https://www.salon.com/2017/12/02/the-gops-biggest-lie-republican-tax-plan-reveals-the-rot-is-deep/
The “Big Lie” has been most closely
associated with the Nazis' incessant propaganda campaign about an international
Jewish “war of annihilation” against Germany, a campaign that brought the
totalitarian Nazi regime to power and paved the way for the Holocaust. In
assessing Adolph Hitler’s psyche, the U. S. Office of Strategic Services
reported,
His primary rules were: never allow
the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there
may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept
blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that
goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you
repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
Sound like anyone you know?
On Nov. 22, Donald Trump declared,
“We’re going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas … a great
big, beautiful Christmas present.” This is one among many lies Trump
has bleated about the tax cut -- a con job designed to appeal to Americans who
struggle to make ends meet, whether they be unemployed or underemployed, the
elderly, working or middle class, or poor. In reality, the
Trump/Republican Party tax cut, whatever final form it takes, is a pack of lies
and distortions designed to further enrich the wealthiest Americans and
solidify the takeover of our government by corporate wealth.
What makes this a Big Lie is its
repetition over a period of 35 years of “supply-side economics,” years marked
by an unprecedented upward redistribution of income and wealth and the growth
of staggering inequality.
We know the wealthy are the chief
beneficiaries of this tax cut. According to the Tax Policy Center,
the top 1 percent receive 34 percent of the corporate tax
cut benefit, and the top 20 percent receive 70 percent of
the benefit. Eliminating the estate tax only benefits those individuals with
wealth exceeding $5 million ($10 million for married
couples). Eliminating the alternative minimum tax gets rid of the
very tax created to prevent the wealthy from getting away with paying no taxes
at all. If it were removed in 2015, for example, Donald Trump would
have been $31 million richer and taxed at 3.5 percent. By
contrast, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, those with
incomes below $75,000 will be paying higher taxes by 2027.
The only possible legitimation for
such a blatantly inequitable tax is the claim that cutting taxes on
corporations and the wealthy will produce investment and job growth; not surprisingly
Trump claims the tax cut will produce 10.5 percent growth in GDP over
10 years. By contrast, the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center
predicts 0.3 percent growth over 10 years. When the
non-partisan Congressional Research Services tracked tax rates from
1945 to 2010, they found that cutting the top tax rates had no positive
effect on economic growth or the growth of savings, investment or productivity.
Corporate CEOs themselves have acknowledged that
they would use new revenue to buy back shares, retire debt, and issue
shareholder dividends – i.e., benefiting Wall Street and its clients, not Main Street
where we live and work.
