What a (Republican) Congress would mean to America.

These ideas have come about organically as many of these Republican candidates campaign on tackling inflation by cutting government spending. And when asked to get specific, many of them invariably mention the need to cut spending on these retirement programs like Social Security and sometimes Medicare, just given how big a part of the Federal budget they are. Let's put up a list of some of the prominent Republicans floating this. There's (Blake Masters), a Senate nominee in Arizona who is recently made waves by calling for PRIVATIZATION of Social Security. There's (Ron Johnson), the Senator from Wisconsin facing reelection who has called for shifting Social Security from a mandatory program to a DISCRETIONARY program. What does that mean? It means Congress would have to REAUTHORIZE IT EVERY YEAR OR THE FUNDING WOULD GO AWAY. There's Rick Scott, who several months ago proposed a plan that would PUT ALL FEDERAL LAWS ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK EVERY FIVE YEARS, UNLESS CONGRESS ACTS, PASSES A LAW TO CONTINUE THEM. THOSE PROGRAMS WOULD INCLUDE SOCIAL SECURITY. And then there's the Republican study committee led by (Jim Banks). It's a group of about a hundred influential House Republicans. They proposed a budget in June that would include long term changes like raising the retirement age in accordance with life span. And reducing benefits over the long haul by indexing them to a lower rate or rather a slower rate of growth.

WASHINGTON — If (Republicans) win control of the U.S. House of Representatives next month, they could hold the government’s credit hostage to force spending cuts ― including to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other lawmakers said this month they’ll use the federal government’s “debt ceiling” to try to pry policy concessions from Democrats.

“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News in an interview published Tuesday.

“And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, OK, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” McCarthy said. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?”

The debt ceiling is a legal limit on the amount of money that the federal government can borrow in order to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. Raising the debt limit doesn’t create new spending, it just prevents the government from defaulting on its debts.

A federal debt default would be unprecedented in modern times and could have catastrophic economic consequences. Republicans used it as leverage during the presidency of Barack Obama, but not when Donald Trump was president. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, debt ceiling drama is back.

“The debt ceiling is the natural place from which you can operate to affect spending change,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told HuffPost earlier this month.

The Treasury Department has said Congress will have to deal with the debt ceiling again sometime next year, though the timing is imprecise because it depends on somewhat unpredictable fluctuations in federal revenue and outlays.

Republicans threatened to block a debt limit increase last year, but 14 Senate Republicans ultimately voted in favor of allowing Democrats to raise the ceiling by themselves with a simple majority vote. Such an outcome would be much more complicated if Republicans control the House.

Republican House members vying to chair the House Budget Committee in the event of a GOP House majority told Bloomberg Government that they would use the debt limit to try to make Democrats agree to changes to Social Security and Medicare. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), for instance, said he favors raising the eligibility age for both programs.

Social Security and Medicare provide monthly cash and medical benefits to older Americans, and past proposals to cut the programs have proven unpopular before lawmakers abandoned them. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund faces a shortfall in 2028, while Social Security’s trust fund will remain solvent until 2034, according to the latest projections.

In 2011, Republicans won “discretionary” spending cuts as part of a debt ceiling standoff with Obama. The discretionary side of the federal budget is smaller than the “mandatory” side that includes programs like food benefits, Social Security and Medicare. The cuts affected a range of government services, including grants for Meals on Wheels programs that delivered hot meals to the elderly and disabled.

Even if Republicans won the House and the Senate, Democrats would retain the ability to block legislation in the upper chamber, and President Biden would still have a veto pen, but Republicans would likely bet that Democrats would agree to their demands rather than risk a debt default, which could roil financial markets.

One influential Democrat, House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.), told HuffPost this month that Democrats would consider handling the debt limit in a lame-duck session before the end of the year rather than give Republicans the opportunity to threaten to blow up the economy next year.

But Democrats have so far passed up opportunities to make the debt ceiling less of a nuisance by raising it by a huge amount or simply abolishing it.

It has taken decades, but it appears that anti-government crusader Grover Norquist’s dream of cutting the government down to a size he can drown in a bathtub is on the verge of becoming reality. No doubt 2018 will go down as a watershed year for Republicans who finally have the authority to at least begin achieving one of the conservative movement’s raison d'être.

It has been the Republican Party’s wet dream to “devolve government to the local level” since FDR and the 1930’s New Deal and they took a giant step towards that goal with a massive gift to corporations and the wealthy who own them. In case there is any confusion, “devolve government to the local level” means abolishing the federal government in its entirety - including all agencies, acts of Congress, departments and programs created for “the general welfare” of the people.

Many Americans are either too stupid or have not been paying attention to the ulterior motive behind the GOP’s “monumental tax scam;” it goes beyond forcing the majority of population to fund corporate and religious entitlements or transferring the U.S. treasury to the oligarchs funding the Republican movement. Although those are crucial to the Republicans’ and Trump’s plan to make America great for the wealthy, they are not the only goal.

The larger goal is what Trump’s chief advisor Steve Bannon described as “deconstructing the administrative state.” Since Trump, the Kochs, and congressional Republicans are prohibited from issuing an edict abolishing all federal agencies, acts, departments and established laws, they will “defund the administrative state” instead.

Republicans will still collect taxes from working class Americans, but instead of funding federal agencies that serve the people, they will give those tax dollars to corporations and religious groups in the form of entitlements. When tax revenue stops covering entitlements for the rich and the religious, Republicans will “defund the administrative state” with extreme prejudice; that will be a major Republican goal in 2018.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that former Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said that Trump and congressional Republicans’ decision to add significant debt in the form of tax cuts for the rich is leaving the country broke. Mr. Lew said in a Bloomberg Radio interview that:

“It’s a ticking time bomb in terms of the debt. You cannot run a fiscal policy by spending trillions of dollars you don’t have at a time that the economy is doing well.”

Mr. Lew thinks that because Republicans created tax reform for the rich and corporations without Democrats’ input, it will be difficult for “the administration” to convince Republicans to fund any “basic functions of government.” For dog’s sake, Mr. Lew is smart enough to know “the administration” could not possibly care less about “a functioning government, deficit or debt, or whether children get thrown off healthcare;” Trump cares about Trump.

It isn’t clear which “administration” Mr. Lew was referring, but it was not Trump or any of his conservative cronies. It is no secret that Republicans pledged to the Koch brothers two years ago that when they controlled Washington they would “go after the federal government, all of it,” and “the administration” has done its part to begin the purge. At least Lew has been paying attention to congressional Republicans’ own statements about where they intend to start deconstructing the government and who they intend to hurt in the process. He said:

“The next shoe to drop is going to be an attack on the most vulnerable in our society. How are we going to pay for the deficit caused by the tax cut? We are going to see proposals to cut health insurance for poor people, to take basic food support away from poor people, to attack Medicare and Social Security. One could not have made up a more cynical strategy.”

The strategy was “made up” at least a couple of decades ago and of course, it is “cynical” by design. It is a conservative strategy that involves abolishing every last element of the New Deal and any federal program since leading up to today. The tax reform is vicious in enriching the already wealthy, but it is the permanent corporate tax cuts that will be the end of “basic government functions.” Remember, the corporate tax cuts are forever and they will allow a greater number of the biggest corporations in America to avoid paying taxes forever — by design.

John Cassady at the New Yorker fairly summed up what is going to happen. After noting the “tax reform” is already going to bring in much less revenue, he concurred with other experts that it is not only “unworkable,” it has already “launched an avalanche of new loopholes to exploit.” He explained:

“What isn’t yet fully appreciated is how porous and potentially unstable the rest of the tax code will be. With a corporate rate of just 20 percent, and a big new break for proprietors of unincorporated businesses and certain types of partnerships, the new code will contain enormous incentives for tax-driven restructurings, creative accounting, and outright fraud.”

Mr. Cassady said “these contortions” are designed to undercut federal revenues, which he acknowledges many Republicans welcome as an easy means of shrinking the federal government.

“The shortfall in tax revenues could be enormous. That is what Republicans want to happen. There are some in the Party who would like to see the tax base decimated, the I.R.S. crippled, and the federal government forced to slash spending on domestic programs, particularly entitlement programs. Nevertheless, for anybody who believes in a properly functioning government, a rational, clearly defined tax system is essential. The Republican reform doesn’t meet that standard.”

As one or two Americans might be aware, the concept of a “properly functioning government” is anathema to Republicans. Their idea of a functioning government is one that takes assets from the masses to fund “the security state, the religious state, the military state, and the corporate state.”

As this author has noted for a few years now, if any American wants a preview of how this “dismantling of the administrative state” plays out and the deleterious effects it will have on the people they can look at what happened in Kansas. Republicans gave massive tax gifts to the rich and corporations and raped the state government in the process by design. In fact, one Kansas Republican appealed to congressional Republicans barely two months ago and warned them to avoid Kansas’ tax cut disaster. However, true to his word to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Mitch McConnell and Republicans are “doing the exact same thing to the federal government” that Brownback did to Kansas because they control Washington.

It is an unpleasant fact that most Americans have no awareness that their government is under assault from the people they elected to “govern” on their behalf. It is a bigger travesty that many Americans are unaware exactly what their federal government does; Americans are inherently ignorant. But they will get a clue when their workplace protections, safe transportation, clean air and water standards, safe medicine, equal rights protections, education, healthcare, and national parks are abolished under the guise of reducing the deficit to pay for corporate tax cuts. It is what Republicans are celebrating will be a very Happy New Year.