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In 6-part tweetstorm, Paul Ryan sums up his House career: making the rich even richer

He also forgot that the tax bill was a give away to special interests.

Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) last month, at the unveiling of a portrait of himself.
Soon-to-be-former Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) last month, at the unveiling of a portrait of himself. CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is in his final days as Speaker of the House, a job that he only reluctantly took in 2015 and will depart with a dearth of accomplishments. While he will leave office unable to realize his college dream of taking Medicaid away from poor people, he launched a tweet-storm on Tuesday morning celebrating the first anniversary of his sole major legislation: the Trump tax cuts that mostly benefited the rich and big corporations.

He began his tweet-storm by noting he’d been working for 20 years to cut taxes.

Ryan lamented in his tweets that becoming Speaker had meant giving up the one job he really wanted — chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — but that he had worked hard to make sure he could still cut taxes for the privileged.

Most dishonestly, he claimed that the bill was passed because he convinced his colleagues that “the need for reform outweighs the needs of special interests.”

But the bill was a massive giveaway to special interests: The bill gave corporate lobbyists virtually everything they asked for in their multi-million dollar lobbying campaigns.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 slashed corporate tax rates — long a priority for big businesses — and lowered the top individual rates for the wealthiest Americans. Among the bill’s beneficiaries were the rich GOP lawmakers who wrote the bill and President Donald Trump himself. Though Trump, Ryan, and proponents vowed it would unleash unprecedented economic prosperity, almost none of the tax cuts’ benefits have gone to the middle class or Americans who make the least income. And the stock market has actually declined since its passage.

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The tweets, sent from his official Speaker of the House account, featured sleekly  produced videos chronicling how the bill became a law with everything but a Jack Sheldon song. They make no mention of the massive hole the bill blew in the deficit, and their production cost will no doubt increase the debt even further.

Earlier this year Ryan tweeted that thanks to the tax cuts, a secretary was saving $1.50 a week. Now, as he prepares to leave public office for the first time since 1999, he will have plenty of time to look back on his one legislative accomplishment.