By SJ Otto
Pundits all across the country are
analyzing and commenting on the Republican Party’s tax plan, under the guidance
of President Donald Trump. The US
has had a lot of pundits comment on the plan and The
Wichita Eagle has relied on Josh Boak[1]
and his article “GOP tax plan may offer little aid for many in middle class”. There
is nothing surprising about this plan—nothing new from the last great tax break
we got under former President Ronald Reagan, back during his reign, in the
1980s. The Republicans, since that time, have given lavish tax cuts to the
wealthy at the expense of the poorer people. Back in Reagan’s time, he actually
raised taxes on those who made less than $20,000 a year. That part of the
population was rather small at the time. So most people got a nice tax cut
accept those who earned the least among the US Population. It was easy for the
middle class workers to just ignore those whose taxes went up. At the time I
was working as a janitor and I just happened to be one of the people who got a
tax hike. My taxes went up by about 10 percent.
Today we see something similar.
Only instead of just raising poor people’s taxes, they took out all the
deductions that people rely on to keep their taxes tolerable.[2]
They cut deduction for child care, mortgage interest deductions, and health
care deductions. All this amounts to a tax increase for many in both the poor classes
and the middle classes.
The argument of the GOP has not
changed from the Reagan years. It is called “trickle down.” The argument is that with less taxes on the
wealthy, there are plenty of benefits the poorer classes get as the wealthy get
richer. For example on Boak’s article:
“The
overarching promise made to the middle class by Trump and congressional
Republicans is that lower taxes would fuel faster economic growth, which, in
turn, would cause incomes to rise. Kevin Hassett, chair of Trump's White House
Council of Economic Advisers, estimates that lowering the corporate tax rate to
20 percent from 35 percent would lead to an average income gain of $4,000 a
year.”
The money is supposed to magically trickle down to us poor
folks. But as the people of Kansas
have learned the hard way “trickle
down” doesn’t work. It is a sham and we now know it. Our Governor Sam
Brownback has given lavish tax breaks to the wealthy in Kansas , all our services have been cut back
and the results have been a huge economic failure.
The reality of the GOP tax plan has been revealed in Boak’s
article:
……. David Kamin, a former Obama White House official who now
teaches law at New York
University
He
added that the proposal could also "run up deficits significantly that
would eventually have to be paid for and could threaten programs that do help
low and middle income Americans whether that be health care coverage, Social
Security, or investments like in infrastructure."
It is not a surprise that wealthy
people support the Republican Party. But there are a lot of working class and
middle class people who support the president and his tax plan. Such people are
hard to understand. Every time this trickle down economics is tried it rips off
of the middle and lower classes. They lose every time and yet they refuse to
learn from their mistakes. We got fooled again naturally.
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