To date, the two best hashtags we've seen to counter the just-released Republican tax plan are #BillionairesFirst and #NotOnePenny, so we decided to use them in our title. Because over the next few weeks, there will be a monstrous messaging battle between Republicans and Democrats over how their new tax cut plan should be framed. Democrats seem poised to win this battle, but then again there is no guarantee that's how it will play out. So today we thought we'd devote a large portion of the column to mustering up the arguments Democrats should immediately start making to any who will listen.

The optimism about how the public will ultimately react comes from some recent polling conducted before the GOP bill was even unveiled. A full half of the public is already opposed to the GOP tax plan, sight unseen, while only one-third supported it, a difference of 17 points. And a whopping six in ten people already think that the GOP proposals on tax cuts will favor the rich. Similar majorities already see the tax system rigged in favor of the wealthy and want to see corporations pay higher taxes, not lower. The mood of the country is already set against large tax cuts for the one percent and Wall Street, in other words, and Democrats just need to successfully tap into that mood.

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With much fanfare, the Republican tax plan was unveiled today. This is an incredibly complex piece of legislation, so it's going to take more than one column to adequately examine what all their proposed changes will mean to American taxpayers. On many of these details, the GOP kept their cards pretty close to their vest until today, meaning this is the first chance everyone's got to figure out how each of these proposed changes will impact them personally. One idea which emerged a few days before the proposal was formally unveiled is to shrink Schedule A to "the size of a postcard." Schedule A is where taxpayers figure their itemized deductions, so it encompasses a lot of the other GOP proposals as well. But today, I'm going to focus on two in particular, because they provide some of the strongest arguments for Democrats and progressives to use in opposing this plan.

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Today we were all supposed to see the unveiling of the Republicans' tax plan, complete with facts and figures, drafted as a bill Congress could pass. This has not happened yet, because they can't agree among themselves over the details and are even now radically changing their own plan to assuage their own membership. We might see their tax plan tomorrow, but then again maybe we won't. There are many aspects of the GOP's tax plan that are broadly known so far, and others which are vague and ill-defined. The latter is what everyone's waiting to see, because drafting an actual bill means putting figures on paper rather than just creating political talking points -- which is so far all Republicans have done on many aspects of their plan. But they did put numbers to one radical change to the income tax law already, so their proposal to almost double the standard deduction while eliminating personal exemptions can already be subject to a deep and wonky dive into the numbers.

As with almost any fundamental change to the tax system, answering the question "Is this going to help or hurt me and my family?" is a tough one to answer. This is especially true in this case, because it is an example of one hand taking while the other is giving away (or robbing Peter to pay Paul, choose your own metaphor). There are many factors involved, and the way the numbers work almost assures that there will indeed be both winners and losers at all income levels. Without seeing the final GOP plan, it's impossible to say what will happen to Schedule A, for instance, where Republicans have been eyeing removing deductions for state and local income taxes (including, up until a few days ago, also removing property tax deductions -- but that is rumored to have now changed). The proposed removal of the Alternative Minimum Tax will also impact how many families figure their deductions and their taxes. These and other changes make it complex to figure out who exactly will be benefiting, who will be losing out, and by how much.

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What with the holiday and all, I don't have time today to adequately comment on the big story in Washington this week: the indictments and plea deal connected to the investigation of Bob Mueller. Instead, I'm just going to offer up one brief observation that few in the media have yet made -- how remarkably tight-lipped the Mueller investigation has been, to date. In fact, all the rampant speculation that is currently flying about what to expect next from Mueller's team really proves the point, because speculation is all that is even possible in such a leak-free environment.

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As that learned philosopher Alice Cooper once said, welcome to my nightmare. Nightmares, actually, since (as usual) we have one terrifying tale of fright for the right, and one spine-tingling scare story for the left, just to be even-handed.

Of course, if you ask any Democrat, they'll tell you that each and every day that they wake up to realize once again that Donald Trump is president is its own kind of nightmare -- and an ongoing one.

This year, in order to be a bit challenging, the spooky stories for right and left will have a common theme, which might be called: "Be careful what you wish for." Because too many among us hope that Donald Trump will be removed from office, without really considering the consequences should that ever actually come to pass. So I flipped a coin and assigned impeachment to the Democrats and the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Republicans. What follows are the bone-chilling tales of terror which might just be the direct results of getting rid of Trump, to frighten anyone who hasn't fully thought through what might happen next.

Both these frightfests are rather apocalyptic in scope, but then again we live in some pretty apocalyptic times. So sit back, relax, eat some Hallowe'en candy, and prepare to be scared silly. Boo!

Democratic Nightmare -- Holy American Empire

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There's an easy test to see whether Republicans in Congress care about financial deficits: Is there a Democrat in the White House? If so, then deficits are so important that the situation requires threats of government shutdowns and defaulting on the national debt to fight deficit spending. However, if there's a Republican in the White House, then (as Dick Cheney so eloquently put it) "deficits don't matter." This was on full hypocritical display once again this week, as congressional Republicans voted to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the national debt, so that the wealthy and big corporations can enjoy massive tax cuts.

We haven't seen precisely what these tax cuts will entail. But from the absolute horse manure Republicans are already spouting about it, expect it to be pretty blatantly tilted towards the upper end of the income scale. Just one single change Republicans are considering would save Donald Trump a whopping 81 percent of his own federal income taxes, although few have noticed this fact yet. This week, unconcerned with the reaction to cutting the state and local income tax deduction, Republicans pondered cutting the tax-free deduction for 401(k) plans. When questioned whether all of these changes would cause taxes to actually rise on much of the middle class, we got a world-class "Big Lie" from Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing House committee:

"In about a week, you will be able to see the reforms proposed and where we are heading with it," Brady said. He said he couldn't guarantee that every American would see their taxes go down because of the changes, but he could "guarantee that every American will be better off because of a simpler tax code that lowers those rates and improves their paychecks."

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While admittedly the Democrats have some fence-mending to do between the two wings of their party, at least their rhetoric doesn't lean quite so much towards military metaphors. But over on the Republican side of the aisle, both sides seem to be using the term "open warfare" to describe what is going on. Steve Bannon was the first to use the belligerent "warfare" terminology, but it now looks like allies of Mitch McConnell are just as committed to a battlefield fight over the course of the next year.

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Republicans are playing a game of peek-a-boo on their tax plan. They don't want to release the full details, because they know full well this will leave them open to attack from both the left ("Not one penny more for the One Percent!") and from the right ("Why are we blowing up the deficit, now that we're in charge?"). But the congressional Republicans who are in charge of drafting the tax bills do still need to gauge support for various proposals, so they are currently engaged in selective leaking in order to run these ideas up the old political flagpole, to see if they are salutable or not (so to speak) among their members. The latest of these is to sharply reduce the amount of tax-free income that can be socked away in a 401(k) retirement plan. President Donald Trump initially pushed back hard against this idea, but today indicated that he might just be open to negotiation on the issue. Which begs a much larger question: Will Trump actually go to the mat fighting for any particular tax issue? Or will Republicans just flat-out ignore the White House, knowing full well Trump is so desperate to sign a major piece of legislation that he'll agree to pretty much anything they come up with?

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I have to begin with an apology for that headline... but in the era of Donald Trump, it was impossible to resist. Senator Jeff Flake made the news today by announcing he will not be seeking re-election next year. He did so in a rather spectacular fashion, with a Senate floor speech that came close to denouncing Trump and all he stands for. As time goes by, more and more Republicans are taking the opportunity to do the same thing, but so far this hasn't much impact on the political world beyond the realm of rhetoric. So while I appreciate Flake's statement for the entertainment value alone, I also have serious doubts as to whether it means much in the grand scheme of things.

Jeff Flake has been positioning himself as the moral savior of the Republican Party's soul for some time now. Earlier this year he released a book titled Conscience Of A Conservative (reprising the title another senator from Arizona used a half-century earlier), in which Flake denounced the coarseness introduced by the Trump takeover of the GOP. His floor speech today is merely a continuation of this theme.

However amusing this all is for liberals, though, Flake's announcement today wasn't entirely unexpected -- because he stood a good chance of losing to a primary challenger next year. Leaving the Senate now is at least somewhat self-serving, because it's always easier to exit on your own rather than have your base voters hand you the pink slip. What this means outside of Arizona, though, is that we'll likely see a Flake replacement who is even more conservative and closer to Donald Trump. Barring an upset victory by a Democrat, this is now almost assured.

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Call it the refusal of "trickle-down economics" to die. Ever since Ronald Reagan introduced the idea, Republicans have clung to a very mistaken concept -- that tax cuts always pay for themselves. Though proven false again and again, this is the fallback Republican position when trying to hoodwink the American public into massive tax cuts for those at the tippy-top of the income scale. "Don't worry," the GOP tells the public, "these tax cuts will generate so much new growth that they will pay for themselves!" As always, the reality turns out to fall far short of this lofty goal.

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