Senator Manchin Needs to Know About Tax Reform

Some of the basic ideas of the tax reform plan Democrats are inching toward were developed long ago. In fact, some of them were Republican proposals. An idea of mine is that only citizens should pay taxes, not companies which are not citizens. However, research was done a few years ago by a House committee and they determined that it was impractical because the rich Americans were hiding so much of their wealth from the tax man. If you look at the reforms the Republicans passed into law during the Trump administration you will find that it was imported from the Kansas experiment. They knew that reducing corporate tax rates would blow up the debt and they didn't care. They understood that when the Democrats took office they would "fix" those problems, yet the Republicans would get the short-term political benefits.

So, the history of this tax reform isn't new, it isn't entirely Joe Biden's, and it isn't without input from Republicans. Their current opposition to any reforms is entirely a political act. They support most of the Biden tax reform plan, though they will never say that. Sen. Manchin needs to know that.

When Pres. Obama proposed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA/ACA/Obamacare) it was with a great deal of research and history including the forerunner RomneyCare which went into law in Massachussetts when Sen. Romney was governor of Massachussetts. The ideas were perhaps originated in the Mass. legislature, but I would suggest there were many studies before that. It was not a grand new idea of the Obama administration and there was significant input by and for Republicans.

This process of bipartisan production of complicated large legislation isn't new and one would expect a senator to know these things. Sen. Manchin needs to know this.

Foreign policy is often a bipartisan affair, even when presidents have incredibly different views on things. When Pres. Obama left office we needed only to finish helping the Kurds to defeat IS and then we could withdraw from the Middle-East. Pres. Trump did precisely that and didn't start other wars. He even continued the Saudis in the Yemen war. This was not a new Trump initiative or even a new Obama initiative.  It's bipartisan foreign policy. Similarly, sanctions on Russia were bipartisan.

A senator, Senator Manchin, needs to understand how this kind of bipartisanship is in effect in our government and that public positions are often lies for political purposes.

I hope that Senators Manchin and Sinema are merely taking positions, but they're costly and bad politics.