Don’t be fooled, Idaho. GOP’s working-class rebranding is nonsense | Opinion

In the last decade or so, the Republican Party has attempted to rebrand itself.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned on cutting taxes, especially on the rich, and balancing the budget by slashing entitlements. It was time for the makers to get their due, and for the takers to get put in their place.

This proved to be a horribly unpopular platform, which sent President Barack Obama back for a second term.

Now the party has been taken over by President Donald Trump, who all but banished Romney and Ryan from the party and claimed he would set a course of reviving American manufacturing jobs. Trump picked “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance as his vice president, proof that he was embracing a departure from the GOP’s old embrace of the rich, in favor of a white working class that had been culturally marginalized — Vance’s Yale law degree notwithstanding.

“The image of the Republicans as the party of the Scrooge-like CEO, the basis of Obama’s 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, has been defanged by Trump, the self-styled billionaire who benefited from a rigged system and convinced his voters that only he could un-rig it on their behalf,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini wrote in 2023.

How’s the unrigging going?

Don’t trust what people — especially politicians — say. Believe what they do.

As a recent report from the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy makes clear, the sum of the last five years of a steady rightward shift in the Idaho Legislature has been massive tax cuts benefiting mainly the rich, coupled with waning support for programs that help the poor and middle class.

Middle-class Idaho families have been left out. If the Legislature doesn’t act before the end of next legislative session, taxes will rise on many Idaho families with children. Those families who make between about $56,00 and $146,000 will see their taxes rise, as the 2018 child tax credit will sunset at the end of this year. The end result, the report notes, will be that middle-class Idaho families wind up with a net tax increase.

So too will the very poorest Idahoans. Refusing the obvious, and wildly popular, option of eliminating the sales tax on groceries, lawmakers opted to increase the grocery tax credit. One consequence of this decision is that there will be no benefit for people who don’t file income taxes, overwhelmingly very poor people. They continue to pay the full sales tax on food, with no access to the tax credit.

Meanwhile, owners of physical gold bricks and coins will pay no capital gains tax on those assets — a specialized giveaway contained in House Bill 40, which also slashed income taxes for the richest people in Idaho. It will be a good year for Scrooge McDuck. Not so much for Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.

In the Idaho GOP’s rebuilt tax code, if you are poor — if your family has to survive on less than $31,000 per year — you can expect to pay more than 9% of your income in state taxes. But if your family makes more than $738,000, you’ll pay about 6%.

These are the policy changes Idaho lawmakers passed as they first tried to end Medicaid expansion, and when that was blocked in the Senate, sought to implement work requirements that, if approved by the feds, are expected to result in tens of thousands of working Idahoans losing their health insurance — because it’s one thing to work, but another thing to repeatedly file all the paperwork to prove to a bureaucracy that you work.

This is a precise mirror of federal policy under unified Republican control of government. Idaho’s delegation has unanimously supported extending massive tax cuts that disproportionately help the rich, exploding the federal debt and, at the same time, ensuring that there will be more hungry children by cutting food aid and more people dying from lack of healthcare by slashing Medicaid.

The GOP has shown you what the core priority is: Soak the poor.

The current incarnation of the Republican Party has not transfigured itself into the party of the working class. Neither is it the party of fiscal responsibility.

It is the party that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.