Grover Norquist in the New York Times Magazine this week and Norquist explains it all:
“As long as we have the annual tax cut, all the business guys are in line,” Norquist explained to me, noting that business trade associations like the National Association of Manufacturers helped lobby for Bush’s 2001 cut, even though it did nothing to reduce corporate rates. Norquist described his pitch to K Street this way: “This year, we’re doing a tax cut. You want to help us with this year, you’re at the front of the line for next. You didn’t get in this year, you can get in line for next year. But we’re going to be doing a tax cut, however small, because we can go as small as we have to to get a tax cut every year. That is what we did for the last four years. That is what we are going to do for the next four years.”
There’s much more about Republican tax “reform” in Nick’s article, including Jim DeMint’s amusingly insane description of why the middle class should eagerly embrace something that looks like higher taxes but really isn’t once you’ve transcended normal consensus reality and seen the light.
The scary part, of course, is that DeMint believes his own gibberish. It almost makes me nostalgic for old fashioned corporate mendacity.
