Pence to billionaires: Use your "stature" to make employees support a tax hike on themselves

Even Trump himself was recently forced to admit that his previous promise that he wouldn’t personally benefit from the plan was a lie.

“Well, what I say is that the, this whole concept, everybody benefits if the country does well. We all do. You guys benefit. Everybody benefits if the country does well,” Trump rambled in an interview with Forbes Magazine.

But no matter how clear the truth about their intentions is, the GOP is dead-set on passing the plan.

Speaking to the conservative Heritage Foundation, House Speaker Paul Ryan actually threatened to cancel Christmas vacations for members of Congress in order to force their scheme on the American people.

And now Pence has discovered a new, appalling tactic to try to advance their reckless efforts: encouraging wealthy business owners to bully their employees into supporting the plan — and thus supporting a tax hike on themselves.

Headlining a planning retreat at the Seminar Network — an organization backed by the billionaire Koch brothers — Pence evinced patent desperation to win more support for the tax scam, even if it has to be forced out of people who would be harmed the most by its implementation.

Pence offered sycophantic praise to the wealthy business owners and donors in the room, thanking them for “what [they] do every day to renew the promise of America” and insisting that their “generosity has made a difference all across America.”

But he later undercut that paean to “generosity” by begging the audience to use their “stature” with their employees to help bring untold economic hardship into their lives.

After the requisite joke about the length of the tax code — as though something as complicated as tax laws for a nation of roughly 323 million people could be fully elucidated in a few pages — Pence insisted that “our broken tax code weakens America itself.”

The laws “[sap] our spirit of entrepreneurship, culture of innovation, and even our belief in a brighter, more prosperous future for our kids and our grandkids,” Pence lamented.

He thanked the crowd for their support of the tax scheme that would do nothing whatsoever to ensure that “more prosperous future” for any kids not born to the 1 percent. But he plaintively begged them to go further.

We need you to reach out, use your voice. Use the stature that you enjoy in your communities and your state and all across this country to share the opportunity that we have with this tax relief legislation. You talk to your employees, talk to your suppliers, your fellow business leaders to get them on board. And of course, we need you to talk to your elected officials about just how important this moment is in the life of this nation. Tell everyone you can that America needs this tax cut, and America needs it now.

The idea that exceedingly wealthy business owners should use their powerful positions to intimidate low-level employees into supporting something that would do no good for them — but a lot of good for their bosses — is preposterous and cruel.

The White House has been lying from the beginning about the impact the tax scheme would have on working, middle-class, and lower-income Americans.

Pence wants to recruit wealthy employers to help them lie even more, and to make the rest of the country shoulder the burden of putting more money into the already full coffers of the richest among us.