KRUGMAN: Let's talk about McConnell's hypocrisy

[kpete]

Krugman:

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

(snippet from behind evil paywall)

Link to tweet

?s=20

[roamer65]

1. CA and NY should garnish federal tax revenue for the same amount.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R

[gratuitous]

3. Don't lose sight of the why McConnell wants states to declare bankruptcy

Ignore the fact that a lot of states have state constitutions that require them to have balanced budgets and so they can't just go bankrupt, but McConnell wants them to do that for one major reason: Unfunded pension mandates for retired public employees. This is a problem that has cropped up during the last 40 years while Republican taxophobia has ruled our governance. States had collective bargaining agreements with their public employees that they have chiseled on because they have to balance their annual budgets, and the bill for those pension benefits is off in the sweet by and by somewhere down the line.

Well, those public employees are retiring in greater numbers now, and the pension cupboard has been stripped bare by emptying the state treasuries into the pockets of the job creators, offering them tax benefits if they'll locate their latest plant in their fair state. Maybe they do actually open a shop and run it for a few years, but then another better offer comes from a neighboring state, and the job creators are gone like your ex on alimony day. The employees held up their end of the bargain for 30 or 40 years, but now when it's time for them to collect their pensions, McConnell wants to whisk it away in the name of fiscal responsibility and denying those greedy geezers their contractual reward.

This is a union busting ploy, because one of the last outposts of unionism is the public employee sector.