Last December, when sociopathic con man and pathological liar Donald "Rump" Trump celebrated his massive tax giveaway to corporations and the top 1% in front of grinning Rethuglican members of Congress, they mistakenly believed it would be a big winner with the public. After all, they had sold their trickle down, supply side tax policy for over 30 years to large, gullible swaths of the public before, even though it created massive deficits and never produced the prosperity it promised. Why not go for it again? The Rethugs tried to make it an issue in the spring primaries against Dems in districts that they should have retained, but they failed. They found that people losing their health insurance, or seeing rates rise as a result of Rump's personal, malignant attack on Obama's Affordable Care Act is far more important.
Writing in American Prospect, William Rice explains how the corporate "raises and bonuses" were temporary PR moves demanded by Rump of corporations eager to please the vengeful clown in the White (Supremacist) House, while giving workers virtual crumbs from their massive windfall. For example, media giant Comcast got Rump's appointees to kill net neutrality after it offered $1,000 one-time bonuses to 100,000 employees. A big publicity blitz by Rethugs followed the December announcement, with too many complicit media outlets going along:
"Maybe, just maybe, the GOP and their big-money supporters had been right when they claimed corporate tax cuts help the little guy.Now, the realization is spreading that these "raises and bonuses," if delivered at all, were the smallest of small potatoes:
It proved to be a tough sell. Tax cuts are traditionally popular (who doesn’t like free money?), but opponents of this bill had done a good job letting people know it was the rich and corporations who gained from the new law, not working families—millions of whom would actually pay higher taxes once the law was fully phased in. The bill was so unpopular that for the first time in recent legislative history, not a single Democrat—not even conservative senators up for re-election in states Trump won—voted for a Republican tax cut.
Indeed, the very necessity of the corporate bonus propaganda campaign was itself a sign of the Tax Act’s toxicity. After 35 years of trickle-down, supply-side orthodoxy (only occasionally broken by lapses into more sensible policies), Americans were all too aware of the stagnant wages, widening economic inequality, and neglected public needs that resulted. They had understandably become weary, wary, and wise. Corporations knew that this time they would have to show them the money up front." (our emphasis)
"While anyone less wealthy than Trump and his cabinet would find an unexpected bonus of $1,000 a welcome surprise, the bonuses were—relatively speaking and in the proper context—crumbs. And they’re crumbs that few workers are actually receiving...[Americans for Tax Fairness] has determined that as of mid-June, only 4 percent of workers have received any kind of tax-cut-related bonus or raise (and by dollar value, two-thirds are one-time bonuses and only one-third are ongoing wage increases). Belying the idea that workers were sharing deeply in the tax-cut bonanza, those payouts represented less than 10 percent of the companies’ savings from the new law. The biggest corrective of all to the feel-good bonus propaganda is that wealthy shareholders (including a healthy dollop of foreign investors) are projected to get 69 times as much from stock buybacks this year as American workers will get from bonuses or raises—$484 billion versus about $7 billion." (our emphasis)As with everything Rump and his supine Congressional cultists touch, it's reverse Midas. The hole blown in the deficit will mean higher consumer prices (coupled with his tariff idiocy) and enormous debt into the future, while providing an excuse for Republican cuts to social welfare programs. Quite the bonus.
(photo: J. Ernst/Reuters. Rump and his gang celebrate enriching themselves.)
