Tag: GOP Reaganomics

It’s Official: The Trump Tax Cuts Didn’t Pay for Themselves in Year One

Federal tax revenues declined in 2018 while economic growth accelerated, undercutting the Trump administration’s insistence that the $1.5 trillion tax package would pay for itself.

It’s time to put to rest any notion that President Trump’s signature tax cuts are paying for themselves. Anyone who says otherwise is lying with numbers.

A year after the $1.5 trillion tax-cut package took effect, economic growth has accelerated, just as Republicans promised it would when pushing the law through Congress. Growth appears likely to hit 3 percent for 2018, after adjusting for inflation, which is a full percentage point higher than the Congressional Budget Office forecast for the year in 2017. Not all of that increase is attributable to the tax cuts, but some of it is.

That’s good news for Republicans’ longstanding claim that cutting taxes would provide such an economic bump that additional tax revenue would flow in to make up for what was lost through lower tax rates.

View the complete January 11 article by Jim Tankersley on The New York Times website here.

Trump and GOP Still Trying to Sell Their Tax Cut for the Rich as Good for Everyone Else

Credit: Getty/NurPhoto, Bastiaan Slabbers

Trump and the Republican Party sold Americans out. This is Trump’s scheme – to keep America great for the rich and powerful, while making it harder for everyone else to succeed.

Trump fuels corporate greed and will always empower wealthy special interests. Trump’s most consistent policy is to help CEOs and rich corporations while hurting workers and families. Look at all he’s done so far:

  • TRUMP TAX: Trump and Republicans passed a tax bill that gives massive new tax breaks to big corporations and more than 80% of the benefits to the top 1% by the end of the decade. CEOs have used these massive giveaways to further enrich themselves, but not to benefit their workers.

Continue reading “Trump and GOP Still Trying to Sell Their Tax Cut for the Rich as Good for Everyone Else”

Two little-known ways GOP tax bill would make chasm between rich and poor even wider

The following article by Daniel Hemel, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, was posted on the Conversation website December 4, 2017:

Protest signs are seen in front of the office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as protesters urge him and others in the U.S. Senate to vote against the $1.5 trillion tax cut. Credit:
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The tax bill passed by the Senate in the wee hours of Dec. 2 will – if it becomes law – widen the gap between the rich and the poor at a time when income inequality is already approaching historic heights.

Initially, most U.S. households are likely to experience a modest tax cut under the Senate plan. However by 2027, the average family earning less than US$50,000 would pay about $250 more in taxes under the Senate plan, while the average family earning more than $1 million would experience a tax cut topping $8,000 a year, according to estimates from Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation.

Yet even those stark statistics understate the full impact of the Senate bill on long-term inequality in the United States. Continue reading “Two little-known ways GOP tax bill would make chasm between rich and poor even wider”

Is the GOP tax plan an unprecedented windfall for the wealthy? We look at 50 years of data to find out.

The following article by Andrew Van Dam was posted on the Washington Post website December 4, 2017:

The Democrats say President Trump’s tax cuts are a massive giveaway to the rich, the most unequal overhaul of the U.S. tax system in modern history. Republicans argue they are a huge middle class tax cut — “a great, big, beautiful Christmas present” for the American people, according to Trump.

Who’s right?

We decided to find out by assembling historical reports about the 10 largest tax cuts of the past 50 years.

After doing our best to find comparable data (we’ll explain metrics and methodology later), we learned a few things: Continue reading “Is the GOP tax plan an unprecedented windfall for the wealthy? We look at 50 years of data to find out.”

The new tax bill will make Americans less healthy – and that’s bad for the economy

The following article by Diane Dewar, Associate Professor of Health Policy, Management and Behavior, University at Albany, State University of New York, was posted on the Conversation website December 2, 2017:

Credit:. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The new tax bill, passed by the Senate early Saturday, is not just about taxes. It has significant consequences for the American health care system – especially for the most vulnerable of our citizens.

If the proposed tax bill comes to fruition, it will reduce the affordability of health care for many Americans. Without access to care, our sickest and most vulnerable – especially the the poor and elderly – will suffer an increasing chance of poorer health outcomes.

What’s more, the bill’s long-term outcomes will be bad for our economy, resulting in lost productivity, lost wages and increased health care costs. If Americans become less healthy and have less access to health care, then everyone loses. Continue reading “The new tax bill will make Americans less healthy – and that’s bad for the economy”

‘I don’t think it’s going to help’: In a pro-Trump area, many voters are skeptical of GOP tax plan

The following article by Jenna Johnson was posted on the Washington Post website December 3, 2017:

Ron Stephens, 49, of Troy, Mich., looks on during a bowling game at 5 Star Lanes on Wednesday in neighboring Sterling Heights. (Sean Proctor for The Washington Post)

STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. — On a busy weeknight at the 5 Star Lanes bowling alley in this Detroit suburb that voted heavily for President Trump, there was little excitement about the Republican plan to cut taxes.

A 60-year-old retiree bowling with a group of girlfriends said she’s tired of the middle class having to pay more so the wealthy can become even wealthier. A few lanes away, a middle-aged woman with frizzy gray hair said that the more she hears about the plan, the more she hates it. And a group of young guys in matching shirts said they didn’t even know the proposal was in the works, although they seemed skeptical that their taxes would ever go down in a meaningful way. Continue reading “‘I don’t think it’s going to help’: In a pro-Trump area, many voters are skeptical of GOP tax plan”

Tax Bill Offers Last-Minute Breaks for Developers, Banks and Oil Industry

The following article by Jesse Drucker and Patricia Cohen was posted on the New York TImes website December 2, 2017:

A drilling rig in Texas. A late amendment in the Senate tax bill would allow certain income from gas and oil ventures to qualify for lower rates. Credit Ernest Scheyder/Reuters

The overhaul by Republican lawmakers of the nation’s tax laws percolated for weeks with virtually no public input, and by the end it turned into a chaotic mad dash with many last-minute changes on Friday night and Saturday morning, some handwritten in the margins of the nearly 500-page bill.

Even hours after the Senate vote, tax experts were scratching their heads over precisely what had made it into the final version of the bill and the impact of some significant provisions.

Still, it was clear that many changes expanded tax benefits for the wealthiest taxpayers, while other attempts to close loopholes fell by the wayside. The bill would add $1 trillion to deficits over the coming decade. Continue reading “Tax Bill Offers Last-Minute Breaks for Developers, Banks and Oil Industry”

To Regain Its Sanity, the Republican Party Must Give Up Voodoo Economics

The following article by Charles P. Pierce was posted on the Esquire website October 17, 2017:

This crazy might be the deepest rooted.

Credit: Getty

Professor Krugman seems miffed, via the NYT:

Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track.

You knew this was coming when the president* tweeted out how proud he was that his tax plan was praised by Arthur Laffer, the cocktail-napkin Kreskin of supply-side economics, the original sorcerer who concocted the spells that produced those magical tax cuts, and, finally, the guy who fed the Republican Party a bowl of the very tastiest monkeybrains. The prion disease’s first symptom was the adoption of what Poppy Bush called, correctly, the “voodoo economics” of Ronald Reagan’s first budget. The Republican Party bought into an economic theory that was just as detached from reality as anything Reagan ever said about trees and air pollution, or anything the current president* has said about anything. Continue reading “To Regain Its Sanity, the Republican Party Must Give Up Voodoo Economics”