Thursday, November 9, 2017

Didn't work in Kansas


From the Washington Post's Plum Line, authored by Greg Sargent:

After massive rejection of Trumpism, Democrats expand offensive to take back House

GARY COHN: GOP TAX PLAN IS ‘TRICKLE DOWN’ ECONOMICS:

Top White House economic adviser Gary Cohn tells CNBC’s John Harwood why cutting taxes bigly on the rich and corporations will be good for America:

“When you take a corporate tax rate at 35 percent and move it to 20 percent … it’s hard for me to not imagine that they’re not going to bring businesses back to the United States. We create wage inflation, which means the workers get paid more; the workers have more disposable income, the workers spend more. And we see the whole trickle-down through the economy, and that’s good for the economy.”

Fortunately, Americans have heard this argument for decades at this point, so perhaps they won’t get snowed by it.

Here's the problem.  Sam Brownback played the trickle-down shell game in Kansas.  It was a fiscal and governmental disaster.  I've written here about that recently.  The problem is that Kansas, like all states, has to have a balanced budget, and it was tremendously out of whack due to the cuts that DID NOT stimulate growth at all.  So the legislature in Kansas recently passed tax increases, so that basic services like garbage pickups and public schools would have sufficient funding to operate. 

However, the USA can have a deficit (and we've had one, for years).  The Republicans get all holier-than-thou about budget deficits when there's a Democratic President to block and stymie, but when they're in charge and focused on passing tax cuts for their wealthy friends, all of a sudden they can have a $1.9 trillion dollar addition to the national debt, and they don't care!  They say that the tax cuts will "pay for themselves" by fostering economic growth.  As Sargent says, we've heard this for decades.  And despite the lessons of the Kansas debacle -- the collapse of the Republican nirvanic state that Brownback tried to create -- the GOP denizens of the House and Senate are going to make things worse by doing to the country what he tried to do in Kansas.

Didn't work there, and it won't work by going full-country.  But wealthy Republican donors want their money and are pressuring Congress to go down the road to ruin again.



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