The NPR Politics Podcast - McConnell Says Moore Should Quit Senate Race; GOP Moving Forward With Tax Plan

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

Five women have now come forward and accused Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, of pursuing relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, including one who was just 14 at the time. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell today said Moore should step aside. Also, the similarities and differences in the House and Senate tax plans. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben and editor correspondent Ron Elving. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, I'm Joshua Johnson, the host of 1A. Every weekday, people gather here to speak freely. You may hear some things you don't like, you may learn something new, and every Friday we review the week's top stories in our Friday News Roundup. You'll find the 1A podcast on the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, this is Nick. I'm a data analyst in Rochester, New York. This podcast was recorded at... 12.05 on Monday, November 13th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. To keep up with all of NPR's political coverage, check out NPR.org, download the NPR One app, or listen on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Things did, in fact, change since the last time we talked to you, the Alabama Senate race specifically. Republican Roy Moore is facing allegations he pursued sexual relationships with teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

One accuser was as young as 14. Some national Republicans now want Moore out of the race, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But Moore says he's not going, and it's too late to remove him from the ballot anyway. We'll talk about that, and we'll talk taxes. The House will likely vote on its tax overhaul this week, while the Senate begins marking its bill up in committee. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent.

And you might be thinking, wait a second, I have not heard one of those people before. And you are in fact correct. Kelsey, welcome. Thanks. I'm really excited to be here. So you're covering Congress with us now. You were the Washington Post before that. Yes, I was covering the Hill for about seven years before I came here. And I'm really excited to keep doing that here for NPR. What is like a fun meeting new people fact that you have to go to? Like, I feel like people have like fun facts like I have a dog or whatever. I am from Chicago and people typically say that is a hugely identifying factor because I will often say, well, in Chicago.

That probably came in handy when the president was from Chicago. It was. Yeah. All right. let's just start with roy moore uh thursday afternoon the washington post published a story saying moore had pursued relationships with multiple teenage girls when he was in his early 30s one of the women the post interviewed said moore kissed her took her clothes off and touched her when she was 14 this led led to many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to distance themselves from his campaign or calling him to drop out. Both of those, though, the distancing and the dropping out are complicated. And we'll talk about that. So let's start with that Washington Post story. That's the top line details right there. What else

was the Post reporting? Right. So the Post reported that there were four women accusing Roy Moore of something. One was 14. She's the one that has gotten the most attention. Her name is Lee Korfman. The other three were the ages of 16 or 18 at the time. And at the time that these things happened, by the way, the age of consent in Alabama was 16, which is a key fact here, clearly. Roy Moore is denying all of this. He did an interview with Sean Hannity that got a lot of attention. Sean Hannity's radio show, I should say, where Roy Moore said that these things did not happen, that he wasn't generally in the practice of dating teenagers when he was in his early 30s, which is about what he would have been at the time that these things happened. And the phrase generally that he used got a whole lot of attention. Correct. Yes. And also this weekend, he said he was going to sue the Washington Post. He has taken a fake news tack on this. He is saying that, you know, the Post is doing irresponsible reporting and that these things are not true and that they're defaming his character, essentially. This article is a prime example of fake news, an attempt to divert attention from the true issues which affect our country.

And meanwhile, Kelsey, Republicans here in Washington immediately distanced themselves from Moore with some qualifiers that we'll talk about. But just before we taped this podcast, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke to reporters reporters in Kentucky, and there were no qualifications there. None at all. He was asked specifically about Moore, and he said that he believes the women and he believes that Moore should step down. That is the furthest anybody in Republican leadership has gone on this. And it's kind of a departure from, as you said, the qualifiers that people were using, which were if the accusations are true, then he should step down. This takes things a big step further, and it indicates that leadership in Washington is just not willing to be on board with more. Now let's listen to a quick clip of McConnell from today talking to reporters in Kentucky.

I think he should step aside. Are you encouraging a write-in campaign with Senator Strange? That's an option. We're looking at whether or not there is someone who can mount a right-hand campaign successfully. Would it be Senator Strange, do you think? We'll see. Is the burden on Moore to prove these false versus someone to prove that these are true in this situation? Or do you believe these allegations to be true?

I believe the women, yes. I believe the women, yes. And as we were saying, that is not quite what a lot of Republicans were saying this weekend. As one example, let's listen to Mark Short, who's President Trump's legislative director. He was on Meet the Press yesterday, and he took a wide range of qualifications in the course of just one answer. No, Chuck, first let me say that I have a nine-year-old daughter, as you know, and I think that the notion of innocent defenseless children being molested is one of the most painful thoughts a parent could have. And I think that there's a special place in hell for those who actually perpetrate these crimes. And I think Roy Moore has to do more explaining than he has done so far. But I think we here in Washington have to be careful as well in this. Roy Moore is somebody who graduated from West Point. He served our country in Vietnam. He's been elected multiple times statewide in Alabama. The people in Alabama know Roy Moore better than we do here in D.C. And I think we have to be very

cautious, as Senator Toomey said, of allegations that are 40 years old that arise a month before Election Day. Ron, when you hear that, do you hear, I condemning Roy Moore or I'm getting as far away from this as I can or skepticism about the claims to begin with? The first thing that Mark Short or anyone from the White House has to do is make it clear they have absolutely Alabama in defiance of Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans, because that is essentially the inspiration and the understanding that Donald Trump has had that's led to the Trump presidency. He wants to be with the Alabamians, not the Washingtonians. You know, and we played that Mark Short clip right there, but he was one of scores of nationally prominent Republicans to be asked questions like this or to come forward with statements like this. This is exactly why this is so toxic for the

Republican Party right now. We have seen a sea change. We've seen a change just in the last 48 hours in the language being used by Republicans to push back instead of saying, well, let's wait and see. Or if true, you started hearing people say, I believe the women, or I believe the women are more credible than Roy Moore. And you saw that with Pat Toomey on Sunday morning on the talk shows. You saw that with Tim Scott on the Sunday morning talk shows. And now Mitch McConnell coming along and adopting that same kind of language, I believe the women. And of course, there've also been several people who were endorsers who had come out strongly for Roy Moore, including Mike Lee of Utah, Steve Daines of Montana, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, all relatively new senators, relatively junior senators associated with the Tea Party or associated with the most conservative elements of populist republicanism. And Kelsey, even before all of this came up, because you have to put this in context, how would you have described, you know, take Thursday on out of it? How would you have

described Mitch McConnell's relationship with Roy Moore before all this even began? I would say that it was distant at best. I think that McConnell was, I mean, McConnell endorsed Strange and McConnell wanted Strange to continue being the senator from Alabama. Strange is the incumbent senator who, of course, lost to Moore in the primary earlier this year. It's important to remember that Roy Moore was hand-selected and supported by Steve Bannon, and that Bannon has not had a warm relationship with congressional Republicans, particularly with Leader McConnell, who he has declared war against. And it would be hard, I think, for McConnell to switch directions and automatically start embracing more to begin with.

But these allegations don't help that. Danielle, I feel like anybody reading all this news this weekend thought at one point or another about this through the lens of what we were talking about this time last year, where four weeks or so before an election, explosive allegations came forward against President Trump. And just like we're seeing now, many Republicans in Washington distanced themselves from President Trump. Some said he should step aside. He did not step aside. He won the election. And by and large, many of the people making those condemning statements tried to wipe them off from ever existing to begin with. Right. Yeah. And, you know, this made me think of a poll that came out

right around the time that the Donald Trump list of allegations came out back in October of 2016. The poll was from the Public Religion Research Institute, and they asked people across the country about whether, quote, an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties. They asked this question in 2011 and they asked it in 2016. What they found was white evangelicals made a really astonishing jump in saying yes to that. In other words, saying, yes, if you commit an immoral act, you can still behave ethically and fulfill your duties. It went from 30% of white evangelical voters to 72% over the course of five years. That's, you know, more than double, well over double. And, of course, there are quite a few white evangelicals in Alabama.

I checked today, 30% of Alabama voters are white evangelicals, 60% are white Christian. And, you know, a lot of those are going to be voting in this election this December. And by the way, that jump for white evangelicals was far greater than for any other religious group. The only group that held steady or potentially declined was religiously unaffiliated people. So what we've seen in this country, in other words, is a sea change in how much people are willing to look away from in electing someone. And we did see a poll come out this weekend from JMC Analytics, which found that 37 percent of evangelicals surveyed said the allegations against Moore would make them more likely to vote for him. Now, that, of course, does not account

for the fact that they were probably planning to vote for Roy Moore anyway, because that, we assume, would have been their champion. And this is the point. When it is their champion who is accused, they see themselves being accused. They see themselves being, in some sense or another, disrespected and attacked. And so I am a white evangelical Protestant from Alabama, and I see this story in the Washington Post. And what Flash has read to me is that this is a hit job being perpetrated by people who hate everything that I stand for. And therefore, I am more likely to vote for Roy Moore. And to jump on top of that, it's not just themselves. It's, by association, the tribe

they're in. Because as we all keep saying, politics in America has become more tribal, affective polarization, which is not necessarily thinking ideologically differently, but just hating the other party more, has grown in this country over time. to the Weinstein allegations in Hollywood and the Trump allegations, where both Republicans and Democrats and independents looked at the Weinstein allegations and were roughly equally likely to say, yes, I believe that. But to look at the Trump allegations from last year, those partisan differences widened sizably. Right. For all the attention that Trump's comment about being able to shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, it seems like increasingly a lot of candidates could almost say that. There's a lot of different dynamics here. But Kelsey, let's just take through some of the solutions, if you want to call them that, that have been floated for this problem that Republicans are facing. First of all, was the idea that, oh, the Republican governor of

Alabama could simply move the election. Kay Ivey has said she doesn't want to do that. It also doesn't seem that that would be legal. There are some legal challenges to that particular option. The second one, he should resign and somebody else could replace him on the ballot. Roy Moore is not the resigning type. He has been accused of doing things incorrectly and breaking the law, in fact, in his previous role as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. And he stayed on and stayed on to fight. And furthermore, it looks like he couldn't be removed and replaced to begin with. Right. So removing him is a difficult thing because the law says that he can't be removed less than 76 days before an election. And this election is about a month away. Another option was a write-in campaign from maybe Luther Strange.

Well, the write-in process has been successful. And not that long ago, it was in 2010 that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski successfully ran a write-in bid. But it's important to remember that Lisa Murkowski was much more established in the Senate than Luther Strange. Luther Strange was just appointed earlier this year. Murkowski had been serving for a whole term and a half. She was appointed to that term by her dad, who had held the seat since 1981, and was then the sitting governor. So people knew Lisa Murkowski, and she is a tremendous retail politician. She spends so much of her time traveling around Alaska, making sure people know who she is, making sure that people have come to respect and appreciate the work that she does.

Strange hasn't had that opportunity, and it would be much more difficult. So Ron, I want to ask the last hypothetical idea that's been floated to you, and that is that Roy Moore could win the Senate election, show up in Washington, D.C., and the Senate refuses to credential or seat him. How frequently has that happened? You can imagine it has not happened frequently. There was a brief flurry of this with Roland Burrus, eight years ago, nine years ago, when Barack Obama vacated the Senate seat to become president. And that Senate seat was filled by the governor of Illinois, who was subsequently prosecuted and jailed and has been in jail ever since for soliciting contributions to his campaign fund in exchange for a possible appointment, possible appointment to the Senate. Now, in the end, he appointed somebody who hadn't been part of any of that conspiracy or any of that skullduggery,

Roland Burrus, who was an older politician in Illinois who'd had offices previously and who was African-American. That seemed to be a pretty popular choice, but there was a question as to whether or not the tainting of the process of the appointment meant that he shouldn't be seated. So for a period of time, the Senate leadership at that time, which was Democratic at that time, said they weren't sure they could seat him. Eventually, they decided that the paperwork was okay, and they did seat him, and he did serve in the Senate. What would happen if they didn't seat him? Which again, we should make clear, as you just did, is a very unlikely outcome here, and like several hypothetical steps down the road, but like what happens? Do you just have 99 senators and someone standing outside?

That would be correct. But, you know, but this is just the most extremely rare kind of set of circumstances. It's extraordinarily difficult to imagine that the Republicans would further hamstring themselves with such a small margin by leaving Roy Moore out in the rain. So a lot of things could happen here, and we're not quite sure. And as we tape, we know that there's a press conference scheduled in a little bit for yet another accuser to talk about an allegation. But we should point out here that given the current political climate and given what happened in the primary, you could argue that the majority of Republicans in Washington being against him and the national media investigating him is more of a positive than a negative. And people have been pointing that out on Twitter all morning. Roy Moore's wife has been on Facebook posting all of these kinds of conspiracy theories about how the post even came across this story.

There is a sense among a lot of the Republicans that are of the Trump wing that having establishment Republicans against him is a good thing. He wants to go in and shake up the city. And this might just be more fuel to that fire. I mean, one thing I would add, though, is I mean, we can't we can't divorce the political climate of, you know, people being very tribal and also being very anti-establishment from the cultural climate, which is which has, you know, people being very tribal and also being very anti-establishment from the cultural climate, which has, I think, shifted in a perceptible way since election 2016 even, where, you know, we have seen this wave of sexual harassment, sexual assault, allegations coming out against all sorts of very, very powerful men, you know, including here at

NPR, I should say, you say, where one of our top editors was forced to resign recently over sexual harassment allegations. And we have seen the hashtag Me Too, the Believe Women campaign sort of going on in social media. And I do not know to what degree this will affect Alabama voters in particular, but you have to wonder how much this does affect people in their heads to be more likely to believe the women, as Mitch McConnell said. Yeah. Especially when there is a group of women who allege these things against a person. You know, I mean, I think that hearing all of this all of the time has to be changing how people in America think about sexual assault and sexual harassment.

And it is potentially reaching a critical mass where the way that we all sort of approach this topic in America is changing. I wonder how much it will make a difference if more Southern Republican men come out and say what Mitch McConnell said. Because if we're talking about tribalism, I think that there is an opportunity here for people's minds to be changed based on who is sending the message that they believe the women. So Mitch McConnell made that statement today. Senators are making their way back to Washington. We'll hear whether other lawmakers join him or not. But the bottom line is this election is now four weeks away. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we will talk about taxes. Support for politics comes from Sun Basket. Sun Basket sends organic and sustainable about taxes. Meals designed to fit every busy lifestyle. Choose from paleo, lean and clean, gluten-free, vegetarian, and family options.

Get $35 off your first order at sunbasket.com slash politics. Hey, this is Steve Inskeep with NPR reminding you that you can start your day with Up First, the morning news podcast from NPR, your guide to each day's news. We bring in some of the smartest people, get a sense of what's happening, and let you go again. It's a quick podcast. So wake up with Up First tomorrow morning on the Apple Podcast app on your phone. We are back, and it is time to get excited, talk some taxes. I'm raising our hands here in the studio.

It's rock and roll. Very exciting. Full disclosure, despite that forced enthusiasm, this is not my favorite topic. That sounded natural, Scott. Danielle and Kelsey, you are both really into tax policy. We've been talking about this nonstop since I started. Yeah, totally true. So let's do it.

The tax bill cleared the House Ways and Means Committee last week, which means it's set up for a full House vote at some point this week. Meanwhile, on the other side of the building, the Senate dropped its bill last week, and that bill will now make its way through the Senate committee. So two bills snaking their way through their chambers at different points. What are the key differences that at some point or another are going to need to be resolved? Okay, so let's start just by saying that there are big things that these two bills do have in common. Let's start there. And a lot of things that are different are tinkering around the edges. So I think that we're going to hear a lot about how different they are, but it's very important to remember they are largely the same, and Republicans largely agree

that getting a tax bill done this year is super important. Right, yeah. So at the center of both bills is a big corporate tax cut. They both get rid of a bunch of deductions or shrink some deductions, depending on which ones you're looking at. But okay, some things that are different. The brackets that they set up are different. The House version would cut what we have right now, seven brackets down to four, whereas the Senate version maintains seven, but moves many of them. The House bill would change the mortgage deduction. It would lower the cutoff point for that so that fewer people could take advantage of it. The House version would get rid of only part of the state and local tax deductions. Senate version would get rid of all of those deductions. And they would treat pass-through

income differently. Pass-through income is the income that many small businesses, but also any sole proprietorship, you know. Your doctors, your lawyers, your dentists. There you go. People who happen to run hedge funds often are pass-throughs. Correct, yeah. So it would change how those people treat their income as well, and also how it's taxed.

So those are some of the differences. They're important. You know, some of these things could get really contentious. But once again, like Kelsey was saying, these aren't major central to the votes to pass it. I'm talking about the Obamacare repeal. It had to be delayed a couple times. It was a really dramatic House floor vote. It seems like there's a little less drama this type around that leadership feels confident that at the moment they have the votes they'll need. I don't know if they're confident that they definitely have the votes, but they certainly seem like they are far closer than they were during health care. During health care, when they were in the lead up to having a big vote, they spent the entire weekend on the phone working over these people who were skeptical.

I did not hear about much of that over this weekend. We saw that the House majority whip Steve Scalise was on TV saying that they would be whipping the bill on Monday during votes. When they do that, that usually means they're pretty confident and they think they can go one by one counting people. And if that's where they're at right now, it stands to reason that they could pass this fairly easily. But we've had surprises about this before. We had a big surprise in 2013 when they thought they had the votes on the farm bill and then they did not. So surprises happen. But right now it does look like they feel confident. And House members tend to be a lot more confident that they can go ahead and vote on something like this if they don't think the Senate is going to hang them out to dry. Now, the Senate could still be a problem.

But at this moment, it's not really a choice for House members. They have to vote and they have to vote yes. So let's talk salt. Politics, substance, and no shame here, basic. So let's talk SALT. Politics, substance, and no shame here, basic definitions of what we're talking about. All right, SALT, state and local taxes. I do know what that is. Yes, yes. So this is a deduction that roughly one third of Americans take. It is more higher income Americans than lower income Americans. Basically, it's this. Whatever you pay to your state and local jurisdictions, you can subtract that from your taxable income when you pay your federal taxes. So it ends up

lowering your federal tax bill. So that is one of the differences in between the current version of the House and Senate bill, right? Right. So the House version would get rid of the state and local deductions except for property taxes. It would still allow people to take that up to a certain point. The Senate version gets rid of all those deductions. And so this is going to be one big point of contention. And so Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, and he really made it clear that he is ready to put his foot down on the SALT deductions.

How can you guarantee House members from blue states that the Senate plan, the total elimination, will not be in the final bill? Look, I'm convinced that this is where we're going to end up because this is it's important, again, as I told you, Chris, to make sure people keep more of what they earn, even in these high tax states. And so what we're working toward, what we've worked so carefully with our lawmakers from New York and California, New Jersey, is to make sure we deliver this relief. And I'm committed to it. So are you saying that the House will not accept a total elimination, that that just won't fly in if even if the Senate passes it? That's what I'm saying. So, Kelsey, the Senate does not have many Republicans from the New Yorks and Californias and the New Jerseys of the world. Not only does the House have a lot of Republicans from those states,

but these are the Republicans who are on the top tier of some of the most contested races in next year's midterms. That is absolutely something they're thinking about in the House, particularly places like the Philadelphia suburbs or the districts just south of Los Angeles in California. Those are the districts where Republicans are actually very worried that they'll lose to Democrats in part because of the president and in part because of politics like these coming out of the Republican Party. There are seven districts in California where Hillary Clinton won the presidential vote, even though a Republican was getting elected to the House.

Those are vulnerable Republicans by definition. If you eliminate salt from the calculation of income, a lot of those people in those very counties are going to take it in the neck. And there are people like that around the country. It isn't just California. They can afford to lose about two dozen seats and still hold the House majority next year. You don't want to lose a third of that right in California. Right. And just to get down to sort of the brass tacks here and explain what we're talking about here, I mean, so clearly in a high tax state, like Kevin Brady was saying there,

if you're paying higher taxes, you have more you get to deduct from your federal tax bill. And that is why in these discussions, you'll hear talk about how the SALT deduction subsidizes these states. Because, you know, if you think about it, if you're the governor of a high tax or even a low tax state, and you say, all right, let's raise income taxes. What you know is that, you know, I'm going to raise income taxes, but the people in my state are not going to feel the full effect of it because some of that that they are paying to my state, they are going to get to eventually deduct from their federal tax bill. So all told, the state and local deduction reduces your total tax bill.

Softens the blow. Right. Absolutely. So one reason that these two bills have different approaches to this is the deficit issue and the fact that the Senate has to have a smaller increase in the deficit in order to fit with reconciliation rules. So Kelsey, you were talking about the fact that big picture, these tax bills are very similar in what they're trying to do. We're going to be focusing on the different deficit figures and how they reconcile those. But when you put that in the scheme of the entire bill, how close are the House and Senate in terms of the deficit issue and how you make those numbers work? Well, we will know more about that by the end of this week.

The Finance Committee is marking up their bill this week, and we will see a different bill at the end of this week than we're seeing today. But I think the state and local deduction is a really good example of why we tax nerds say tax reform is hard. It's a hashtag on Twitter. It's something we talk about all the time, because it's that place where politics and the necessities of getting a bill passed clash. So it costs a lot to preserve this property tax deduction. And the Senate can only lose $1.5 trillion on this bill and still get it passed with 51 votes. Only lose $1.7 trillion. Okay, we're talking about a 10-year period. That's an enormous amount of money, no matter how long you stretch it out. So yes, the real problem here down at the

bottom is how many people can you give tax cuts to and not just rip huge holes in federal government revenue that is necessary to support the military and everything else the government does. So if you're going to make it anything like generous in terms of tax cuts, you are going to completely violate one of the standard principles of the Republican Party, which is to try to balance the budget and reduce the debt. So we have gotten some listener questions over the last few days about dynamics of these two bills and how they would affect people in specific situations. Let's roll through a few of them. Ron, this goes to you because you are the one of all of us who teaches college classes. This is from Scott in North Carolina who wants to know how this bill affects

graduate students. Okay, so the House bill as it stands right now would actually make those tuition waivers that graduate students depend on to pay their tuition taxable income. Right now, about 145,000 graduate students receive some kind of a tuition waiver in exchange for their teaching and research and the other things they do in the university machinery. In none of those cases right now are those waivers, that tuition value, considered taxable income. And the House plan would tuition value considered taxable income. And the House plan would count them as taxable income. The Senate plan, which is still somewhat up in the air, leaves those tuition waivers as they have been. So that could be one big problem for the House

and Senate to have to work out between them. All right. Another question. We're going to stick with the Carolinas here. Susie says she splits her time between North and South Carolina. I don't know. Is that a controversial move or not? Major, major controversy. So Susie writes, I make $12,000 a year because I'm on Medicare disability. I haven't even been filing taxes because my income is well below the poverty level. The new brackets have me lumped in with people who make $45,000. Do I have to file now?

I haven't heard much about folks in my income level and holy buckets, do I feel ignored? Please address this issue. Thanks, y'all. Holy buckets here to stay. Apparently, I wasn't even in that episode and people keep tweeting at me about it. It's a thing. All right. Anyway, Susie. So there's a whole bunch we don't know about Susie here, right? You know, we don't know if she has kids. We don't know if all of that income is from Medicare disability or not. But either way, this gets at a big thing that is in both the House and Senate versions, which is the growth of the standard deduction. Both of them would raise the standard deduction for a single person to twelve thousand dollars. That's up from just over six thousand right now. Now, of course, we're not even factoring in exemptions right now, which would also disappear in both of these bills, by the way. But either way, the point is, if you're making $12,000 a year, Susie, and if the standard deduction is $12,000, then you don't have taxable income. And so I don't know about whether you'd have to file, but at the very least, that would certainly seem to zero out

what you would owe. But one more thing. She does get at something important here. She talks about how I haven't heard much about folks in my income level and holy buckets do I feel ignored. And this is true. Republicans have been selling their bills as being middle class bills. And then, of course, you're hearing a lot of talk, especially from opponents of these bills, saying these largely benefit upper class Americans. You don't hear a lot about very low income Americans and people living below the poverty threshold. And, you know, the things that would very much affect those people, for example, growing the earned income tax credit, drastically increasing the amount of the child tax credit that

is refundable, those sorts of things, those aren't included in these bills. And I have seen some criticism both from the right and the left saying that these are things that the bill should tackle. And Paul Ryan in the past has argued for the growth of the earned income tax credit. So these aren't or wouldn't be necessarily politically foregone conclusions. You know, and if you really want a middle class tax cut, what you do is you cut payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare taxes. But that's not anywhere in any of this legislation. They're not touching that whole issue. And if I'm not wrong, something like approaching half of all the taxpayers in America don't make enough now to pay federal income taxes. Their big tax burden is payroll

taxes and state and local taxes. All right. Well, Susie, holy buckets, you are not ignored here on the podcast. One last question from Nancy in Oakland. In all the discussions about the Republican tax proposal, I haven't heard anyone talking about the nature of the budget cuts that would be sure to follow. Even if some middle class and working class people would have slightly lower taxes, aren't the inevitable cuts to services going to do more harm in the end to the majority of people? Can you address this? We're addressing it. Well, Nancy, the discussion of cuts is inevitable.

Republicans have talked about that for the entirety of this year. They do definitely want to make cuts, but I don't think the actuality of cuts is as inevitable. We saw how hard it is to cut services and to cut programs people are already using when the health care bill failed. And that is a lesson that Republicans have learned. I did speak with many, many, many conservatives in particular who say that they view the tax bill as the starting point of a broader fiscal agenda for Republicans. But I think it's fair to say that it's much easier to get a tax bill passed

than it is to get a spending cut passed. So as much as it may be discussed, I wouldn't say that it is inevitable that those service cuts would ensue. So it's clear there are a lot of very specific situations that people have questions about. It's equally clear that we have people who are happy to answer them. So if you have questions about the tax bill, the multiple tax bills, what the final tax bill could look like, send us an email at nprpolitics at npr.org which is also the address where you can send that time stamp that we

use at the top of the show. But for the record, we're not giving you financial advice, people. We are not certified tax accountants. And we are not in a position to give people individual tax advice. That having been said, we'll just go right ahead and tell you what we think. Yeah.

rondoestyourtaxes.tumblr.com. All right. I'm using that. Forget accountants, man. That is a wrap for today. We'll be back on Thursday with our regular weekly roundup. You know where to find us the rest of the week. We're on NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and of course, on your local public radio station every day. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter.

And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent, tax consultant. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.