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Trump's pathetic bankruptcy past shows through in GOP's fantasyland tax bill
It will take a long, long time, to pay off the obligations the GOP has now saddled America with.
By Jonathan C. Lipson and Andrea Monroe
Dec. 21, 2017
This week, Congress passed the bill formerly known as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” with the support of 278 House and Senate Republicans. At any other time, it would be hard to imagine that congressional Republicans could support major tax legislation drafted in such haste and with so little regard for distributional consequences. It is even harder to imagine that Republican deficit hawks would support such a fiscally reckless and unprincipled bill. Yet almost every Republican member of Congress did precisely that, taking a lesson from President Trump’s playbook: Buy extravagantly today, and leave someone else to foot the bill tomorrow. If this sounds familiar, it should: this is how the president ran his infamous Atlantic City casinos through a record four bankruptcies. We know how that story ended — Trump’s casinos were shuttered after years of losses. While the United States cannot, technically, declare bankruptcy, the GOP tax bill promises to saddle the nation with unsustainable debt based on implausible promises. While his casinos performed worse, on average, than their Atlantic City competitors — losing 40% more jobs and a third more revenue between 1997 and 2010 — Trump did exceedingly well for himself, bragging to the New York Times that “the money I took out of [Atlantic City] was incredible.”
Trump could not have put his casinos through so many bankruptcies without creditor support. In order to gain that support, he made extravagant and unsubstantiated promises about the wealth and jobs the reorganized casinos would create. None of those promises came true. The same can be said about the GOP tax bill. Congressional Republicans would certainly deny that they are modeling their tax legislation on Trump’s business failures. Yet, the resemblance to his mismanagement of the casinos — his only other real experience with large, public organizations — is unavoidable: run up huge debts based on implausible promises in order to benefit the few at the expense of the many. If Trump’s bankruptcy past is prologue, Republicans will eventually try to distance themselves from the future pain caused by their rushed and deeply misguided effort at tax reform. But the GOP tax bill’s passage means that the 278 congressional Republicans who supported this irresponsible tax legislation are all bankrupt Trumpists now.
It will take a long, long time, to pay off the obligations the GOP has now saddled America with.