PROVIDING OVER TWO TRILLION IN TAX CUTS IS NOT THE PROPER PRIORITY

…Homeless living in America

 

Trump’s tax cuts will only marginally help the nation’s poor.

 

OK, l am not a tax or financial expert, but it doesn’t take a financial or economic genius to understand that reducing federal taxes is not by any stretch the nation’s most pressing issue today.

 

To put it more clearly, since Donald J. Trump’s election, the discussion has been about lowering taxes for those battered by years of economic change.  But there is simply no way that shoveling out $2.6 trillion in business tax cuts over 10 years does anything to help those people and places that are in financial straits.

 

On the contrary, the GOP’s list of tax cuts and other corporate goodies, along with the absurd repeal of the estate tax and various other benefits for the well-off, this will only aggravate the existing inequalities.  By depleting the government’s coffers, it makes it much harder to finance public initiatives in education, job training and other spheres which would promote earning mobility for those Americans who are lagging behind.

 

The Republicans are now trying to get rid of the ability to write-off the state and local taxes from the federal taxes.  This is their effort to pay for their ridiculous tax cuts.  Ending the deductibility of state and local taxes is probably their worst bad idea. This current provision punishes states with more progressive tax structures that currently ask their best-off citizens to ease the difficulties of their less fortunate neighbors. Shifting the goals against states willing to spend money to eliminate local social ills is the agenda of the anti-tax individuals who support getting rid of these deductions. They are trying to disable government by making it harder for states to call on their well-off citizens to help take on a little more of the negative load.

 

It is extremely important to show how much damage this Trump tax cut would do to all US programs that we already have and for the ones we need going forward.

Democrats are properly already noting that the Republican budget pays for the tax cuts with a $1 trillion reduction to Medicaid, and nearly half that amount from Medicare. If Republicans can’t get their act together to destroy Obamacare, they’ve decided that they will simply starve the health-care system that is targeted at all low-income Americans

 

The Trump tax cuts also removes the priorities that deal with the gap between the rich and the poor.  Regional differences are so pervasive throughout the Western states that the Economist magazine, not exactly an anti-capitalism publication, they recently devoted their cover report to what we need to do to reduce the gap between rich and poor locales. “Opportunities are limited for those stuck in the wrong place,” the magazine wrote, “and the wider economy suffers.” All who care about saving our democracy should support a reformed market system that responds to those that are currently being left out.

 

Reporter Dylan Matthews has reported on Vox, that Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have introduced a bill that would expand the child tax credit to $3,600 a year per child for those age 0 to 5, and $3,000 a year for those 6 to 18. This is mostly for assistance for the poor and the lower part of the middle class.

 

The plan, Matthews also writes, would cut child poverty in the country almost in half, from 16.1% to 8.9%. The cost: roughly $1 trillion over a decade, is against the $1.5 trillion Republicans claim would be the price of their tax cuts after they are done shuffling the tax code around.

 

Which do you think would do the most good?

 

That is the question that the Republicans refuse to deal with, and since all the Republicans ever know to do is cut taxes.  Doesn’t that mean the rest of us have to pretend that this bogus tax cut exercise makes any sense at all….which it doesn’t...?

 

Yes, the total cost of the Bennet/Brown bill would be $1 trillion over 10 years vs $1.5 trillion for the GOP’s tax cuts.

 

It doesn’t take the “financial or economic genius” to understand which would be the best for those at the bottom of the US economic scale.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017