Transcript: Vance Scamming of MAGA Voters Takes Ugly Turn in Vile Rant
Sargent: Let’s talk about the distributive consequences because I think that’s what you’re getting at there. The benefits such as they are that will go to working people will be in the form of pretty minuscule tax cut, which gets extended for those people. But at the same time, the bill cuts taxes enormously for people at the very top of the income spectrum. And then on top of that, if you put together all the features—the health care cuts, the cuts to food stamps and other safety net programs, plus the array of tax cuts mostly benefiting the wealthy—what you get overall is a large redistribution of wealth upward. Can you talk about that?
Linden: Yeah, very simply, people in the bottom will pay more, people at the very top will pay less. That’s what this bill does. It’s exactly for the reasons you said. There are tax cuts mostly for people at the top, very small tax cuts for people in the middle, almost no tax cuts for people at the bottom. And then on top of that, you have increases in costs like health care, food, energy, and education for the vast majority of low- and middle-income people. You put it all together, most Americans are going to actually end up paying more or be no better off, and people at the very top will pay a lot less in taxes. And on top of that, Republicans are going to come back and say, Oh my God, the debt is so high. How did the debt get so high? Never mind that we just spent $4.5 trillion on tax cuts. We have to cut even more from middle-income people. They’ve got to pay more in state taxes. They’ve got to pay more in energy prices because the debt’s too big, even though they are the ones who caused it to rise. So you put all that together, it’s a tax cut for rich people paid for by everybody else.
And that is, by the way, the way that most Americans see it. And it is the reason why JD Vance is out there lying about the bill, because they know this is a massive vulnerability for them. This is the worst thing that could happen for them: that the American people understand that they’ve been betrayed.
