On taxes, let’s actually be clear: Ted Cruz has proposed a value-added tax, or VAT. He can call it a “business flat tax” but it is a VAT. Whatever its pluses and minus, it allows him to propose a very low income tax with the rest of revenue-generating bits hidden on the business side. That’s rather clever, really.
Rubio’s tax plan is in sync with past successful Republican tax plans in that it would improve incentives to invest while also directing immediate tax relief to taxpayers; that was both the Reagan and Bush II plans. But it is really more of a general election plan in that it can be sold as something more than “cut taxes for the rich and all be well”.
Of course, all the Republican tax plans are big revenue losers for the federal, which Democrats will certainly attack in a general election.
Ben Carson - who is still on the stage - is asked a question! In answer, he tells people to check his website for details on his tax plan, which is always a crowd-pleasing strategy.
Jeb says he admires Kasich’s moves; but then pivots to saying that he wants to repeal Obamacare.
Kasich says that Jeb knows that he’s no pro-Obamacare. But then he points to Reagan as the basis for getting “people on their feet.”
This is a fight between the two of them; but it’s hard to tell because they’re being much more polite, and they are both trying for political reasons to wriggle out of supporting not putting the mentally ill in prison, which is a weird political belief to be ashamed of.
Kasich gets a key question, about his support of Medicare expansion and how it fits in with conservative ambitions.
“When we expand medicaid and we treat the mentally ill, then they don’t live under a bridge or in a prison where they cost $22,500 per year,” he says, in an answer that wouldn’t be out of place in the Democratic debate the other day. “Guess what else: they get their lives back.”
Medicare and Social Security reform has been a foundational Republican issue for decades, and yet Trump completely rejects it.
His solution to program funding problems is, basically, more economic growth – even though Social Security benefits actually rise with economic growth. The math doesn’t work.
Trump’s position shows how the Republican party is moving away from entitlement reform now that it depends more and more on older voters. Social Security is now concerned one part of Americans’ “earned benefits” – as opposed to the “welfare” benefits of Obamcare, Medicaid and various income supports which, you know, go to Democratic voters.
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