Moar Senatorial Stupid

 

Valhalla burning in the distance, after the original production, Bayreuth 1876, via BR-Klassik. Rick Scott wants to do this to the world every five years.

Rick Scott: "My plan is not to raise anybody's income tax. It is to raise some people's income tax." #NPR

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Rick Scott: "Who said I planned to sunset Medicare? I only said I planned to sunset Medicare!" #NPR

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Rick Scott: "I never said I wanted to do ANYTHING. I just wanted to start a conversation about the stuff I wanted to do, which I actually didn't want to do."

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Although, looking at the actual text of Scott's interview now that it's up at the NPR website, I"m finding some evidence that Scott is not actually out of his mind, just really remarkably stupid.

The income tax proposal in Scott's "11-Point Policy Book" is like this:

All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.

Which means, as he explained it to NPR,

I'm not going to raise taxes. What I'm saying is we have people that have voted for government programs that could work and don't want to work, and that's what my focus is. We have billionaires that have figured out how to hire the right lawyers to not be part of this. So I want to make sure this is fair to all Americans, and that's what - that's - it's real simple. We can't.... I'm not raising the tax rate. I'm not even raising their taxes. I'm saying we got to get these people to work so they're part of the system.

Can he do this? Sadly, no, but it's possible he believes he can. In his view there are two kinds of people who don't pay income tax under the current system: billionaires, thanks to their lawyers, and Democrats who don't want to work, thanks to "government programs" he's not naming. So the plan is (1) to get the billionaires' lawyers to allow IRS to collect something from the billionaires, "even if a small amount", like the $750 Donald Trump paid in 2016 and 2017, when he had some skin in the game; and (2) to make all the Democrats get jobs, so that they too will owe income tax.

Except there aren't enough billionaires and people without jobs—Democrats, Republicans, or otherwise—to do that with. Households that don't pay income tax, 107 million tax-unit households in 2020 and 103 million in 2021, or 60% and 57% respectively (which will revert this year to something like the normal 42% or 45% as the pandemic recedes), overwhelmingly do it by having jobs, getting tax withheld from their paychecks, and then getting a refund equal to the amount they paid in, or more, thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit, because they earn less than $57,414 a year (plus up to $10,000 in investment income, in a very partial bow to the retired trying to survive on Social Security and the remains of a 401K). 

You can't have "all Americans pay some income tax" unless you raise taxes on all these people, either by raising the rates or reducing the EITC. Whether Rick Scott knows they exist or not.

On Medicare, Scott's Point 6 ("We will eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress") includes sunsets not just for that and Social Security but for everything Congress does:

All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.

Nevertheless he just flat-out denied it in the NPR interview: that is he doesn't want to sunset Medicare, but apparently he has to, to "start a conversation" every five years, so Medicare can be preserved:

So I have zero interest in sunsetting Medicare. I can't imagine anybody up here would want to sunset Medicare. What I want to do is make sure we continue to fund Medicare so people that are relying on Medicare, like my parents did, they continue to get Medicare....

I grew up in public housing - born to a single mom. I have relatives dependent on Medicare. I have relatives dependent on Medicare disability. What my focus is is to make sure that the government continues those programs. And when we sit here and we run up $30 trillion worth of debt, we have zero conversation about how we're going to make sure Medicare's continued to be funded, I don't think we're being honest with the American public. And I think I want to be in a situation where - let's have the conversation. How do we fix these programs so they're long-lasting?

Because remember our long tragic history of losing Social Security and Medicare because Congress forgot to have a conversation? Neither can I. Can't recall one single time when that happened. (Though I can remember Republicans working to permanently defund them, most recently in the White House by executive order in 2020).

I actually don't think Scott's people were even thinking about Social Security and Medicare when they came up with that quinquennial Götterdämmerung concept—they may not even have understood that the programs are federal legislation—because when they explicitly mention the entitlements in the program, it's with a demand to "start the conversation" every year:

Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.

If they were thinking even half-seriously of anything at all when they put these proposals together, it must have been the picture of Congress occupied 24/7 with jobs that didn't need to be done and letting laws lapse by the dozens or hundreds (of the more than 30,000 statutes passed since 1789) because they didn't have time to get around to them and obviously unable to do anything new at all.

But I think they were mainly working to see if they could sound as stupid as Trump. And in Scott's mouth it certainly does.