At last, a chance to take people’s health insurance away.

Speaking to National Review editor Rich Lowry at an event hosted by the conservative magazine, House Speaker Paul Ryan made the case for the American Health Care Act by presenting it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cut Medicaid spending.

“We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around,” Ryan says, before interrupting himself to clarify exactly how big of an opportunity this is, “since you and I were drinking out of kegs.”

AHCA’s Medicaid rollbacks would cost 14 million people their health insurance coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But those 14 million people are people who only got Medicaid coverage relatively recently. Ryan’s youthful dream refers to provisions of the law that will cap per capita spending for the millions of other lower-income Americans who get Medicaid coverage.

Medicaid as it currently exists is already a very efficient health insurance provider, covering both children and adults at lower per capita costs than private insurance, so it’s very unlikely that Ryan’s per capita caps can be implemented without compromising the quality of the care.

Cutting spending on health care for children is particularly cruel, and will also have deleterious long-term consequences for the overall American economy. Studies of earlier waves of Medicaid expansion find that kids who gain coverage are more likely to complete high school and college, go on to earn more money and pay more taxes, and have fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations later in life.

Undoing that sounds bad to me, but Ryan is passionate about the idea that the government helping low-income people can actually hurt them. As he explained during a 2014 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, social assistance programs make it less painful for people to be jobless.

“The left,” he said, “thinks this is a good thing. They say, ‘hey, this is a new freedom — the freedom not to work.’” But they’re “making a big mistake here. What they're offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.” Under Ryan’s health bill, if you want your kids to get medical care then you’re going to have go out there and hustle and make sure you find yourself a better, more soul-filling job. And he’s been dreaming about that kind of soul-filling for a long time.

The GOP health care plan: The more you need, the less you get

Hillary Clinton signaled the potential for a major national security policy reversal this week after she told an activist in Iowa that the planned $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program “doesn’t make sense.”

Despite a momentous speech embracing nuclear disarmament in Prague in April 2009, President Barack Obama has stunned critics by embarking on an aggressive effort to upgrade the military’s nuclear weapons program, including requests to buy 12 new missile submarines, up to 100 new bombers, bombers and 400 land-based missiles, along with upgraded storage and development sites.

The decision has been called the greatest expansion of nuclear weapons since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Clinton’s comments came in response to a question after a Des Moines campaign event from Kevin Rutledge, a coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee’s “Governing Under the Influence” project. Staff and volunteers with the project in Iowa and New Hampshire have been peppering presidential candidates with questions about corporate influence over military policy, immigrant detention, and other issues.

Rutledge asked the former secretary of state as she left the event on Monday: “Would you oppose plans to spend a trillion dollars on an entire new generation of nuclear weapons systems that will enrich military contractors and set off a new global arms race?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that,” she responded. “I’m going to look into that. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Watch the exchange below:

If Clinton indeed adopts a position rejecting the new nuclear weapons program, it would be a dramatic break from the hawks and the interests of the defense contracting industry — much more so than any other national security policy she has described so far.

During the first Democratic presidential debate in October, Clinton called the “spread of nuclear weapons” the greatest threat to national security. Obama has similarly identified nuclear proliferation as a greater threat than an apocalyptic battle between superpowers — even while supporting the massive nuclear arms stockpile upgrade and refusing to change the hugely risky hair-trigger alert status of our nuclear arsenal.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works to promote social justice, has asked other presidential candidates about the nuclear weapons build-up.

Republican candidate Marco Rubio dismissed concerns, telling activist Kathleen McQuillen that “no country in the world faces the threats America faces.” He added, “The “the bottom line is that deterrence is a friend of peace.”

Democratic contender Martin O’Malley replied that he favors a shift from nuclear weapons into cybersecurity. cyber security.

The Obama decision to ramp up a new generation of nuclear weapons has surprised and angered those who have worked for nuclear arms reduction.

“President Obama’s administration Administration must stop this ill-advised and dangerous escalation of spending on nuclear weapons,” said the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in a statement.

Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert and president of Ploughshares Fund, pleaded with Obama to suspend his plans to develop a new arsenal of nuclear weapons in a 2014 opinion column. He wrote that Obama should confront those in Congress and the Pentagon who  that have demanded more nuclear spending.

Instead, the Obama administration sent a budget request last year that calls for a spending spree: $348 billion over the next 10 years, $1 trillion over 30.

“The plan to spend a trillion dollars over the next three decades on a new generation of nuclear warheads, bombers, submarines, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles  — all —all for a weapon that can never be used — is reckless, wasteful, used—is reckless, wasteful and downright dangerous,” the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Elliott Negin told The Intercept. “Nuclear weapons are useless against the military challenges we face today, and the world would be safer if the United States reduced its spending on nuclear weapons systems, not throw more money at them.”

The gears, however, are already in motion.

In October, the administration awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to develop next-generation long-range bombers capable of firing nuclear weapons, a project that analysts expect will swell to $80 billion.

The post Hillary Clinton Suggests She May Oppose Obama’s $1 Trillion Nuclear Arms Upgrade appeared first on The Intercept.

More than any political candidate in memory, Donald Trump's value proposition to voters is simple and crystal clear: He's a winner.

Everything else follows from that. He doesn't owe wealthy political donors or political elites anything. He'll get the best trade deals and kick the most terrorist ass. He'll defy political correctness and tell it like it is. ISIS will give us its oil. Mexico will pay for our wall. Corporations will beg us to relocate their factories to the US.

Why? Because Trump is a winner. "We will have so much winning if I get elected," he assures us, "that you may get bored with winning."

This message has proven astonishingly resilient, to the point that the entire US political class is flummoxed. Attacks just bounce off the guy. What could ever bring him down?

No one seems to know. The other day, Vox's Ezra Klein mused about what a Trump loss might look like. He said it will just ... happen. Trump will be winning, and then he won't be. No one will predict it beforehand; hundreds of hot takes will explain it in retrospect.

I think Klein is right that Trump will fall; I am among those who believe such a fall is inevitable. There's some slim chance Trump could become the GOP nominee, but if he does, I'm not the only one thinking the odds of him beating Clinton in 2016 are vanishingly small. (Maybe someday I'll eat those words.)

(Photo by Bilgin S. Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Anyway, whether or not we can predict the timing of Trump's fall, I think it's possible to say something about how and why it will happen. And it won't be, contra Klein, Trump supporters becoming "more pragmatic."

Rather, the seeds of Trump's destruction can be found in his greatest strength. To put it bluntly: If your value proposition is that you're a winner, your value evaporates the minute you're no longer winning. Losing refutes a winner, and no one wins forever.

People like winners who win

A hint about how Trump might finally go down can be found in some replies to Klein's piece by political science PhD candidate Kevin Collins:

The research he's referring to, conducted by political scientist Larry Bartels (now at Vanderbilt University) and published in 1985, found that in close, ambiguous political contests, preferences and expectations are tightly related and mutually reinforcing. There's a "bandwagon effect" that sees voters, especially low-information voters, flock to the candidate most expected to win.

I don't know how much we should rely on 30-year-old research about voter preferences, given the ways American politics has changed even in the past few years. But I do think Collins gets at something essential.

Trump's vulnerability (like his strength!) is that his appeal is entirely personal, entirely based on the expectation that he's a winner who will win. He's an alpha male, the top dog, the guy with the balls and the leverage to get the good deals, the guy who can't be intimidated, the self-made, independent guy who's not afraid to say what everybody's thinking. "I play to people's fantasies," he wrote in The Art of the Deal. "People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts."

That hyperbole has been fervently embraced by his supporters, independent of any policy positions. Policy positions are simply not the point. Indeed, when the Trump campaign puts his platform into the traditional framework of a campaign commercial, it almost comes off like a parody:

"Stop Muslims coming into the US ... until we can figure out what's going on." If this is a policy position, your right-wing uncle's Facebook rants are a think tank.

The point isn't what Trump will do, it's who he is: someone who will stand up the Mexicans and Muslims and politically correct liberals and turncoat Republican pols and biased journalists. His rhetoric is full of dominance displays. That's what all the insults are about. They work because he's winning.

Beneath every narcissist is a scared kid

But those who live by personal appeal die by personal appeal.

You don't have to be a psychologist to understand what's really going on with Trump. His entire career, like his campaign, has been about declaring his awesomeness and forcing others to acknowledge it. He has surrounded himself with trophy wives, sycophants, and his own name, everywhere he looks. He built a whole TV show premised on the idea that he's a savvy, decisive business executive, harvesting obeisance from the rotating cast of supplicants. It is overcompensation on a world-historical scale.

At the root of this kind of narcissism is always the same thing: a vast, yawning chasm of need, a hunger for approval and validation that is never sated. Down there in the lizard brain, it's fear: fear of being left out, laughed at, or looked down on, fear of never belonging, never being accepted, no matter how many towers you build.

The fear can only be calmed by validation, by accumulating visible markers of success until no one can laugh at you. There's a submerged glacier of insecurity beneath every blowhard. (I fear that conservative primary voters, as a class, are insufficiently aware of this important fact.)

(Shutterstock.com)

Trump has built a life around being constantly validated, and his primary run so far has only seen him in that mode: winning, punching down at weaker opponents, being showered with adoration.

But the thing about politics is it's not an episode of The Apprentice. Despite the evidence of the past few months, it is not designed to make Donald Trump feel important and powerful. Sooner or later, everyone in politics is humbled. Everyone loses, at least a news cycle or two. Every politician has to eat shit, more than once, and smile through it. Eventually they must decide that eating all the shit is worth it for the chance to do some good.

That's what Obama was getting at in this interview — if people running for president don't have a powerful desire to make the country better, it's not going to be worth it. "If you are interested just because you like the title or you like the trappings or you like the power or the fame or the celebrity," he said, "that side of it wears off pretty quick."

Trump, however, is not willing to eat shit for the greater good. His enormous ego is, like the ego of every blowhard, incredibly tender. He legendarily never forgets a slight. Twenty-five years ago, Vanity Fair editor Grayson Carter called Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian," and to this day it rankles Trump. He sends Carter pictures of his fingers, insisting they are normal size. Really!

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Even today, Trump's rallies have become long, discursive rambles in which he addresses and rebuts every single accusation cast at him by his detractors. (Responding to criticisms of his rhetoric: "I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words.") He can't let go of any slight. His whole life has been devoted to refuting those who doubt the awesomeness of Trump.

Trump supporters may find Trump less charming as a loser

The kind of persona-based, expectations-based support Trump is receiving works as long as it's working. It wins as long as it's winning.

But "I always win" is a brittle claim. All it takes to disprove it is a single loss.

And eventually, Trump will lose something — maybe Iowa, maybe New Hampshire, maybe just a couple of news cycles. (And make no mistake: To a winner, second place is losing.) When he's being pressed to explain his loss, what he did wrong, do you suppose he will acknowledge error?

No. What error could there be? He can't communicate his message any better. The message is Trump. And he's Trump! If voters aren't voting for him, they're stupid.

The reactionaries who are attracted to Trump are, as numerous lines of research have demonstrated, more anxious than liberals and thus more prone to value order, stability, structure, and social hierarchy. They are highly sensitive to the pecking order and in-group/out-group distinctions.

This has served Trump's nationalist, xenophobic campaign well, but it could come back to bite him if he becomes second man on the totem pole — or, god forbid, third. To the hierarchy-conscious, the way things work is you pay respect to the winners above you. You only punch down at the losers below.

(Shutterstock.com)

Under attack, or in the face of skepticism or, y'know, losing, Trump's thin skin will make him defensive and volatile. He can't modulate, can't do humility, can't abide the thought of anyone above him. All his claims, all his stories, all his insults are yuge, the best you'll find anywhere.

The same belligerence that looked like strength when Trump was on top will look defensive and bitter when he's not. And the more doubtful or skeptical voters and the media become, the more Trump will escalate, the more his chest will puff. He doesn't know any other strategy. He'll enter a negative spiral as self-reinforcing as his rise has been.

For as long as he's been in the US public eye, Trump's been winning. He won every week on The Apprentice, and ever since he descended on his classy elevator, he has dominated every week of the GOP primary. Most of his supporters (few of whom reside in New York City) have never seen Trump when he's losing.

I suspect they won't like it. And he won't like them for not liking it. And they won't like that either. And so will go the inevitable fall.

Donald Trump’s tax plan would add $9.5 trillion to the national debt from 2016 to 2026 and another $15 trillion in the following decade (before added interest), according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center. Nearly all households would get a tax cut under the plan, averaging about $5,100 in 2017. However, the benefits would be overwhelmingly skewed to the highest-income taxpayers, with those in the top 0.1 percent (who make $3.7 million or more) getting an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million.

Trump has said he’d pay higher taxes under this plan. Because the GOP presidential hopeful has not released his income tax returns, we don’t know how the proposal would affect him personally. However, it would boost after-tax incomes for those in his income class by nearly 20 percent.

By contrast, the lowest-income households would receive a tax cut of about $130, about one percent of their after-tax income, and middle income households would get an average tax cut of $2,700, or about five percent of their after-tax income. Overall, one-third of the benefits of Trump’s tax cuts would go to those in the top 1 percent (who make $737,000 or more), according to TPC.

When he introduced his plan, Trump promised it would raise the same amount of money as the current tax code. He’s also said he would “insist” on a balanced budget. However, TPCfound that Trump’s plan would raise the federal deficit and national debt by amounts that far exceed any tax cut in history.

In 2017, it would add $545 billion to the deficit and more than double the projected annual budget shortfall. Over the next decade, his tax plan would add more than $9.5 trillion to the national debt, excluding added interest costs. In 2025 alone, it would increase the annual deficit by $1.1 trillion. To prevent his plan from adding to the deficit that year, Congress would need to cut all projected non-interest spending by one-fifth.

To meet this goal by cutting only discretionary programs, Congress would have to eliminate 80 percent of all defense and non-entitlement domestic spending. Alternatively, it could offset a tax cut of this magnitude by cutting Medicare and Social Security by 40 percent.

TPC’s analysis assumes that people and firms change behavior in response to tax changes, but does not attempt to calculate macroeconomic effects (dynamic scoring). Trump claims his tax cuts would lead to a substantial increase in the economy, and thus pay for themselves.

His plan includes provisions aimed at reducing the cost of capital and increasing after-tax returns to savers. These measures could boost the overall economy by increasing savings and investment. However, unless Trump’s enormous tax cuts are somehow offset with very large spending reductions, they’d substantially increase the national debt and drive up interest rates, thus neutralizing their economic benefits. So far, Trump has not described what spending he’d cut to pay for his tax plan.

Trump would collapse the current seven individual tax rates (with a top rate of 39.6 percent) to three brackets, 25-20-10. He’d repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax and the estate tax. He’d maintain the current personal exemption, but nearly quadruple the standard deduction from today’s $12,600 to $50,000  for married couples and from $6,300 to $25,000 for singles. Investors would pay a 20 percent rate on capital gains, in contrast to today’s top rate of 23.8 percent (including the Affordable Care Act’s 3.8 percent surtax).

Trump also said he’d cap the value of itemized deductions, though he did not say how.

Trump would cut the tax rate on business income to 15 percent. Importantly, this rate would apply to all businesses, including both C corporations and pass-through firms such as partnerships, sole proprietorships, and S corporations.

He’d repeal the corporate AMT and eliminate most business tax preferences. U.S.-based multinational corporations would be taxed on foreign profits in the year they are earned, and lose the ability to defer tax on that income. Firms would be subject to a 10 percent tax (payable over 10 years) on existing unrepatriated foreign earnings.

Trump’s plan would result in major changes in the way people and firms file returns. For example, TPC estimates that nearly 90 percent of those who currently itemize would take the new standard deduction. At the same time, without strict rules to stop them, many high-income individuals would likely restructure their compensation from wages (which Trump would tax at a top rate of 25 percent) to business income (which he’d tax at 15 percent).

While Trump would eliminate the ability of hedge fund operators to categorize their income as “carried interest,” these investment managers would likely pay less tax on their compensation than they do today, since they’d be able to pay at a 15 percent rate, rather than the current 23.8 percent capital gains rate.

Trump did not specify many details of his plan. TPC asked his staff to clarify key specifics, but received no response. As a result, TPC made its own assumptions about important details (for a list of questions TPC asked the Trump campaign and the assumptions it made, click here). here). In most cases, TPC’s assumptions limited the revenue loss of his plan.

Even without knowing those precise details, the basic story is clear: Trump’s plan promises massive tax cuts that are heavily skewed to the highest-income households. And it would blow a hole of historic proportions in the national debt.

The Tax Policy Center provides independent, non-partisan analysis of the tax proposals of candidates for public office. We describe our approach here.

The post Trump Would Slash Taxes for the Top 0.1 Percent By An Average of $1.3 Million, Add Nearly $10 Trillion to the Debt appeared first on TaxVox.