tax cuts

This is one of those stats that’s sure to be both repeated and disbelieved, courtesy of Bill Clinton’s speech at the phenomenal DNC 2024 last night: since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the cumulative tally of job creation between the two parties is not even close: 50 to 1. Out of the 51 million jobs that have been created since then, about 50 million of them can be attributed to Democrats (under Clinton, Obama, and Biden who account for 97.4% of the total), and only 1 million to Republicans.

That is a pretty stark objective review of right-wing economic ideology. Which is billed, by the way, as “job creating” policy. Trickle down economics, supply side, Reaganomics, libertarian theory, Mudsill Theory — by whatever name you call it, the policy of giving massive tax cuts to the rich while cutting spending on the middle class is supposed to magically create great prosperity for all. Instead, the numbers show the exact opposite — prosperity is not trickling down. It is in fact being hoovered up.

DNC 2024: Fierce middle class energy

I hope to write more about the overall amazing, vibrant, and joyful atmosphere of the DNC this year — delivering not just the strongest support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz possible, but bringing back the sense of hope and optimism from the Obama years in the most refreshing and much-needed way. But for now I’ll just say that the Democrats are driving home this economic message that has already been wildly successful under Joe Biden: when we invest in the middle class, the economy truly does grow for everybody.

When the middle class is strong, America is strong. It’s a lesson we learned in the post-war era of the 1950s but have drifted away from since the 1970s when corporate leaders and big business interests mounted a concerted effort to turn the tide against the New Deal value system that lifted us out of the Great Depression and the economic policy that ushered in that broad distribution of wealth in the U.S.

It feels like the fever is finally breaking. The decades of epic gaslighting fomented by the merchants of doubt may have reached the peak disinformation tolerance of the American people. Here’s hoping the real economic stories will now get told — and that Americans will go to the polls this November and cast their ballots accordingly.

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Trump tax cuts right-wing economics

At least, not according to what Republicans promised when they passed them. The Trump tax cuts didn’t work to grow the economy, increase revenues, alleviate the debt, or benefit ordinary Americans as alleged.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was introduced by then-Speaker of the House (and fiscal hawk) Paul Ryan and signed into law by then-President Donald Trump on December 22, 2017. It permanently reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, and lowered the overall tax for all brackets — seems fair, right? Except the wealthy walked away with 50 times the amount of tax benefit as the lower brackets.

Trump tax cuts add $1.5 trillion to the deficit

Not only did the tax cuts not raise revenue as promised — they became a liability on the balance sheet when almost immediately going into the red. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated the TCJA would add approximately $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years, after accounting for any temporary growth effects. The national debt will rise to accommodate as we borrow money to make up the shortfall between earnings and expenditures.

The Trump tax cuts reduced federal tax revenue, with significant declines in corporate tax receipts (surprise, surprise!). They did the exact opposite of what they promised to do — leaving our economy in a more precarious position even before the pandemic hit.

Who benefited from Trump’s tax cuts?

Conservatives and right-wing economists claim that tax cuts will help ordinary people by raising wages. In reality, however, corporations instead used their tax windfalls to do other things: stock buybacks, dividends, and executive pay. In fact, this happens over and over again each cycle of empty promises from so-called “fiscal conservatives” who in large part know exactly what they do.

Billionaires love Trump tax cuts!

They seem to believe they are entitled to the lion’s share of America’s money (as they have been since at least Mudsill Theory in 1858 and even before) and by gum, nothing is going to stop them — not democracy, not a sense of decency, not a sense of institutional preservation as used to be the very core pillar of Conservatism. No longer. Now it’s a will to power and to plunder. It’s not so much trickle down as it is hoover up.

Reaganomics, Trickle down, Laffer curve, Supply-side economics — it’s all the same

The magical revenue-generating power of tax cuts has been long promised and never delivered by right-wing Republicans. Since the 1980s edition, Reaganomics — the economic “theory” drafted on the back of a cocktail napkin dubbed the Laffer Curve for the slightly drunken man who scribbled it — has moved immense amounts of wealth upwards into the hands and coffers of the 1% and 0.1% at the expense of the masses.

The argument is that rich people will take the extra billions in returned tax money and use it to innovate and grow the economy — except that never happens. And why would they? They don’t have to earn revenue the old-fashioned way, through free market competition — they can just sit back on their laurels, buy a Senator or two, and rake in a huge windfall every few years that a GOP officeholder is in the White House. It is rock solid orthodoxy for the right-wing now, that tax cuts are almost the only policy initiative they care about — along with a side of deregulation and the slashing of the social safety net.

We’ve seen this movie before. The rich guys take the money and run — in many ways literally, into the arms of tax-free havens like the Cayman Islands or Seychelles. They do not return it to the American economy — although they do inject it into American politics, to skew the playing field even further in their favor despite already extracting extraordinary privileges and benefits to themselves from all aspects of their coziness with the political elite and their direct capture of various institutions.

As LBJ once said:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1960

The economic elites are dividing us over race and religion, in order to pick our pockets. This is why we can’t have nice things. We should boot them out and have nice things.

Related Reading:

Trickle Down Economics
Dark money
The GOP is 3 Cults in a Trenchcoat
Property vs. People, all the way down
Oligarchy and the Creep of Fascism
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SOTU 2024 Joe Biden Presidential address

Strong economic messages of the Keynesian buttressing of the middle class that is Bidenomics were everywhere in evidence at last night’s State of the Union address, Biden’s third since taking office in 2021. In SOTU 2024 he spoke about stabbing trickle-down economics in its gasping heart as a repeated failure to the American people. Instead of giving another $2 trillion tax cuts to billionaires, Biden wants to give back to the people who he says built America: the middle class.

The President delivered strong, sweeping language and vision reminiscent of LBJ’s Great Society and FDR‘s New Deal. He also delivered a heartwarming sense of unity and appeal to put down our bickering and get things done for the American people.

“We all come from somewhere — but we’re all Americans.”

This while lambasting the Republicans for scuttling the deal over the popular bipartisan immigration bill thanks to 11th hour interference from TFG (“my predecessor” as JRB called him). “This bill would save lives!” He is really effective at calling out the GOP‘s hypocrisy on border security with this delivery.

“We can fight about the border or we can fix the border. Send me a bill!”

He is taking full advantage of being the incumbent candidate here. He has the power and the track record to do all these things he is promising, and he’s telling the exact truth about the Republican obstructionism preventing the American people from having their government work for them.

SOTU 2024 Joe Biden fiery speech with Kamala Harris and Mike Johnson in the background behind him

I love that he calls out Trump in this speech, without naming names — almost a kind of Voldemort effect. He who must not be named — because giving him the dignity even of a name is more than he deserves.

He says that Trump and his cabal of anti-democratic political operatives have ancient ideas (hate, revenge, reactionary, etc.) — and that you can’t lead America with ancient ideas. In America, we look towards the future — relentlessly. Americans wants a president who will protect their rights — not take them away.

“I see a future… for all Americans!” he ends with, in a segment reminiscent of the great Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, with its clear vision of power and authority flowing from what is morally right and just, instead of what is corrupt and cronyish. It gave me hope for the future — that Americans will make the right choice, as we seem to have done under pressure, throughout our history. 🤞🏽

Continue reading Biden SOTU 2024: Success stories and big policy ideas
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It’s been said that the devilish ways of pedophiliac liberal Democrats are killing Christianity in America, but the numbers tell a different story. Following the 2016 Armistice in the War on Christmas, Donald Trump yet managed to drive 1 in 7 Evangelicals from the fold, according to data from Pew and PRRI.

Far from the surge in True Believers prophesied by the right wing, the religious right’s deal with the proverbial and/or literal devil seems to have driven members away. Trump is losing Evangelicals, and really — should we be so shocked? If it doesn’t matter (to some) whether our leaders are serial philanderers and lifelong business cheats, or earnestly striving public servants spreading compassion — what use is their moral code, then? None. It is bankrupt.

Shrödinger’s Moral Leadership

The religious right can’t have it both ways — either moral leadership is important, or it isn’t. It can’t selectively be important *only* when a Democrat is in power. Evangelicals also need to make a choice between God and Caesar. Prosperity gospel is the latter and not the former, but many pretend otherwise or are fooled — after all, fool’s gold can still fool.

Cognitive dissonance upon dissonance continues to fall in the totally unraked forest of right-wing values. I’m aiming to continue pulling on a few threads connecting the religious right, and Evangelicals in particular, to the rise of political extremism in the Republican Party:

  • The pitch that winning the culture war is more important than God’s law is thin at best
  • Donald Trump is not a Christian
  • The “imperfect vessel” fails as moral justification
  • Jesus didn’t care about tax cuts
  • Christian leaders’ claims that politics is amoral ground beyond the reach of God’s teachings is self-evident nonsense
  • Christians are leaving their own moral house unguarded. No one is showing the living proof of Jesus’ teachings anymore — and it’s not the fault of the people on the left who weren’t doing it before.
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