Debt ceiling deal exposes Republicans’ greed agenda

Today’s Republican Party just stripped down to reveal the heart of its agenda in the debt ceiling negotiations.

First, we saw that Republicans were willing to risk big job losses for American workers by threatening to default on the national debt if they did not get their way.

Second, getting their way amounted to protecting the rich.

Third, pretty words about reining in out-of-control spending proved to be a false front to hide ongoing work to sell cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

“We only got to look at 11 percent of the budget,” Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Fox News after he agreed on a debt deal with President Joe Biden. McCarthy explained that he is moving on to deeper cuts: “We have to look at the entire budget … the majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending. It’s Medicare …”

Yes, the future cuts will target Medicare and also Medicaid and Social Security. The Speaker made no mention of defense spending, the other big slice of discretionary federal spending.

He did not suggest finding new revenue by raising taxes on the super-rich to reduce deficit spending.

McCarthy’s proposal of a budget panel outside of Congress is a blatant effort to take political pressure off of Republicans running the Ways and Means Committee and the Appropriations Committee. He wants to give the dirty work to an outside group that does not have to answer to voters.

The Speaker says his new commission will “look at every single department in America so we can find the waste.”

Somehow, he did not mention former President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which will add $1.8 trillion to the deficit before 2030.

He also turned his back on ending the massive “carried interest loophole.” That flaw in the tax code is a safe harbor for the richest of the top 1 percent, the hedge fund elites.

McCarthy’s bottom-line demands in the debt ceiling talks directly contradict Republican claims to be the party of working-class people.

America’s conservative party is leaving middle-class wage-earners to feel the pain of deficit reduction while guarding the flow of government handouts to the rich.

For example, the Republicans said “no” to removing tax subsidies for big oil and gas companies. That shameless stand comes as the top oil companies recorded record profits in 2022. Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Exxon and Shell pocketed so much money last year that their sales were more than the “economic output of Colombia, South Africa or Switzerland,” according to CBS News.

Earlier this year, environmental activist Jonathan Noronha-Gant told the Associated Press that a “windfall tax on oil and gas profits is needed more than ever to free up money desperately needed to help those struggling with the cost of energy [and] as economies around the world face recession.”

McCarthy did not stop there in his role as guardian of the rich.

He got yet another win for the oil companies by getting Biden to agree to speed up reviews of big oil and gas projects, reducing the time for environmental studies from four years to two.

And the GOP won fast-track review for a natural gas pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia. 

While pushing the big oil agenda, Republicans also protected tax subsidies that go to corporate farm operations that do not need the money. Farm subsidies under President Trump “jumped to their highest level in 14 years, most of them paid without any [review] by congress,” NPR reported in 2019.

A  Bloomberg Business headline 10 years ago told the story very simply: “Taxpayers turn U.S. Farmers into Fat Cats with Subsidies.”

Just as emphatically, the GOP said “No, no, no!” to raising taxes on corporations.

“Corporate subsidies are an area of the nondefense discretionary budget that is ripe for scaling back … last year’s corporate profit margins were the highest since 1950,” the Washington Post editorial board wrote last week.

To protect rich people cheating on their current tax bill, the Republicans got President Biden to cut $21 billion intended to help the Internal Revenue Service modernize its computers and replace retiring workers.

This “clawback will eat into the tax collection agency’s efforts to crack down on rich tax cheats,” the New York Times reported last week.

The paper described this gift to people avoiding taxes, if not cheating on taxes, as a “political win for Republicans, who have been outraged by the prospect of a beefed-up IRS …”

To further protect the rich, the Republicans also put an end to Biden’s effort to delay repayment of student loans in the aftermath of the pandemic.

They also insisted on removing $30 billion already in the treasury to deal with the nation’s COVID-19 crisis.

And the GOP won more strict work requirements for people applying for food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a major social safety-net program. They also wanted tougher requirements for Medicaid recipients, but Biden refused.

These Republican victories amount to losses for people living at the edge of economic need.

“The [debt ceiling] agreement puts hundreds of thousands of older adults, aged 50-54, at risk of losing food assistance,” said a statement from Sharon Parrott, the head of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Stripped of pretense, the GOP’s demands in the debt deal revealed naked greed.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.