Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, has openly questioned whether the GOP deserves to keep the House majority, lamenting the lack of accomplishments this Congress. He’s not alone.
When Congress began the new year, Rep. Andy Biggs gave a television interview and made a startling confession: House Republicans have done nothing they can run on.
“We have nothing. In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on,” the Arizona Republican said on the conservative network Newsmax. “It’s embarrassing.”
Anchor Chris Salcedo responded with a bemused chuckle. “I know,” he said. “The Republican Party in the Congress majority has zero accomplishments.”
The exchange captured a dynamic that looms over Republican lawmakers heading into the 2024 election: They’ve passed little substantive legislation since winning the majority in 2022 and struggled to do the basics of governing with a Democratic-led Senate. Their first year was instead marked by fractiousness and chaos, complicating the party’s pitch to voters this fall. The challenge is accentuated by likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump making “retribution” against his enemies, rather than shared policy goals, the centerpiece of his comeback bid as he continues to spread fabricated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
So there’s actually two things there that sound good to me, that I immediately doubt because if Republicans were in favor of it I have to assume there’s something horrible about it…
What’s bad about a national sales tax, and banning earmarks? Those kinda sound like good things to me.
Sales taxes disproportionately impact the poor.
First, any tax that’s a fixed percentage will be a higher percentage of a person’s income even that income is lower.
Secondly, there’s a point in “wealth generation” where you don’t spend everything you make. Money that you save isn’t taxed by a sales tax – so, again, the less money you make, the more it impacts you.
Regarding “earmarks” it really depends on what it’s for. As a blanket statement, “Earmarks Are Bad” is just a small government taking point – which itself can be understood as an anti-poor dog whistle, since conservatives call support for society’s most vulnerable “wasteful spending” – but you can often hear “earmarks” in reference to defense spending, which is typically a Democrat talking point.
I think that “earmarks” is actually a really interesting word, since, in a practical sense, it never means anything – or, more accurately, it always means nothing specific but I’m a vaguely specific way. The word doesn’t refer to a specific spend, but it refers to a specific kind of spend – so it sounds much more specific than it actually is.
If a politician refers to a specific earmark, they run the risk of alienating whoever benefits from it; by being exceptionally vague, they can associate their brand with fiscal responsibility without actually doing anything fiscally responsible.
I’m just curious what a world with sales taxes instead of income tax would look like. I’m sure that the poor, and the retired, would be disproportionately impacted. But income taxes are impacting most of us, right up the ass, all the time. And what a waste of time, energy all the tax filing nonsense is. That’s not fair, either, and I want to be freed from it.
I didn’t express good OR bad. I just listed some of the things that were done.