This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
And you get a tax cut! And you get a tax cut! And you, and you, and you!
Unless you're poor. Then pay up.
So says Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor, Rhodes scholar and celebrated policy wonk, who through his newly released hack-job of a tax plan has achieved the impossible: He has made Donald Trump look like a grown-up.
In the months since Trump began hoisting himself upward in the polls, his fellow Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to spotlight what an unserious contender he is. It's not just his frequent insults and puerile doxxing that demonstrate his unseriousness; it's first and foremost his intolerably silly policy positions.
Jindal has been especially critical, calling Trump an "unserious and unstable narcissist," who "has no understanding of policy. He's full of bluster but has no substance."
Yet again and again, the other 14 Republican presidential candidates have proved themselves to be no less silly on policy issues than Trump. On the occasions when he has staked out new territory on the craziness frontier, the other candidates have quickly tried to meet or surpass him. This was the case, for example, with his hateful comments about immigration (which led to me-too calls to unilaterally ignore the 14th Amendment, among other highlights). Trump says jump, and the other contenders say: How far right?
The pattern is repeating itself with taxes.
In recent months, candidate after candidate has released tax plans increasingly drenched in red ink. Marco Rubio's plan would increase deficits over 10 years by more than $2.4 trillion under traditional (so-called "static") budget scoring, according to the Tax Policy Center; Jeb Bush's plan would increase them by $3.4 trillion, according to his own advisers.
Trump recently released his own plan, which looked an awful lot like Bush's but with even yooge-er tax cuts. The business-backed Tax Foundation estimated the revenue loss at about $12 trillion over 10 years on a static basis. Bush quickly criticized Trump's indifference to "fiscal responsibility." Jindal's campaign likewise released an ad suggesting Trump's plan was not "serious."
Then Jindal — who once declared that the Republican Party needed to stop being the "stupid party" — decided he, too, wanted to pander to stupidity.
That is, he decided to out-Trump Trump.
In a sprawling, largely detail-free plan released Wednesday, Jindal tried his hand at the tax-cut buzz saw. On a static basis, the Tax Foundation estimates, Jindal's proposal would cut revenue by $11.3 trillion over the next decade.
That's in the same ballpark as Trump. Yet rather than denying or trying to draw attention away from the gigantic hole he intends to blow in the budget (as Trump and Bush, respectively, have done), Jindal touts it with pride.
"Governor Jindal's plan reduces the amount of money the federal government will be able to spend," his Web site boasts, invoking long-ago disproven "starve the beast" rhetoric. The main effect of previous attempts to "starve the beast" through tax cuts, as Jindal surely knows, has not been spending decreases, but subsequently legislated tax increases.
Not that Jindal could easily cut his way to deficit neutrality, even if he found the political willpower to do so. Killing Big Bird, slashing the Education Department and whittling away at "waste, fraud and abuse" wouldn't offset revenue declines of this magnitude. To give you a sense of scale for what's required to amass $11.3 trillion in spending cuts, imagine completely eliminating all Social Security spending ... while continuing to collect all Social Security taxes.
And that still wouldn't be enough to plug the hole.
Jindal's plan is also, impressively, even more regressive than Trump's. While Trump would raise the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent by a mere fifth (21.6 percent), Jindal would increase their incomes by a full quarter (25 percent).
Then, in addition to lowering taxes on the rich, Jindal — but not Trump — would raise taxes on the poor.
Yes, you read that right. Jindal wants to engineer a reverse Robin Hood, taking money from the poor to give to the rich.
This may not be surprising, though, given that as governor of Louisiana, Jindal has backed other measures to shift more of the tax burden onto the poor to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
Maybe Jindal's outlandish federal tax proposal, like his administration's outlandish suggestion that Planned Parenthood patients go to dentists and nursing homes instead, is a Hail Mary attempt to improve his poll numbers. Or maybe he's just no less crazy, and no more serious, than a certain "unserious and unstable narcissist" he keeps putting down.
Twitter, @crampell