The Fraud Of Trump's Tax Cuts

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.

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)

Now, the realization is spreading that these "raises and bonuses," if delivered at all, were the smallest of small potatoes:

"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.)

Trump Adviser Surprised When CEOs Don't Follow The Trickle Down Script

As Senate Republicans prepare to introduce their "wealthfare" tax bill, which proposes to end the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate just to shovel $300 billion more in tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, it appears not all corporate CEOs are on board with the Republican trickle- down script that tax cuts will magically boost the economy and job growth.

Here's how one smarmy Trumper got the message:

President Trump's top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, looked out from the stage at a sea of CEOs and top executives in the audience Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting. As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes. 

Very few hands went up. 

Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren't the other hands up?” he said.

This is the former Goldman Sachs head who weaseled around when his boss said Charlottesville neo- Nazis are "good people" and both sides were responsible for violence, but who stuck with the regime in order to get tax breaks for himself and his billionaire donor class. Yet, as the "top economic adviser," he doesn't have a clue what the reality is, even in his own insulated world. Somehow that fits the pattern.

Make no mistake. Both the Senate and House Republican tax packages are the opening wedge to gut the social safety net while benefitting the Kochs and Mercers of the world, and their agenda.  It's a fight we can't afford to let them win.

Trickled On

For the better part of 35 years, one of the myths that Rethuglicans cling to is that tax cuts on corporations and upper income people ("supply side" or "trickle down" economics) produce prosperity through greater economic activity. In reality, what they produce are wealthier plutocrats who donate to the Rethugs, and budget shortfalls requiring government to either borrow money (with interest) or, more typically with Rethug politicians, to slash government services.

Four Rethuglican governors with their eyes on the Presidency in 2016 are now facing crises of their own making:  Chris "Krispykreme" Christie in New Jersey, Scott "Koch Head" Walker in Wisconsin, John "Itchy" Kasich in Ohio, and Pyush "Bobby" Jindal in Louisiana have been merrily cutting taxes, only to find that the cuts didn't produce new revenues through economic growth.  All four states have significant shortfalls in their state budgets which will force confrontations with their state legislatures, which are very reluctant to cut funds for education, public works and public safety.  What makes this situation dangerous for the four is that they have pledged -- three in writing and one (Krispykreme) verbally -- not to raise taxes, a violation that could produce a Teabagger challenge in their next primary or election.  If everyday people weren't going to be the victims of their idiocy, we'd cheer the fix they've put themselves in, once again drinking the "trickle down" Kool Aid.

Krugman On Laffer's Continuing Influence With Republicans

Paul Krugman elaborates on a profile in the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle of discredited supply side "economist" Arthur Laffer, from whom Republican presidential hopefuls are still seeking counsel:

The question you should ask, then, is why this always-wrong economic doctrine now has a stronger grip on the GOP than ever before.

It wasn’t always thus. George W. Bush’s inner circle clearly had little use for the likes of Laffer; they engaged in a lot of deceptive advertising about the economy (and a few other things), but they never made extravagant supply-side claims — and remember that Greg “charlatans and cranks” Mankiw served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But since 2009 the GOP has swerved hard right into fantasy land — and it has done so despite a remarkable string of dead-wrong predictions by the people peddling that fantasy. [snip]

What seems to have happened to American conservatives is that they have lost all the checks and balances that used to limit that kind of solipsism. And of course it’s not just economic policy.

What do we do in the face of a major party gone mad?

As we know, the madness of the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party doesn't begin and end with its attraction to supply side/ trickle down economics.  It also shows up in its anti-science, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, anti-poor, anti-Latino, anti-black, anti-Muslim pathologies.  The answer to Krugman's rhetorical question is, we each do everything we can to remove these people from power and keep them away.

Why We Love Elizabeth Warren, Cont'd.

"I grew up in a America that said, we collectively, all of us, are going to make those investments in education so that any kid, who works hard, who plays the rules, who tries to get out there and make something of herself, is going to have a fighting chance to make that happen...It changed in the 1980′s when the Republicans came up with a different vision.  They said, ‘Eh, that’s not how you build an economy. The way you build an economy is you let those at the very top, the richest and the most powerful, keep more of their money and more of their power, and somehow it’s going to trickle down for everybody else.  Well we tried that, for more than thirty years and it really hasn’t worked. It has cut the legs out from under America’s middle class.” -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on MSNBC's "Hardball" last night.

There aren't many progressive voices out there that can capture the contrast in visions between the Democratic Party and the Rethuglican / Teabagger Party in a clearer and more compelling way than Sen. Warren.  The Rethugs continue to be in denial about the failure of "supply side" economics to produce economic growth (except in the net worth of plutocrats), much like they're in denial about the Iraq fiasco that they set in motion.