The politics of the tax bill in 2018

Josh Marshall and John Judis have dual posts on the politics of the tax bill for 2018 at TPM on 12/21/2017. Judis in The Politics of the Republican Tax Bill: A Dissenting View essentially agrees with the hopeful arguments Republicans pundits are making that well, a lot of people will see a little bit of a tax cut, so they will be so grateful to Dear Leader Trump and the Republicans that they won't care that the richest people are laughing all the way to the bank. And the stock market, and various kinds of speculative bubbles.

Josh in A Dissent from Judis’ Dissent makes a good case that, at least in 2017, the Democrats actually defined the narrative on Obamacare and the tax cut. Those two are connected, since the failed Obamacare repeal bill also included huge tax cuts for the wealthiest (emphasis in original):

There’s a more specific factor that has taken hold in part because of the Obamacare repeal fights, in part because of Trump himself and the plutocrats he’s surrounded himself with. The point I made about the Bush tax cuts above is that people care how things affect them. If I get some tax relief that’s my focus not the fact that someone richer did too, even if maybe they got more than they really needed. But polling shows that a majority of Americans think the big payoffs to the wealthy in this bill are coming at their expense. That is a significant difference from the Bush 2001 tax cut bill and the Reagan one twenty years earlier. Whether that is because of the substance of the bill itself or the Trump prism through which voters are viewing it is uncertain. But it’s a major difference, a highly significant one and not one I expect to see change.

In other words, set aside that it is largely a major giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. The last year has cued the public up to assume that’s what it does.

This is the kind of New Deal narrative that the Democrats have largely avoided since Bill Clinton's election in 1992. Which is why there is good reason to worry that pressure from big donors and the deeply-ingrained habits of corporate Democrats to fall back on conservative framing. But it's a relief to see the evidence that a more progressive narrative has come to dominate the public reaction to the bandits' tax cut Trump just signed into law.

He also casts doubt on the argument that Republican commentators are pushing that the positive effect of small tax cuts will make most voters forget about the inequality program:

We have a recent example, the legislation Obama and the Democrats passed in the midst of the financial crisis included temporary middle income tax cuts larger than the current cuts in this bill. Politically speaking it made no difference at all. Indeed, most people didn’t even realize they’d gotten a tax cut.

Some of that may have been that the Democrats did a poor job selling the bill. I do think that’s part of the equation. The bigger factor, however, is that the overriding narrative of the Democrats first two years of complete control of the federal government was that they’d raised some taxes and spent a lot of money on new programs and stimulus relief. The tax cuts the great majority of people got just didn’t change that equation, certainly not for people already inclined to see what the Democrats were doing in negative terms. What all of that comes down to is that there’s little reason to think that small but non-trivial changes in the amount of take home pay will make an unpopular bill popular. We have evidence for this. It’s recent and I think pretty on-point. [my emphasis in bold]

Lots will change between now and November 2018. The Senate Democrats' ill-considered move to force Al Franken out of the Senate based on the Gillibrand Standard has virtually guaranteed that Democratic candidates in 2018 will face an even bigger volume of pseudoscandals than usual. And if they fold as easily as they did in the Franken case, those pseudoscandals will be far more potent than they should be.