Economist Paul Krugman explains why Trump’s corporate tax cuts were a ‘dismal failure’

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President Joe Biden has proposed a corporate tax hike as a way to pay for his ambitious infrastructure plan, and some Republicans are objecting vehemently — insisting that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a raging success. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disagrees, slamming the Trump-era GOP tax cuts as a “dismal failure” in a Twitter thread posted on April 5.

Passed when Donald Trump was president and Republicans controlled both branches of Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the United States’ corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — and Biden has proposed increasing it to 28%. Many Democrats have emphasized that the Republican tax cuts of late 2017 did precious little for the American middle class and greatly increased the federal deficit.

Krugman, in his Twitter thread, writes, “I’ve been a bit surprised to see some Republicans opposing Biden’s plans by claiming that the Trump tax cut for corporations was a big success. I thought they’d gone into hiding given its dismal failure.” Continue reading.

GOP digs in on preserving Trump tax cuts

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Republicans are signaling a determination to protect their 2017 tax-cut law and prevent President Biden from making good on campaign pledges to partially undo the measure.

The tax law, enacted after GOP lawmakers sought for years to slash rates for individuals and businesses, was one of former President Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishments. But with Democratic control of Congress, Biden has new avenues for delivering on his 2020 promises.

Biden has called for rolling back the Trump tax cuts on people making above $400,000 a year and to partially reverse the reduction in the corporate tax rate. And even though he has indicated tax increases are not his most immediate priority, Biden has noted they could be a way to finance his spending priorities down the line. Continue reading.

Trump ends it all with one final scam — and it bodes badly for Trumpism’s future

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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.

The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan

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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.

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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.

New Data: Rich Got Richer, But Most Americans Fared Worse Under Trump

The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find. Continue reading.

U.S. government debt will nearly equal the size of the entire economy for first time since World War II, CBO finds

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Report comes after huge increase in the deficit this year as government attempted to limit coronavirus fallout

For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government’s debt will roughly equal the size of the entire American economy by the end of this year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The rapid change is largely due to the surge in new spending that the government authorized as it tried to control the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

By the end of 2020, the amount of debt owed by the United States will amount to 98 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the CBO said. That is up from 79 percent last year. Total government debt will surpass the U.S. economy’s size next year, the CBO said. Continue reading.

Republicans prove they’ll never miss an opportunity to help the top 1% — not even during a pandemic

AlterNet logoWhich 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.