Tag: Reaganomics
Democrats demand repeal of ‘obscene’ tax cut for millionaires that GOP buried in previous COVID relief bill
A group of 120 Democratic members of Congress is calling on their party’s leadership to ensure that a tax break for millionaires that Republicans quietly buried in an earlier coronavirus relief package is repealed in upcoming aid legislation, arguing the rollback would free up hundreds of billions in revenue which could be used to help struggling families.
Led by Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in the Senate, the coalition of lawmakers sent a letter to Democratic leaders on Tuesday demanding the reversal of “costly tax breaks for so-called ‘net operating losses’ that Republicans tucked into the CARES Act,” a $2 trillion relief measure that former President Donald Trump signed into law last March.
“These special-interest giveaways will confer over 80 percent of the benefits to just 43,000 taxpayers, each earning at least $1 million per year,” reads the letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “We urge you to repeal these unwarranted tax cuts, as HEROES and HEROES 2.0 proposed and President Biden has recommended. This would save over $250 billion, which should be repurposed to help Americans who have lost income due to the pandemic and its economic fallout.” Continue reading.
Trump ends it all with one final scam — and it bodes badly for Trumpism’s future
For a presidency that’s been awash in grift and deception from the start, you could not have scripted a more fitting end.
In his final moments as president, Donald Trump hailed his massive tax cut for the rich and corporations as one of his leading accomplishments — just after pardoning the chief architect of his “economic populism,” all to protect him from facing charges that he literally stole money from Trump supporters with a two-bit scam promising to help build his border wall.
As Trump prepared to depart from Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday morning, he hailed his presidency as “amazing, by any standard.” Continue reading.
Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says
Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.
The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.
“Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview. Continue reading.
The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan
The reason everybody is so angst-ridden about the economy is because we all have the wrong idea about what it is supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work.
Most of us have a quaint, 19th century idea about free markets and all that up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger stuff. You know, work hard, play by the rules, keep your nose clean, and you’ll do well. That is certainly the cultural myth our society bathes us in.
But that’s not how things actually work. It’s the dissonance between how we imagine things work and how they really work that causes our perplexity and angst, and rage. It is also that dissonance that has been so deftly manipulated by Donald Trump and given rise to Trumpism. Continue reading.
The GOP traded democracy for a Supreme Court seat and tax cuts. It wasn’t worth it.
Was it worth it?
Republican lawmakers must ask themselves this question at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, whenever that is. Perhaps then they will finally inventory every misdeed they ignored or encouraged, every scar they seared into our republic and its institutions, in pursuit of their holy grail: another Supreme Court seat.
Two Republican senators, Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), have said they oppose a vote on a Supreme Court nominee so close to the election. This principle, of course, was widely endorsed by Republicans four years ago, when the GOP-controlled Senate refused to even hold hearings for the nominee President Barack Obama had put forward in March. Continue reading.
Surprise! Under Trump, Super-Rich Rake In Billions While You Get…A #MAGA Hat
If you are in the 99 percent here is how well you are faring under Trump policies compared to the 1 percent: for each dollar of increased income that you earned in 2018, each One-Percenter got $88 more income.
Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01 percent of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household. Let’s call them the Platinum-Premiere-Point-Zero-One-Percenters.
The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich.
Ponder that. Continue reading.
The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure
Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.
This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. Continue reading.
Republicans prove they’ll never miss an opportunity to help the top 1% — not even during a pandemic
Which of the following statements do you think are true?
1) Republicans used the massive coronavirus relief package passed in late March (the CARES Act) to slip, at the last minute, more than $100 billion over a decade to households earning more than $1 million per year.
2) Republicans used the CARES Act to attack the few measures from the 2017 Trump Rich Man’s Tax Cut that were designed to bring in at least some revenue from multimillionaires. Continue reading.
Mnuchin Again Insists 2017 Tax Cuts Will ‘Pay For Themselves’
Trump administration officials continue to make wildly inaccurate statements about the economic impact of the Republican 2017 tax law. On Wednesday, contrary to all available evidence, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the Senate Finance Committee that he stands by previous administration claims that the tax cuts “will pay for themselves.”
“This will be simple math,” Mnuchin testified under oath. “We measure this over 10 years. We got eight years left. I look forward to writing the committee a letter in eight years going through all the exact numbers.”
Mnuchin’s claim, flagged by American Bridge, a progressive opposition research organization, is widely disputed by experts, even experts who tout the benefits of the 2017 law. Continue reading.