With Mike Johnson as Ringmaster, the House GOP Clown Show is back, extorting American taxpayers coming and going in the name of owning the libs and protecting billionaire tax cheats.
The White House quickly dismissed a proposal Monday from House Republicans to pay for aid for Israel amid its war with Hamas by cutting funds for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“Politicizing our national security interests is a nonstarter. Demanding offsets for meeting core national security needs of the United States — like supporting Israel and defending Ukraine from atrocities and Russian imperialism — would be a break with the normal, bipartisan process and could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The White House last week outlined a roughly $106 billion national security supplemental funding request that included money for Israel and Ukraine, which is fighting off invading Russian forces, as well as investments in the Indo-Pacific, humanitarian aid and border security measures.
Jean-Pierre argued there is “strong bipartisan agreement” in providing funding for each of the areas included in the White House proposal.
“Threatening to undermine American national security unless House Republicans can help the wealthy and big corporations cheat on their taxes — which would increase the deficit — is the definition of backwards,” Jean-Pierre said.
“Playing political games that threaten the source of funding for Israel’s self-defense — now and into the future — would set an unacceptable precedent that calls our commitment to one of our closest allies into question,” she added. “We cannot afford to jeopardize that commitment as Israel defends itself from the evil unleashed by Hamas.”
As Jon Chait points out, the House GOP bill would eliminate the $30 billion in money in last year's infrastructure bill for the IRS, and send a fraction-- $4 million -- to Israel as aid.
House Republicans have framed this demand for weakening the IRS as a deficit-cutting measure. Johnson “has said the new expenditure must be covered by other spending reductions to avoid adding to the debt,” reports the Washington Post. Representative Chip Roy, a right-wing Republican, claims, “I support Israel, but I am not going to continue to go down this road where we bankrupt our country and undermine our very ability to defend ourselves, much less our allies, by continuing to write blank checks.”
But cutting IRS funding does not avoid bankrupting our country. In fact, it hastens it. IRS funding is used to increase collection of tax payments. In theory, the IRS could be funded so lavishly that additional funding does not yield any net tax revenue, but reality is nowhere close to this level.
Research suggests that every additional dollar in IRS funding yields many times more dollars in revenue, through both direct enforcement and by deterring fraud. One recent paper estimates that a dollar of funding yields $12 in revenue.
The Congressional Budget Office, which issues official budget estimates, is required by law to use far more conservative estimates of the budgetary impact of IRS funding. Even so, its conservative methods would predict the GOP plan to reduce IRS funding will increase the deficit by about $30 billion.
So Republicans are saying this is a plan to “pay for” Israel aid. But that description is close to the opposite of the truth. It’s not a pay-for, it’s an add-on. Democrats and anti-Russia Senate Republicans want to add Israel spending to spending for defending Ukraine. Johnson and the House Republicans want to take out the Ukraine spending and throw in a big handout to rich tax cheats.
Nobody likes the IRS, so the Clown Show figures this is an easy win on paper.In practice, this won't get past the Senate and everyone knows it, but the point is to run out the clock in 2.5 weeks and crash the economy as we near the shutdown point on Nov. 17.
It's taking hostages. Meet the new Ringmaster, same as the old Ringmaster.
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