Republicans in Congress have released their tax proposals and to no one’s surprise, it is a massive redistribution of wealth from the have-nots to the oligarchy. Ed Burmila breaks down the awful details.
What does a massive tax-cutting bill so bad that even Republicans balk at it look like? Start with a staggering $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over ten years.
Sounds great, right? Well, you’re not getting any of it. It consists largely of corporate tax rate cuts – more on that in a second – and repealing the estate tax.
…The GOP plan overwhelmingly benefits people with very high incomes. Eighty percent (!) of the benefits would go to the top 1 percent of earners, or people earning over $390,000 annually. Is that you? I didn’t think so.
…How does a group of “fiscal conservatives” justify $1.5 trillion in deficit spending? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The tax cuts will create so much economic growth that, they’ll pay for themselves!
Since 1980, the country has been following this line of logic again and again and there is a mountain of evidence that it simply doesn’t work. So-called supply side economics, with its “trickle down” promises, have been a disaster in practice even if some economists insist that in theory they are effective.
So basically it is the same old bait-and-switch game that the Republicans have been playing for decades now in order to disguise this wealth transfer. They seem to think that this worn-out disguise still has some life in it and some will buy it. I was listening to a call-in show on NPR about the tax bill and one caller said that Trump is a genius and the tax plan will result in middle class people like him benefittig greatly. When the host pointed out that analysts have shown clearly that most of the money will go to the wealthy, the caller just repeated that Trump is a genius and will see to it that somehow the middle class will be the biggest beneficiaries.
A quote attributed to Jonathan Swift that says, “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place” illustrates the durability of this kind of magical thinking.
Mano,
The estate-tax—a tax that affects only those worth more than $11 million—repeal will save Donald Trump’s children an estaimate $1 billion.
Families like the Waltons have literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for this repeal.
Jeff
A couple of years ago I was arguing on a forum with someone about trickle down economics. He claimed it was obviously true. I went and dug up actual data. Over the last 40 years, in dollars adjusted for inflation, the per capita GDP had increased by over 100%. Over that same time span the median per capita income had increased a mere 6%. In other words, the vast majority of that economic bounty was going to the 1 percenters. It was not trickling down.