Just in time for the Halloween season, a ghoulish idea fit to be buried forever rises from the grave and gets a stake through the heart, surely to rise again.
As it did under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, a massive tax cut _ benefiting the very wealthiest _ is exploding the federal deficit, prompting so-called conservative calls to slash the nation's social safety net to get the country out of a fiscal crisis of its own creation.
In the just-ended federal fiscal year, corporate tax collections plummeted by 31 percent, thanks in to a cut in the tax rate. Income tax receipts barely grew, despite healthy GDP growth.
Combine those trend lines with Republican demands to grow the Pentagon, the costliest discretionary government spending, and you get what every economist with a brain predicted and what Republicans denied, denied, denied would happen: an astronomical, 17 percent increase over 2017 in the deficit _ to $779 billion, rocketing on the way to $1 trillion by 2020.
Reminder: Supposed fiscal hawk Sen. Bob Corker, who provided a pivotal vote for the tax bill's passage, had vowed to oppose it "if it looks like to me ... that we are adding one penny to the deficit."
This year's deficit increase, $113 billion, is 11,300,000,000,000 pennies.
The increase, especially obscene at a time of robust economic growth and low unemployment, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now deems "disturbing," even though it was exactly as projected.
His solution, of course, is to slash Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.
Those programs could use reforms _ including raising the threshold of income that's taxed on the richest among us. But what McConnell and his ilk envision is something far more draconian. Of course, President Trump has ruled out such rejiggering.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool us the umpteenth time, and what the hell are we thinking?
