BIDEN'S WEALTH TAX PROPOSAL INVITES THE MEDIA TO CALL REPUBLICANS ON THEIR BULLSHIT (WHICH WON'T HAPPEN)

President Biden is about to propose a wealth tax on the super-rich. The New York Times reports:

The White House will ask Congress on Monday to pass a new minimum tax on billionaires....

The tax would require that American households worth more than $100 million pay a rate of at least 20 percent on their income as well as unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks and bonds, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold.

Can it pass? The Times tells us that that's not clear:

Moderate Democrats, including Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have balked at raising the corporate tax rate or lifting the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent, leaving the party with few options to raise revenue.

Still, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, slammed the idea of taxing billionaires after [Senator Ron] Wyden’s [earlier] proposal to do so was released, although Mr. Manchin has since suggested he could support some type of billionaires’ tax.

The Washington Post says:

... all previous efforts to tax billionaires have failed amid major political head winds, and it is unclear if Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will go along with the plan.

And here's CNN:

... the reality of it becoming law is unclear on Capitol Hill, where some more moderate members of the party have previously balked at such efforts.

Let me point out a word that doesn't appear in any of these stories: Republican. Not one Republican is quoted by the Times, the Post, or CNN.

That's understandable: The tax proposal, if it passes, will pass as part of a budget bill that every Republican in Congress will vote against. But I'd like to hear what Republicans have to say about this proposal to tax the wealthy. After all, Republicans have been saying for several years now that the "Democrat Party" is the party of "elitists" and that they're becoming "the party of the working class."

Much of the mainstream media takes this very, very seriously. Here's NPR last year:

Republicans are increasingly comfortable attacking corporations these days....

Top Senate Republicans — some considering 2024 presidential runs — have been echoing the call to remake the party even before the 2020 election. "We've got a big battle in front of us, Republicans do, to try and make this party truly the party of working-class America," Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in November.

Writers such as the Post's Greg Sargent see new waves of Republicans, such as the "national conservatives," as a serious challenge to GOP orthodoxy:

This NatCon vision fuses economics and culture: The GOP and conservative movement have traditionally been too beholden to macroeconomic metrics such as gross domestic product growth as measures of national greatness. Free-market orthodoxy has undercut more fundamental values such as families and community.

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib reported last year:

Starting a couple of years ago ... there has been a sprouting of new-wave conservative proposals designed to help working-class families, even if those plans required ditching traditional free-market economics....

Seib went on to describe policy proposals from Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton. So ... why not ask those guys how they feel about the Biden wealth tax proposal? Or ask them about other kinds of increased taxation of "elitists"?

No one in the press wastes time asking Republicans about these proposals because everyone knows they'd be opposed. Which is fine -- but in that case, stop telling us that the Republican Party might really be becoming "the party of the working class."

A few journalists understand this. in the Post last year, Paul Waldman called Republicans on their bullshit:

Let’s take this seriously for a moment and ask: What exactly is the Republican Party offering the working class?

Take, for instance, the memo Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) recently wrote for Republicans entitled “Cementing the GOP as the Working-Class Party.” ...

The revealing part ... is the actual policy suggestions Banks offers. In their entirety: harsh immigration policies; protectionism on trade; “Anti-Wokeness”; opposing “Wall Street” by complaining about covid lockdowns that hurt small businesses; and going after technology companies’ “censorship” of conservatives.

So if you’re looking for actual policies, that’s really just two things: immigration and trade. Which isn’t exactly nothing, but it sure isn’t much.

And when a Republican comes up with an idea to help people of modest incomes in a substantial way — as Mitt Romney did with a plan to give parents a generous no-strings child tax benefit — most other Republicans reject it.

... Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) came out in favor of a unionization drive against Amazon in Alabama — but not because he believes all workers should have the right to collectively bargain (he doesn’t). It was only because Amazon’s “leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values” by being too “woke.”

If your company is mistreating you but hasn’t weighed in on whatever culture war issue Sean Hannity is talking about, your plight is of no concern to Sen. Rubio.

The Jim Banks memo, which was addressed to House minority leader and likely future Speaker Kevin McCarthy, says that Republicans should be both pro-worker and pro-plutocrat, while being anti- ... well, let Banks explain:

So the Republicans are (a) pro-business, (b) pro-free market capitalism, and, based on their ongoing oppostion to taxing massive accumulations of wealth derived from big business, (c) pro-plutocrat ... but they're (d) anti-corporation. Whatever that means.

And we get the same nonsense in a post by Batya Ungar-Sargon at Bari Weiss's Substack that lavishes praise on a Rubio proposal to require every billion-dollar corporation to include a token worker on the board and allow the formation of a workers' organization that would be kinda-sorta like a union but wouldn't be able to negotiate wage increases:

Rubio’s bill, like much of what happens on the populist right, is navigating the Scylla of the pro-corporate Right and the Charybdis of the progressive-union Left, opening a new lane that casts itself as both pro-business and pro-worker. If the capital L labor movement has traditionally put workers in an adversarial relationship with management, and the pro-business right has historically ignored the plight of workers altogether, new populists like Rubio are seeking a way to give workers more power while circumventing the unions that are often aligned with the Democratic Party—and without succumbing to the big business pressures of the Republican donor class.

In other words, essentially no additional power at all, and definitely no more of the money that's being accumulated in great quantities by the extremely rich.

The headline of the Paul Waldman piece put it this way: "Republicans want to be a working class party. But not that much." Yup, that's about right.