"It's ridiculous." Father of Reagan tax cuts slams GOP's "big tax cut for the rich"

The GOP’s corporate tax scheme is getting worse every day. It slashes taxes for millionaires and large corporations. It cruelly eliminates credits and deductions used by working families. It has Obamacare repeal baked into it. And many senators are hoping to add a provision that triggers harsh cuts to public programs if — as is inevitable — the bill does not produce job growth.

While Senate Republicans are being whipped into line, opposition to the bill is growing louder. And not just from Democrats.

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan who helped design his famous supply-side tax cuts, is disgusted with the bill now being considered in the Senate, according The New York Times.

“What they have here is a big tax cut for the rich paid for with random increases in taxes for various constituencies,” Bartlett said. “It’s ridiculous. And it’s telling that they are ramming this through without any debate. All of the empirical evidence goes against the tax cut.”

Bartlett, to be fair, is hardly representative of conservative politics. He is an independent who disavowed the GOP over a decade ago, and was also highly critical of George W. Bush.

But he is not the only former Reagan adviser to express concerns about the GOP scheme. Larry Kudlow, a Trump adviser, has as well. He worries the changes to the individual income tax are “going to hurt a lot of different people” and that this is “not a true tax reform bill.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a dire report that the plan would raise taxes on the poor. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the deficit hawks who tried to forge a budget blueprint in the Obama era, staunchly oppose it. And AARP, outraged over the bill’s cuts to Medicare and tax increases on disabled seniors, is now mobilizing.

Republicans have repeatedly claimed that this tax bill is the reason why they have put up with all of Trump’s behavior. If this is what they were holding out for, they have descended into complete moral and ideological bankruptcy.