Last Updated on August 17, 2021 by David Vause
So Republicans were catatonic at the thought of paying the middle and lower classes $24,000 during this time of financial calamity for so many. They’ve managed to save Republic and extra $7,200 by cutting that to $14,000 per month.
I wonder where their concern over budget was when they passed the 2017 Republican tax cut. Ridiculously called the Tax Cuts Act and Job of 2017, it yielded an extra $21,240 in income for the $500K-$1M per annum earners and a whopping $69,660 pay hike for the greater than $1 million per annum set. By contrast, those making $10K to $20 K get a paltry $60 of take home a year. But it was called the Job Act too. Since Reagan, the lie has always been that tax breaks for the wealthy would have a trickle down to help the poor. This has never happened. In 2016, the last year of the Obama Administration, the budget deficit $585 million, or 3.1% of GDP. The year the Republicans had intervened to make things better, it had already grown to $667 million or 3.4% of GDP. A year after their tax and jobs bill, these numbers had jumped to $779 million. The expected economic expansion did not occur and the deficit/GDP ratio had climbed to 3.8%. In 2019, the tax and jobs bill continued its damage with a $984 million deficit. Making the rich richer did not help the economy either and the ratio climbed to 4.6%. In 2020, pre-COVID numbers, President Trump had sealed his place in history by being the first President to take the deficit over one trillion at $1,083 million, with a 4.8% deficit to GDP ratio.
And never mind the tax cuts to corporations, which cut the effective corporate tax rate from 17.2% to 8.8%. Companies are good at hiding where their money goes, but they cannot hide their initial cuts.
Now, that the Republicans are no longer writing the fiscal legislation, they are reassuming their old values and becoming concerned about deficits. They are whining about aid to a desperate nation. But remember Reagan’s tax cuts grew the deficit. Bush junior’s tax cuts blew the lid off the budget deficits. It took hard negotiating by a Democratic President with both Republican and Democratic legislatures to balance it.