Get Ready — More Tax Cuts for Morbidly Rich Are Coming
This predictable cycle happens every time a republican is installed in the White House.
For at least the past hundred years, the republican party’s singular agenda has been cutting taxes for the wealthy, well-connected, and corporations. Just about every so-called “policy” the party supports is subterfuge for this objective.
Cutting regulations?
Tax cuts.
Reducing government agencies and its workforce?
Tax cuts.
Privatizing Medicare?
Vote suppression?
Money in politics?
Subsidies to polluting industries?
Yup, tax cuts.
Even anti-union “Right to Work” laws like Taft-Hartley and the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus v. American Federal of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) decision; and anti-choice positions on reproductive health, are distractions to shift our focus away from tax cuts.
So-called “school choice” initiatives are another, and part of a decades-long plot to destroy public education to return us to a feudal system of lords and serfs.
Opposition to minimum wage laws, worker safety protections, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), tuition-free higher education, universal health care.
You bet, all point to tax cuts for the morbidly rich.
The “controversy” over transgender men playing women’s sports, transgender bathrooms, and racial code talk like “BLM,” “DEI,” “illegals,” and “CRT,” are more distractions to get us fighting amongst ourselves, because when we’re doing that, we’re not paying attention to — you guessed it — tax cuts.
President Lyndon Johnson famously opined, “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.”
Bob Dylan sings about it in the song “Only a Pawn in Their Game” recorded back in 1964.
This predictable cycle that happens every time a republican is installed in the White House is what republican strategist Jude Wanniski named the “Two Santa Clauses Theory” back in 1974.
Every time republicans control the government, Wanniski explained, they must drive up the country’s debt so massively and fast so when Democrats (“Santa Claus,” the party of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and the Affordable Care Act,) eventually re-gain control, republicans have “cause” to scream about how much debt with which we’re saddling our children, forcing Democrats to have to face cuts to the very programs providing the most assistance to average working Americans.
Well, here we are again — a republican congressional majority with a republican president. And what do you think their talking about now?
ProPublica reported last week:
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a promise of sweeping tax cuts, for the rich, for working people and for companies alike.
Now congressional Republicans have the job of figuring out which of those cuts to propose into law. In order to pay for the cuts, they have started to eye some targets to raise money. Among them: cutting benefits for single mothers and poor people who rely on government health care.
The New York Times published a menu of tax and spending cut options GOP lawmakers are considering. Among them are eliminating the federal estate tax, which only affects those with estates worth $14 million, and generates over a decade $370 billion in government revenue. According to Tax Policy Center think tank estimates, the top 0.1% pay 30% of that tax.
ProPublica added:
Many ultra-wealthy people already largely avoid the tax. Over the years, lawyers and accountants have devised ways to pass fortunes to heirs tax free, often by using complex trust structures.
Another item on the republican wish list involves slashing the top corporate tax rate by almost a third.
The adjudicated sexual assaulter was successful in getting the top corporate rate down from 35% to its current 21% in the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, his only arguable “accomplishment” of his first term. Slashing this a further third would bring it down to the lowest of all the economically competitive nations. In fact the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that extending those tax cuts would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit.
And how do republicans plan to pay for it?
The same way they always do — cutting social safety nets, like Medicaid and the child tax credit, specifically eliminating the “head of household” IRS filing status to bilk single parents and others caring for dependents out of almost $200 billion more in taxes over a decade. According to a Tax Foundation analysis, this would cause the after-tax pay of people making about $14,000 and $100,000 to decline the most.
Eliminating income taxes, but maintaining payroll taxes, on tips.
Ending overtime pay taxes.
Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction.
These are nothing but sops to the morbidly rich disguised as “looking out for the little guy”.
As Thom Hartmann explained recently in his piece “The Hostile Takeover of the United States by Corporate Raiders Has Arrived in Full”:
Republicans are trying to do to our government, in other words, what corporate raiders do to companies.
Some of it is simple greed: as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows, the cash stash at the very top of the American economic pyramid grows exponentially.
He added:
The simple reality is that nations without a large and active federal government providing protections and services to its people never develop large middle classes.
As I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, their argument was largely based on the turmoil of the 1960s, when women, Blacks, and young people were demanding rights; they worried that these protests could lead to the destruction of our republic and a “communist takeover.”
Nowadays most rightwing billionaires have largely abandoned that argument, simply asserting their disgust at having to pay taxes to support programs that primarily benefit “the little people.”
It’s an old ploy we keep falling for.
There aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires in America to get the politicians they own elected outright, so they look to us to do it.
Most people aren’t going to take kindly to being told they have to shoulder the burden of paying the taxes the economic royalists get out of, so the politicians on the take and the generously financed right-wing hate media feed the base a steady diet of red meat comprised of fear and outrage toward LGBTQ+ Americans, disabled Americans, women, students, Democrats, “ANTIFA” (which isn’t a thing), Black Lives Matter, immigrants, and “woke” schools indoctrinating students into a “Marxist agenda”. Throw in a little so-called “Christian” nationalism while they’re at it.
Too many of us fall for it, because when we’re at each other’s throats, we’re not in the streets demanding the rich pay their fair share like the rest of us.