One of the primary elements in the discussion selling of the tax bill to the public by the Administration has been the occlusion of questions about the financial health of the nation as a whole by concentrating on the immediate benefits many are expected to accrue. This has been enhanced through the provision of online calculators that supposedly will help you calculate how much you’ll benefit when your taxes fall. And these calculators are not necessarily government-supplied; the media provides such tools in the belief that this is a good service.
This concentration on the individuals’ drop in tax rates cripples the far more important discussion of the impact of the tax bill on the Nation as a whole. By concentrating on the individuals’ gain, by the immoral appeal to the avarice of isolated person, the Administration continues an extremist strategy to divide & conquer. How so? Because not everyone will benefit immediately from this tax cut. After all, it must be paid for, and some of that will be through immediate cuts to programs that service the unfortunate, those who are far down the socioeconomic ladder.
This year.
Next year, it may be cuts to more general entitlements, such as Social Security, a favorite target of the extremist right (remember Bush II’s proposal to privatize Social Security?). This is how you dismember those services that someone thinks they know better about. One piece at a time, with a financial distraction for the non-targets at the same time.
Oh, look, a squirrel!
So what about that important discussion? The extremist right-wing is depending on the Laffer curve, the idea that cutting taxes will lead to economic prosperity. It’s worth reiterating that Bush I called it voodoo economics, and if that’s a bit of a blunt instrument in that it dismisses context as unimportant, the addition of the context of today, as we discussed elsewhere, indicates that, much like the tax cuts during the Bush II Administration and the more recent and disastrous example of the Brownback tax cuts, eventually rejected by the local Republicans themselves, the tax bill recently passed and signed may lead to not much economic activity at all – and quite possibly, and sadly, a recession (which will quickly, and appropriately, labeled the Trump Recession; I look forward to his denials that there’s any recession going on, desperately trying to dismantle the institutions which puncture his balloon of fantasy – but I digress).
In the engineering world, we’d call this an unnecessary risk. The country’s perking along at a more than acceptable unemployment rate of 4.1%, we’ve slowly recovered from the last Republican-induced economic meltdown, and those economic problems left over from the Obama Administration, which I tend to see as a resulting from the GOP‘s refusal to responsibly compromise with President Obama, are correctable with minor adjustments. Perhaps the biggest problem has nothing to do with taxation, but with monopolies which may be stifling the economy. But that’s a different discussion.
So, as you go off to find out just how much more money you’ll keep in reduced taxes, try to remember that someone else has to pay to cover your reduction in obligation. And, as has been well advertised, it’s not the commercial world bearing more of the burden. It’s someone else. And don’t depend on future economic activity stimulated by the tax cut. Kansas is a smoking example of how that can burn down the economy. You may have more money in your pocket, but when the mob burns down the city in anger at economic catastrophe, well, I fear those dollar bills are flammable.
