The Do-Nothing Duo: King And Zeldin Complicit In Trump Tax Scam

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Your home has been robbed and burned to the ground. The police inform you that the bandits have been apprehended and are sitting in custody. After a debrief, you learn that a discussion occurred between the bandits prior to the robbery. Two of the bandits voiced opposition to burning your home. "Can't we just rob them?" they said. When the rest of the gang vetoed them, the two robbers protested by sitting in the car while the robbery and burning occurred. Later, when you come face to face with the robber gang, the two who stayed in the car plead their case.

"Don't blame us," they said. "We only helped plan the robbery and find your house on a map. Once our leader decided to burn your home down, we voted no and didn't get out of the car!"

Do you press charges on the entire gang, or spare the two who didn't enter your home?

This is the closest analogy to the token opposition we are seeing from Republican members of Congress, who have voted "No" on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, also known as the Trump Tax Bill.

Two of them, local Congressmen Lee Zeldin (NY-01) and Pete King (NY-02), recently came out in public opposition to the bill on the sole basis of its repeal of State And Local Tax deductions (SALT), which briefly eliminated itemized deduction of property taxes before partially restoring them up to $10,000. Indeed, they voted 'No' on the House legislation, before the Senate passed a separate version. Both houses of Congress will have to vote again on a unified bill.

Based on their comments, you would think that King and Zeldin voted against a SALT deduction bill. If that was the case, we would have been hearing from the pair for months on end, well before November, less than a month before the bill's passage.

The reality is that the Trump Tax Bill is a total renovation of the tax code, that further consolidates wealth into the very top income brackets by attacking poor, middle and upper-middle class families on a number of financial fronts. King and Zeldin, who have been in hiding for months while their conference in the House crafted and shaped this bill with the help of lobbyists, opposed the legislation on narrow grounds. Their chief concern is the effect of the SALT deduction repeal on homeowners and the housing market, which makes sense since the real estate industry, which does not back this bill, is the single biggest combined contributor to both King and Zeldin, and exerts incredible influence over lawmakers in high-density suburban communities.

Angering homeowners is, generally speaking, a bad idea for any Long Island representative, though God knows how King and Zeldin figured out their constituents' thoughts on the issue, what with them refusing to hold town hall meetings in favor of screened calls where their fan-base can call in and give them pointers on how to continue doing an awesome job. These guys have more profile filters on constituent contact than a dude-bro wanderlust has on his OKCupid profile.

Thankfully, local GOP mega-donor Steve Louro is on a first name basis with Zeldin and called him personally to let him know how he feels about the repeal of SALT deduction.

As a homeowner myself, I am glad that we are all in agreement that the SALT repeal is cause enough to vote against this behemoth of a bill.

But like the robbers in my analogy, King and Zeldin are seeking a pardon from constituents on the basis of sitting in the car while their associates reduced our home to ashes. They helped support, plan and shepherd this bill from the beginning of its route to passage, until nine-tenths of the way through before yelling "STOP!" inches in front of the finish line.

There was never any doubt that this bill was going to pass the House of Representatives. As is often the case with controversial legislation, King and Zeldin were permitted to stand on the sidelines and watch their team score, so as not to risk upsetting their constituents.

The Trump Tax Bill is poison not only to the middle class and working poor, but to the entire economy. Since King and Zeldin have not voiced opposition to any other aspect of the bill, we have to assume that they would have voted "YES" if the full property tax deduction was restored.

In case you aren't up to speed on all the details, here is a quick rundown of the damage this bill seeks to inflict on major portions of the population.

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Healthcare

Both House and Senate versions of the bill would remove the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act, which would result in an additional 13 million Americans without health insurance by 2027, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Worse yet, the Senate version of the tax bill opens up a $1.4 trillion deficit, which according to "pay-as-you-go" (PAYGO) budget rules, mandates that all tax cuts or entitlement increases be off-set by tax increases or budget cuts, would automatically slash Medicaid by up to $400 billion over the next decade, and impose deep cuts to other areas of the budget including agriculture and education.

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Education

The House bill is particularly brutal for students and higher ed institutions. Graduate student tuition waivers would now be taxed as income, and employer-provided education assistance would be taxed as well. Tax-exempt benefits are currently capped at $5,250 per year for undergraduate and graduate course work.

The bill also repeals student loan interest tax deduction, and the tax credit that is received by part-time students.

To put this in a local context, we are eliminating tax benefits for working parents who attend college or university part-time so they can earn a degree and grow their employment opportunities, or earn a higher salary at their current jobs. Graduate students, who are our future scientists, medical professionals, and business owners, have less financial incentive to pursue higher education degrees.

When I was in high school, my mother was one of those students - a registered nurse and full-time working mother of three, who made the decision to go back to school part-time and earn a higher degree so she could become licensed as a Nurse Practitioner, which comes with a significantly higher salary. It took her several years, and I can tell you that if her graduate student benefit was taxed as income, there is a good chance she would not have enrolled as a student. Thankfully it was there, and the salary increase enabled her to live a more comfortable life and contribute to the economy as a consumer with better purchasing power.

In a county like Suffolk that funds itself through speculative revenue sources like the county sales tax, providing disincentive to people who go back to school to earn degrees and increase salary is a horrible idea.

Income Inequality

The most destructive feature of the Trump Tax Bill is its effect on the income inequality gap that has been widening for more than 30 years.

Benefits of this tax reform bill flow upwards to the top income brackets immediately, and significantly worsens up through 2027, when the bottom 20% of earners actually see a slight tax increase.

This bill would be the largest tax cut in history. And unlike most of the largest tax cuts, including Reagan’s, Nixon’s, and even George W. Bush’s Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, the Trump Tax Cut does not resemble the curve of the population; that is, this round of tax cuts will be the most regressive in modern U.S. history, with almost no benefit flowing downward to the middle class and below. The wealthiest Americans would not only, as expected, receive the largest share of money - they would also see the greatest benefit relative to their income, a patently unfair result.

The myth that tax cuts for the wealthy grow the economy were popularly expelled after the 2008 Great Recession, but academically had been repudiated long before that and even today, we have former Reagan advisers coming out to admit that this method of trickle down economics does not work.

Even from a supply-side perspective, this bill fails. You know it's bad when Goldman Sachs economists speak out to claim that the bill would not significantly boost economic growth. That alone is more nuanced opposition than our own Congressmen provided.

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The Need for Real Opposition

The Trump Tax Bill giveaways don't stop at the ultra wealthy, however. It also includes language that “codifies the rights of unborn children”, allows tax exempt religious organizations to engage in political activity, and inserts major barriers to immigrant parents claiming child tax credits for their U.S. born children.

All of this legislative horror show brings to mind a simple question: how hard is it to bribe your constituents with a tax cut bill?

And I think, when considering the various failed attempts at imposing bad legislation designed to hurt Americans who don't look like Trump, think like Trump, or have bank accounts like Trump, the answer is clear: it's really hard, when said tax cut bill is a disguise for every bad Republican idea of the last four decades.

So in the case of Congressmen King and Zeldin, what would real opposition look like, if they were inclined to provide any?

It would have started months ago with fundamental questioning and concern, both in public and behind closed doors with Congressional colleagues, about how a trillion dollar tax cut might affect those constituents on Medicaid (many of whom vote Republican) through mandatory budget cuts.

It would have continued with speeches on the floor of the House about how the tax bill is going to carve a gash into higher education and impact working families who use tax benefits to pursue degrees and better their lives.

Both Congressmen should have been holding town hall meetings with constituents (yes, even the ones who yell at them, as former Democratic Congressman Tim Bishop was once criticized for not doing), in addition to their dial-a-friend telephone town hall shams.

And even after the passage of the House bill, King and Zeldin should have been keenly interested in the developments of the Senate bill, and continuing a more nuanced vocal objection to the worst elements of both versions through their official websites and the media.

What was Lee Zeldin doing while the Senate bill passed, and in the aftermath?

Besides hiding from constituents? Tweeting support for Mike Flynn's communications with Russia ("100% in America's best interests"), trolling TMZ, asking the NY Giants why they haven't fired their coach, and doing his usual nativist shtick by opportunistically leveraging the Kate Steinle murder trial to drum up anti-immigration sentiment (FYI Steinle's parents have come out strongly against these tactics and the whole Kate's Law movement).

As for Pete King, he's been virtually media silent, sans for some Twitter posts about MS-13 and defending the honor of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

That both of these men spend the bulk of their time espousing their criminal justice, national security and foreign policy credentials while voting against the economic interests of their constituents is not a surprise. King and Zeldin's House committee assignments look virtually identical, King taking on Homeland Security and Intelligence, Zeldin on Foreign Affairs and Israel, and both men serving on Financial Services (their other biggest campaign contributor next to the real estate lobby). Judging by their assignments, you'd think King and Zeldin represented a banking sector on a military base located in a Ganglandia war zone. Hey, is it possible that a Congressman serving Suffolk County could have a say on topics like Education, Health Services, Transportation, or Telecom? Take a look at our local economy, it doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out where our interests lie.

Instead, in the midst of a monumental decision on our economic future, the people of the 1st and 2nd New York Congressional Districts are stuck with representatives who like to burnish their tough guy anti-crime/anti-immigrant/aggressive foreign policy credentials, while changing in a D.C. phone booth to become the Do-Nothing Duo en route to the House of Representatives, where our interests come second to lobbyists and right-wing hate groups.

King, a pompadoured Toad Prince of fear, loathing, and luxury, can only be gotten off his throne if there is action to be taken against Muslims, their mosques and their neighborhoods, which he has been so vocal about having surveillance over. He is almost never present on kitchen table issues, unless you're a local boy scout troop that wants to present him with a medal for financially sponsoring a youth chili cook-off or some other benign constituent issue.

For Zeldin's part, other than being an Israel hawk, he is mostly a hollow meat-puppet for extremity, whose shape has conformed to the fist of Breitbart White Nationalists, and local fringe activists such as the Conservative Society for Action, and The Oathkeepers.

There is precious little time before the Trump Tax Bill scam becomes law. If King and Zeldin wish to oppose the bill in a meaningful way, they will need to provide much more depth on the reasons for that opposition beyond SALT, and talk to their constituents, the media, and their colleagues in both the House and Senate about precisely their points of support and disagreement with the bill. Don't hide behind "well that's the Senate version; well the House already voted and I was a No". There is more work to be done.

Talk to us, Congressmen. Make no mistake, this the only topic of policy conversation on the mouths of your constituents, even the ones who support you. Forget the convenient distractions and get to work in stopping this assault on working Americans. The 2018 election is closer than you think, and you have credible opposition. Do something.