If you want to know how Donald Trump would govern if he wins in 2024 — or Ron DeSantis or for that matter Will Hurd — tune out the din of the Republican presidential campaign and cast your gaze toward the House of Representatives. What you will see is that it’s not Trump’s party so much as Jason Smith’s.
Jason who? Trump sucks up all the attention. But it is Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who would play the crucial role in setting the legislative agenda if the party retains the House and wins the presidency. And his plans for 2025 don’t look so different from Republican plans of 10, 20 or even 25 years ago.
Every four years, Americans tend to forget the reality that, on most topics, Congress governs. I am not immune to this phenomenon. I remember covering the debate in the 2020 Democratic primary about Medicare for All versus Joe Biden’s proposal for a public option — all of which came to naught when it turned out the votes weren’t there for any kind of big push on health care. I also covered debates in the 2008 campaign in which Barack Obama derided Hillary Clinton’s plan for an individual mandate — and then watched him become a strong believer in the idea once he became president and realized Senator Max Baucus supported it.
Republicans tend to get less into the nitty-gritty of policy during their primaries. But it’s worth recalling that far and away the most significant legislative achievement of Trump’s term, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, was driven almost entirely by congressional politics: It was the vision of former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Representative Dave Camp, as watered down by interest-group considerations and the qualms of moderate senators. There was nothing particularly surprising about this legislation to anyone who followed Congress in the late Obama years, but it was quite different in substance from the populist atmospherics of Trump’s campaign.
By the same token, the tax legislation House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is pushing, Smith’s Families and Jobs Act, is traditional Republican legislation — a deficit-financed regressive tax cut like the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, or the tax bills signed by George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
Out of deference to the current era of high inflation and rising interest rates, Smith’s bill pretends to be deficit-neutral — offsetting the cost of its tax cuts by repealing the clean-energy tax credits from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. But that only raises enough revenue to pay for three years’ worth of tax cuts, at which point they simply expire.
The result, as detailed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is legislation that would raise the deficit by over $1 trillion. Perhaps more to the point, adding to the deficit would put further upward pressure on inflation in the short-term.
Who wins? The Tax Policy Center says the average family’s tax bill would fall by $380 in the first year of implementation. The middle quintile would do somewhat worse than average, saving about $350, because the top quintile would do dramatically better and score a $1,230 tax cut — while the richest of the rich, in the top 0.1%, would secure an average tax cut of $38,920.
Compared to some recent Republican tax bills, this is only moderately regressive. Judged relative to pretax income, the top quintile does somewhat worse than the 40th -80th percentiles, though still better than the poorest fifth of the population.
It hardly qualifies as a blinding new insight, I admit, but so be it: In 2023, as it has been for more than a quarter of a century, the Republican Party’s top economic policy priority is to reduce taxes on the richest households.
Meanwhile, though congressional Republicans lack consensus on how to find non-fake ways to offset the costs of those tax cuts, the Republican Study Committee does (sort of) have a plan. The RSC is the largest caucus group inside the GOP conference, with 175 members, and once served as the main right-wing factional group (it was displaced by the Freedom Caucus). The group’s plan is to achieve $14 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.
Some of this comes through intelligent reforms to the Medicare system such as site-neutral payments. But the largest cuts come from repealing the Affordable Care Act and enacting further cuts to Medicaid. That’s paired with raising the full retirement age for Social Security (in effect an across-the-board benefit cut), which would hurt the lowest-income elderly the most, and from a largely unspecified $5 trillion cut to non-defense discretionary spending that, if applied across the board, would hammer border security, law enforcement and other things Republicans claim to care about.
Granted, the RSC budget is a wish list. How much a new Republican administration could actually achieve in 2025 would depend on the size of its majorities. Still, these kinds of legislative documents show which direction parties intend to go if they’re given a chance to govern. And Republicans are giving a strong indication that, beneath the sound and fury of the presidential campaign, they want another chance to cut taxes for the rich by taking away health care and retirement benefits from the poor and middle class.
None of this is getting much attention on the campaign trail, of course. But make no mistake: When it comes to actual policy, what Republicans on Capitol Hill are proposing is more important than what any Republican presidential candidate is talking about.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author, most recently, of “One Billion Americans.”
