Sam Jammal: "Thousands Of Lobbyists Are Lining Up With Their Own 'Fixes' To Our Tax System"

In his Washington Post column yesterday, just before Señor Trumpanzee's closed-to-the-public speech in Springfield, Missouri, Greg Sargent predicted that we'd hear the death rattle of whatever pretensions to genuine economic populism Trump has ever harbored, if any. "Trump," he continued, "will make it official that this rhetoric is merely a disguise for the same old trickle-down economics we have heard for decades-- confirming that his economic agenda is in sync with the very same GOP economic orthodoxy that he so effectively used as a foil to get elected... [T]he most recent version of his plan would shower most of their benefits on the wealthy and corporations. And the Wall Street Journal reports that this is what his plan is expected to do, quoting officials who say he will sell this as pro-worker, by claiming it will end the 'rigged' economy he railed against during the campaign:"

One of the officials said Mr. Trump would make a “very bipartisan speech” that would reflect Americans’ frustration that a well-connected few are reaping economic gains.

“We’re going to end the rigged system,” said the official, echoing language used by groups backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch and contending that Americans understand how they would benefit if businesses prosper. “We’re going to build a tax code that really allows all Americans to have access to the American dream.”

Sargent wanted to be clear that though Trump's plan is being "sold as as targeting the well-connected few," it is just a vehicle to "slash the top rate and corporate rate and repeal the estate tax." It's nothing more than newish packaging on serially failed Republican Party trickle down economics.

“The basic fallacy is that rich guys and corporations are paying too much,” [Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center's Steven] Rosenthal told me. “But actually we tax capital lightly, and we tax corporations ineffectively. We have a top statutory rate of 35 percent. But our corporations pay a much lower rate-- maybe half of that, depending on how you estimate it. They are paying an effective tax rate that is pretty competitive with our international competitors.”

Now, if Trump wants to make the case that huge high-end tax cuts will actually help workers, fine-- let’s have that debate. But the point is that Trump is revealing once again that his populist economic nationalism-- as he himself defined it-- was largely a scam all along. It had several main components. Trump signaled he’d break from Paul Ryan-style limited-government conservatism by protecting social insurance programs and by pushing for massive infrastructure spending. He’d break with the GOP economic orthodoxy that has reigned since Ronald Reagan, by taking on economic elites and getting them to “pay more,” and by pursuing protectionist trade deals in the interests of American workers. He’d also protect their interests (or pretend to, anyway) by deporting undocumented immigrants and building a wall on the Mexican border.

Trump sold out the first with his failed health plan. The big-spending infrastructure scheme is nowhere in sight. And today he will use that same rhetoric to sell a tax plan that lavishes most of its benefits on the top. Sure, maybe Trump’s trade agenda will end up benefiting workers-- we’ll see. But for now, his populist economic nationalism is pretty much dead, effective today. Just about all that’s left of it are the stepped-up deportations and the frantic bellowing about his Mexican wall to cheering rally crowds.

Meanwhile, over at the NY Times Magazine, Nick Confessore's How to Get Rich in Trump's Washington asserts that the Trumpanzee presidency has changed the rules of influence peddling and spawned a new breed of lobbyist on K Street.' His opus is based on a view that Trump's surprise election meant that Washington's "lobbying old guard-- the guys that threw down black Amex cards at Joe’s Crab and sent fat quarterly bills to clients they barely did any work for -- were on the defensive" and that new-- or b-list-- hustlers and shady characters would have a chance.

There are about 10,000 registered lobbyists in Washington-- roughly 20 for every member of Congress-- and thousands more unregistered ones: consultants and "strategic advisers" who are paid to help shape government policy but do not disclose their clients. By whatever name, they are the people companies and countries hire to help roll back regulations, unstick bids, tweak legislation or get meetings. Lobbying is at once Washington’s most maligned, enduring and essential industry. Underpaid young politicos and retiring lawmakers depend on Beltway lobby shops-- known as ‘‘K Street’’ after the city boulevard that once housed many of them-- for the high-six-figure salaries that will loft them into Washington’s petite aristocracy. Congress needs K Street, too: After decades of cutting its own staff and research arms, much of Capitol Hill’s institutional memory and policy expertise now resides in the lobbying industry. But the private sector needs lobbyists the most. The modern federal government is so sprawling and complex that it practically demands a specialized class of middlemen and -women.

Over the decades, lobbying has evolved from a niche trade of fixers and gatekeepers to a sleek, vertically integrated, $3-billion-a-year industry. A good lobbyist doesn’t go into a meeting asking for legislation; she or he already has the bill drafted, a coalition of businesses and trade groups poised to support it, a policy brief to hand out to reporters and to the officials positioned at dozens of decision points throughout the bureaucracy and relationships with advertising and polling firms to manage the public rollout. Everyone has a lobbyist-- or three, or 50-- and the lobbyists know everyone. K Street is majestic and immovable, veined through Washington like fat through a prime steak.

Last year venerable figure among Texas Democrats told me that a crook like Vicente Gonzalez, running for Congress at the time, had no interest in being an actual congressman-- and no knack for what it would take to succeed as one-- but that he would just join up with the most corrupt members of Congress he could find so as to start the process of building a post-Congress lobbying business. And, indeed, Gonzalez won-- pretending to be a progressive and even tricking the Congressional Progressive Caucus into endorsing him over an actual progressive-- and immediately joined the Blue Dogs, a group, like the New Dems, that routinely sells it's votes to lobbyists.

Last cycle, lobbyists spent $29,750,705 on "campaign contributions" (legalist bribes) for people running for Congress $22,779,300 of which went to incumbents. $16,047,566 went to corrupted Republicans and $13,652,190 went to corrupted Democrats. Of the dozen most corrupt people running for House seats last year-- measured by the amount of bribery they accepted from lobbyists-- 11 were Republican sleaze bags and just one was a Democrat, ultra-slimy New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer.

• Paul Ryan (R-WI)- $413,332
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $333,934
• Barbara Comstock (R-VA)- $241,138
• Steve Scalise (R-LA)- $197,321
• Pat Tiberi (R-OH)- $170,753
• Kevin Brady (R-TX)- $156,416
• John Shimkus (R-IL)- $148,235
• George Holding (R-NC)- $126,809
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- $125,650
• Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)- $120,766
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- $119,436
• Greg Walden (R-OR)- $111,120

What do these 12 have in common-- aside from being conservatives? Each one is known throughout Washington have having no sense of morals and being out for themselves with careers contemptuous of American working families. Back to Confessore, the journalist who knows more about lobbyists, their corrupt practices and how they operate than anyone reporting about politics today. He wrote that "like virtually every other candidate for president, Trump campaigned against this thicket of money and influence, positioning himself as an outsider who would 'drain the swamp.' This pledge would soon prove more rhetorical than real, but it contained a grain of truth. Trump arrived in Washington with a relatively short baggage train of Beltway relationships and obligations. He didn’t read policy briefs; he barely had policies. His inner circle was a hodgepodge of Breitbart alumni, nominally Democratic financiers, Trump Organization employees on loan, the odd reality-show star and Republicans who would have been unemployable in almost any other administration. The smart money in Washington-- K Street and K Street’s clients, the big corporations and trade associations-- didn’t quite know what to expect. But mostly, they didn’t know whom to call." And that's where swampy creatures and crooks like Corey Lewandowski, Michael Cohen, Brian Ballard, Brad Gerstman, Barry Bennett, Newt Gingrich and other Trump (and Pence) cronies stepped in. Big firms like Lockheed Martin and paying immense sums to buy access to Trumpanzee. "Many of the Trump-connected lobbyists," wrote Confessore, "told me they were turning away as much business as they accepted. One person offered Lewan­dowski $250,000 just to get the president to tweet about him. A lobbyist who worked on Trump’s inaugural committee told me of a billionaire who, within a week of the inauguration, offered a million dollars if the lobbyist could arrange for his picture to be taken in the Oval Office with the new president... By the end of his first 100 days in office, it seemed, Trump had not so much drained the swamp as enshrouded it with a billowing fog of uncertainty. No previous president had changed his mind more often, or contradicted his cabinet so frequently, or permitted such vicious ideological combat under his White House roof... All of this had inadvertently created an entirely new business model for Trump’s friends and former employees. In normal times, K Street did much of its business on Capitol Hill, where the churn of legislation offered unending opportunity to deliver goodies for clients. But the power vacuum in Trump’s cabinet agencies, and the inexperience of his West Wing staff, seemed to offer a different kind of opening. It was easy to imagine that a single phone call, coming from the right person, could redirect a major policy initiative. Some of the old firms would do O.K., Lewandowski thought-- the ones that had relationships in Congress, that understood the intricate ballet of lawmaking. But the real action, he was betting, would be at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. 'I think this particular administration is really going to be driving the agenda,' he told me. 'Not Congress.'"

Official Washington professed itself to be aghast at Lewandowski, who did not bother to couch his sales pitches in the Beltway’s customary euphemisms: He was what they pretended not to be. Ethics watchdogs cast him as living proof of the hollowness of Trump’s campaign promise to "drain the swamp." Lewandowski disagreed. In his view, the swamp was the sprawling, unresponsive bureaucracy, not the people you paid to help you get your phone calls returned. Still, friends of Lewandowski’s told me that White House officials had advised him to keep a lower profile.

...In a sense, Lewandowski’s biggest problem was the president himself. Lewandowski had bet that the White House would be the center of energy and action in Trump’s Washington, but instead the Trump administration was being swallowed by its own chaos. Divided by factions and backbiting, unable to wield full control of the bureaucracy or execute on many of its own ambitions, the administration was in danger of becoming a minor player in the policy debates of the day. Many companies were coming to the conclusion that on complex issues like tax reform, their energies were better directed at lawmakers on Capitol Hill-- and their money better spent at the traditional lobbying firms stocked with ex-lawmakers and their former aides.

Moreover, despite Trump’s campaign pledges, many of the agencies he now oversaw had proved more than friendly to the legions of longtime Beltway lobbyists working for the energy, telecommunications and other industries. In many cases, Trump had hired them outright: By the summer, he had appointed more than 100 lobbyists to jobs in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Federal Communications Commission and elsewhere. Their old clients didn’t need much help from the new Trump guys on K Street. They already knew exactly whom to call.

Perhaps that’s why the traditional lobbying shops were doing just fine. As for protecting clients from Trump’s Twitter howitzer-- well, that had turned out to be easier than it looked, several lobbyists told me: Just show up in person, promise the president you’ll create some jobs and publicly give him the credit. "You make it about Trump and you link it to jobs, and you could be Russia or China and he will support you," one told me. "It is that unsophisticated."

Ann Coulter was live-tweeting the Trumpanzee speech yesterday

So let's go back to the Trumpanzee tax proposal and Sam Jammal-- candidate for the Democratic nomination to take on Wall Street shill Ed Royce in CA-39: "Right now, thousands of lobbyists are lining up with their own 'fixes' to our tax system. Everything is centered on how the most wealthy will benefit. None of the conversation is about how we help working families... Tax reform should be about making sure the middle class is still a reality for our community. We should scrap corporate tax reform and focus on reforms that help regular people. This includes increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding deductions on child care, student loans and home ownership, and promoting job creation by entrepreneurs and small business-- not paybacks to the uber wealthy. We can't continue to have an economy where so few can get ahead and so many are falling behind. Everything we are hearing on Trump's tax reform looks like a bad deal for our families. We need to stop this 'reform.'"