Jacobin: Democrats’ Lies About Tax Breaks Sound a Lot Like Republicans’

I completely agree with David Sirota.

The hubbub over the stillborn “America First” caucus has overshadowed the real story which is the launch of the bipartisan SALT Caucus. The Democrats are evolving into the old Republican Party with Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce becoming pillars of the new Democratic Party.

Now, these new Democrats want their tax cuts and niggardly social welfare state in addition to the main course of professional class culture war virtue signaling. While the Democrats used to be the party of the little guy and standing up to Corporate America, they are now the party of all the elites in this country who demand that all the wealth and power of Corporate America and the plutocracy be used to crush the little guy and his elected representatives in the name of fighting “domestic extremism.”

It is weird watching the new Democratic Party that is emerging which is the same old Eastern party of the Federalists, the Whigs and the Republican Party. The current of elitism is running so strong in the Democratic Party that they even want to embrace censorship and revisit the Bill of Rights.

The Hill:

“A bipartisan group of House members from high-tax states on Thursday launched a caucus focused on advocating for undoing the $10,000 limit on the state and local tax deductions (SALT), as lawmakers press to include repeal of the cap in infrastructure legislation.

“It is high time that Congress reinstates the state and local tax deduction, so we can get more dollars back into the pockets of so many struggling families, especially as we recover from this pandemic,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), one of the chairs of the caucus, said during a press conference.

The caucus has about 30 members from states such as New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois. Democratic members of the caucus include Gottheimer, and Reps. Thomas Suozzi (N.Y.) and Bill Pascrell (N.J.), who have all been outspoken on the SALT issue in recent days. …

Earlier this week, nearly every Democrat in New York’s House delegation wrote a letter to House Democratic leadership saying that they “reserve the right to oppose any tax legislation” that doesn’t repeal the SALT deduction cap. …

“Around here, the operational question is, how many votes do you have,” she said. “We already have a lot of votes on this issue, and it’s going to grow.” …”

The new SALT Caucus is already up to 30 members.

This is a far larger caucus than the “America First” caucus. They want to eliminate the SALT deduction cap in order to get more dollars back into the pockets of struggling millionaire families. Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill has no chance of passing the House without the support of the SALT caucus. This is the new “progressive era” that Anand Giridharadas was recently talking about.

Jacobin:

“For years, Democratic lawmakers fought the GOP lie that cast estate tax cuts for billionaires as efforts to rescue family farms. But in this new era of ubiquitous misinformation, the same Democrats are waving a white flag in the battle against anti-tax bullshit. They are ripping a page out of the GOP’s “death tax” playbook and conjuring a new lie, this one depicting tax breaks for affluent donors as a defense of working-class homeowners.

In the process, Democratic leaders show they fight far harder for the donor class than they do for the working class.

At issue is the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions that was included in President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill. The cap was designed to limit the amount of state and local tax payments that households not using the newly expanded standard deduction can write off from their federal taxable income. …

And then came the creation of a whole new bipartisan SALT Caucus — a group of lawmakers organized to fight for the new tax breaks. …

As a 2016 Demos study found, the donor class tends to be far wealthier, whiter, and more conservative than the general population. A full 45 percent of donors giving more than $5,000 to campaigns have a net worth of more than $1 million — and those same folks just so happen to be the big winners of a SALT cap repeal. …

The data proves AOC is indisputably correct. But in this age of misinformation, those facts are being drowned out by a new Democratic megaphone now blasting the same kind of tax lies long blared by the old Republican noise machine.”

The Democrats are officially the party of the professional managerial class.