Republicans Are Growing Antsy the White House Has Already Doomed Their Plutocratic Tax Bill
27 November 2017
As Congressional Republicans return from the Thanksgiving break, they face a crammed agenda and the daunting task of passing an already wildly unpopulartax plan by the end of the year.
According to Politico, many are worried that the White House has already doomed the tax overhaul with a tone-deaf rollout that featured multimillionaires Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn as spokesmen.
The GOP hopes to convince voters that their tax plan isn’t a giant handout to millionaires and billionaires — which it is — and that it will lower the tax burden of middle class families — which it will not.
Mnuchin didn’t help matters by posing with a sheet of newly minted dollar bills alongside his wife Louise Linton — who tenderly fondled an edge of the sheet of currency while wearing black, elbow-length leather opera gloves.
A CNN reporter found the gloves for sale online for $635.
“No, they are not lined with diamonds, gold or even anti-anxiety medication,” wrote Mediaite.com’s Lawrence Bonk. “They are just gloves. Really expensive gloves that cost half of what an average American pays on rent per month.”
“If you asked us to put together a photo shoot to show this is a taxpayer-funded giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, I don’t think we could do a better job of this,” said Tim Hogan of the anti-tax reform group Not One Penny — which repurposed the Mnuchin image to use in its fundraising.
Gary Cohn — who is, like Mnuchin, a former Goldman-Sachs executive — flubbed his own pitch for the tax cut bill when he said the average family will receive an addition $1,000 per year, which they could use to “renovate their kitchen” or “buy a new car.”
“The offhand comment delivered to reporters in the White House briefing room seemed to underscore how out of touch the Hamptons-summering millionaire was with the expenses facing everyday Americans,” wrote Politico’s Annie Karni and Eliana Johnson.
GOP legislators like Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) have tried to distance themselves from the White House in an effort to sell the plan to a public in which 52 percent disapprove of the plan and only 25 percent support it.
One White House official said that Mnuchin’s “arrogance” rubs some lawmakers the wrong way.
“There were some testy conversations” between Ryan and Mnuchin, the official told Politico.
Ryan reportedly asked the White House to send anyone but Mnuchin to Capitol Hill to discuss the tax plan. The speaker’s office, however, denies the rumor.