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Two Years Later, Republican Tax Scam Clearer Than Ever
After two years, it’s clearer than ever that the GOP Tax Scam was a massive handout to the wealthiest few and largest corporations.
Sunday [12/22/19] will mark the second birthday of Trump’s signature legislative achievement: a nearly $2 trillion, deficit-financed tax cut weighted toward corporations and the wealthy. Unfortunately, on this birthday — like the first one — our toddler is way behind on nearly all its developmental milestones.
Americans were promised, for instance, that the tax cuts wouldn’t add a penny to federal deficits. In fact, they would more than pay for themselves, reducing government debt.
When virtually every single independent analyst predicted the opposite, Republicans attacked the refs. But the refs were right.
The cuts only helped the wealthy and now Republicans are, of course, trying to take away public benefits from the rest of us to pay for their bad policy. The American people deserve better.
In the fiscal year that recently ended, the deficit once again widened, to nearly $1 trillion. That is 26 percent higher than the deficit in fiscal 2018 and an astounding 48 percent higher relative to 2017, the last full year before the tax cuts were in place.
.... increased because tax revenue isn’t coming in nearly as strongly as you’d expect during an economic expansion. In fact, thanks to Trump’s tax overhaul, corporate tax revenue is down more than a fifth since fiscal 2017. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the legislation overall will end up adding nearly $2 trillion in red ink over a decade.
Trickle-down economics has always been a fraud. It is an idea propagated by big-money interests to give an intellectual veneer for more tax breaks for billionaires.
[Retiring Republican] Rep Mark Meadows pronounced that Trump shouldn’t be impeached because the economy is “growing at levels that we have never seen in the history of our country.”
This is a lie... the economy is on track to grow slightly more than 2 percent this year.... below the average during the postwar period (about 3 percent) and well below the rate when Bill Clinton was impeached (4.5 percent).
The mechanism by which these tax cuts were supposed to goose growth, after all, was by stimulating business investment. But business investment has shrunk each of the past two quarters. Apparently, whatever modest boost the tax cuts gave to investment was not sufficient to overcome the drag from Trump’s trade wars (which Trump also insists are helping the economy).
.... was also supposed to fuel higher wages..... inflation-adjusted wages are rising at about the same year-over-year pace as they were in the couple of years before Trump took office. Those big raises apparently got lost in the mail. Perhaps they were accidentally routed to fund record share buybacks.
Every Republican senator supported the GOP tax scam. Here are a few we must defeat in 2020: Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, Cory Gardner, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, David Perdue, Susan Collins.
...approval ratings for the cuts have been underwater almost every day since they were but a twinkle in the party’s eye. The law may have also whetted public appetite for the higher taxes on the wealthy that many Democrats want. Though... making the rich pay more was also popular before the GOP made them pay less.