The Republican Party's New Proposed Round of Massive Tax Cut for the Morbidly Rich You Haven't Heard Of
Why is the corporate cable media keeping the proposed new round of republican tax cuts a secret? Ratings=money.
There’s a primary reason republicans get away with lying to the American people about being the party of “tax cuts” and “fiscal responsibility”.
Messaging.
The corporate media structure is predicated on ratings, which equal money.
Since most of the wealthiest people have a personal stake in staying as rich as possible while paying next to nothing (and in some cases, actually nothing) in taxes, they naturally gravitate toward the party whose raison d’être lies solely in massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — the republican party.
But there aren’t enough morbidly rich in the country to win all the elections republicans need to hold onto power, so they traditionally resort to fear, outrage, grievance, desire for horse race, racism, and a little salacious conspiracy theory to crank up average voters.
This is where the corporate media is happy to oblige.
The corporations that own the big American media conglomerates thrive on horse race because it’s how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), interested in staying rich, their personal fortunes depend on this.
This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.
Put simply, the media is as “liberal” as the corporations that own it.
There is no equivalent on the left.
To get any truly “left-leaning” media, we need to go to internet sources like The Real News, Common Dreams, Alternet, The Daily Kos, streaming services like Roku that carry TV stations like Democracy Now!, or the Progress channel on Sirius XM satellite radio.
With this much control over the message, republicans can get away with telling working-class people organized labor, public education, environmental regulations, Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid are “liberal ploys” that ultimately hurt them. So when they tell people they are “the party of working people,” “job creators,” “freedom,” they don’t have to work so hard even though the evidence screams the contrary.
No wonder we heard so much about the debt ceiling fight back in May but not about the new tax cuts republicans proposed that would threaten to add at least $21 billion to the federal debt over the next decade.
Ways and Means Committee ranking member Rep. Richard E. Neal explained:
It’s Republican clockwork. Not even a week after their manufactured default crisis and it is back to tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected. This stoops to a new low even for them: retroactive corporate tax cuts, next-to-nothing for the most vulnerable children and families, and sneaking in favors for Big Oil. Make no mistake about it, they are laying the groundwork for even bigger cuts in 2025, and the only way they will ever achieve a balanced budget is by sticking seniors and working families with the bill.
https://twitter.com/RepRichardNeal/status/1667537304221523969
Here is what the proposed tax cuts, parceled put into three separate bills (again, to the ultra wealthy, not anyone else), aim to accomplish:
— Reinstate corporate tax breaks on interest spending, equipment, and research.
— Chip away at the Inflation Reduction Act by limiting electric vehicle tax credits, preventing tax payers from implementing those credits toward used vehicles, canceling tax credits incentivizing clean energy production and investment, and repealing a chemical waste site tax.
— Eliminate green energy tax credits intended to defray $216 billion of the $240 billion tax cuts’ cost.
— Raise the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69.
https://twitter.com/RepDonBeyer/status/1669093536451444741
— Further chip away at Medicare by turning it into a voucher program.
— Increase deductions for families making under $400,000 over the next two years.
— Eliminate requiring taxpayers to report Venmo or similar transactions over $600.
— Implement a "deduction bonus” for married couples filing jointly for the standard deduction, for which they would receive $4,000 for two years.
— Increase the method by which businesses claim depreciation deductions through raising the bar to a permanent $2.5 million from the current $1 million stipulated in the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA) former president Trump signed into law in 2017.
— Permanently extend corporate tax breaks the TCJA grants currently through 2025, something the Tax Policy Center reported would cost the country around $500 billion.
— Expand tax benefits for small start-up businesses to "S Corporations," eliminating some so-called "red tape" small businesses face pertaining to contract workers.
The so-called party of “fiscal responsibility” would add $21 billion to the national deficit over the next decade.
Accountable.US Economic Security & Corporate Power director Liz Zelnick explained:
If House Republicans were actually serious about the deficit, they would demand wealthy corporations pay their fair share in taxes. Instead, they’re giving billions in wasteful tax giveaways to greedy corporations, instead of making critical investments in American families and communities.
In a press release, Accountable.US stated:
“Not a penny” of the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts benefited any American in the bottom 90 percent of income distribution. Today, half of corporate stock is held by the wealthiest 1% of Americans. These cuts come as corporate profits across industries hit a record high.
Democrats sitting on the House Ways and Means panel propose offering an amendment to provide a permanent extension of the 2021 Child Tax Credit responsible for lifting four million children out of poverty. Republicans are, naturally, opposed to this.
The past 20 years, CEOs have boasted an average increase 350 times more than their employees.
According to a 2021 Treasury Department watchdog report, the IRS failed to collect more than $38.5 billion from taxpayers earning over $200,000 a year, and more than $2.4 billion from those with incomes over $1.5 million.
The 651 richest billionaires’ total wealth increased more than $1 trillion during the pandemic.
Another report, from ProPublica, revealing leaked IRS tax filings that show between 2014 and 2018, the wealthiest 25 Americans enjoyed a $400 billion windfall while paying equivalent to a 3.4% tax rate.
There is also an amount taxpayers do not pay by the filing deadline, called the tax gap, the IRS estimates between 2011 and 2013 to be, on average, $441 billion annually.
Harvard University research shows those responsible for 70 percent of that tax gap are the richest one percent of income earners.
Author and political commentator Thom Hartmann wrote in his piece “What Happens When Corporations are Taxed at 50% — Like Before the Reagan Revolution?”:
If we want a healthy, happy society in America, it’s not enough to just raise the top personal income tax bracket; we must also raise corporate taxes.
The main benefit of raising the top personal income tax bracket back up to nosebleed levels is that it causes CEOs and business owners (people who can essentially determine their own pay) to restrain themselves from draining the corporate coffers just to buy a new super-yacht, jet, private island, or a fourth 70-room mansion in the Swiss Alps.
Back in the 1933–1981 era, instead of behaving like spendthrift wastrels, CEOs and business owners would take income up to the edge of the top tax bracket and then stop (with the most prosperous CEOs maxing out at around 30 times average worker income), leaving the rest of the money in the company.
But the republican party has demonstrated over the past 70 years — massively over the last 40 or so — it is perfectly fine solely serving the economic royalists.
No wonder they want to obliterate the Inflation Reduction Act, which requires ultra-wealthy companies that report more than $1 billion in profits to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders to pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks.
For the past 40 years, those ultra-wealthy companies and have taken advantage of generous loopholes that even those who should be paying the Trump-era corporate tax rate of 21 percent are getting away without having to part with a single cent.
No wonder they claim a provision in the IRA provides the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $80 billion over ten years to ensure Americans making over $400,000 aren’t gaming the system is, in effect, “hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey.”
Something the IRA seeks to accomplish is replenishing the IRS enforcement staff that has been cut 30% in the last 12 years despite a population increase.
The only armed IRS agents will be ones who have been traditionally responsible for criminal investigations.
The IRA requires Americans making over $400,000 — not “$30K” — to pay a little more in taxes.
The republican party has nothing — literally nothing — to offer average working class Americans anything other than umbrage and outrage intended to divide people along class, racial, and economic lines. Because when we are fighting amongst ourselves over how much more “those people,” those “takers,” have than we might have, we’re not paying attention to how much the wealthy tax cheats continue to rip us off, compliments of the GOP.
And they have an entire media infrastructure dedicated to providing the distraction.