Left's Unhinged Response To Trump Tax Cut Reveals Their Real Fear: What If It Works?

Terry Jones

The Investor’s Business Daily Editorial

December 24, 2017

As tax cuts become a reality, Democrats have gone ballistic, claiming that the GOP's sweeping tax plan will rob the middle class and the poor, line the pockets of the rich, and tank the economy. It's all false, class-warfare claptrap, and they know it.

Following passage of the Republican tax reform, Democrat politicians and leftist media celebrities have become nearly unhinged, and that may be an understatement.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the tax cuts a "scam" and "simply theft, monumental, brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it." She added that it was "not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs," but "a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation." Plutocracy?

Not to be outdone, former Democratic presidential candidate and millionaire socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called it "a great day for the Koch brothers and other billionaire Republican campaign contributors who will see huge tax breaks for themselves while driving up the deficit by almost $1.5 trillion."

Celebrity leftists fared no better. "Woman, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter, you have betrayed us all," former comedian and TV host Rosie O'Donnell tweeted at Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who voted for the tax cut plan. "Dear god, ask for forgiveness, redeem your soul tomorrow."

She even offered her $2 million in cash to vote "no."This is how desperate the left has become, and how divorced from reality. For all the talk of how tax cuts will line the pockets of the rich and destroy the economy, virtually no one in the mainstream of the economics profession, left or right, agrees.

The Tax Policy Center (TPC), a liberal think tank, noted that more than 80% of Americans will get tax cuts under the plan just passed. And the benefits will go to every income group, not "billionaires." This, by the way, is bolstered by other recent analyses by Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation and by the widely respected nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

TPC estimates an average tax cut of about $2,140 per person. By the way, some 16% of the richest Americans — those in the top 0.1% of incomes — will face an average tax increase of $387,610.

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, further crunching the TPC numbers, found that while the top 1% of incomes now pay 27% of all federal taxes, they will get just 21% of the tax cuts. The bottom 80%, including the middle class, pays only 33% of all taxes, but will take home 35% of the tax cuts.

Of the 12% who will face tax hikes, they're overwhelmingly among the rich — not the middle class.

So, no, it's not "tax cuts for the rich." That's a totally bogus argument.

For that matter, so are the arguments that tax cuts tank the economy. History is replete with examples of why that isn't true.

The tax cuts on corporations and small, pass-through businesses, along with letting companies immediately expense the cost of new equipment, should lead to more business investment. So should shrinking the death tax, which should encourage more small-business investment.

How much more is an open question, but the Heritage Foundation, which employs a widely used economic model, estimates that the tax cuts will tack on 2.2% to long-term GDP, or roughly $3,000 per household.

That estimate includes a 4.5% jump in capital investment, mainly in equipment, and a hefty 9.4% gain in business structures. Along with expected rises in both the number of jobs and hours worked, after-tax wages for the average worker will be 3.5% higher than they would have been without the tax cuts.

Others see more modest, yet still significant, gains. The Tax Foundation, for instance, forecasts a long-term permanent rise of 1.7% in GDP and 1.5% for wages. It also sees 339,000 new jobs.

These aren't pie-in-the sky guesses. As history clearly shows, growth-oriented tax cuts such as these almost always have major benefits for the economy and for average workers. During the 20th century, big tax cuts in the 1920s (Harding, Coolidge), 1960s (Kennedy) and 1980s (Reagan) all yielded major growth dividends for the U.S. economy.

What's more, those past major tax cuts were to varying degrees bipartisan. Sadly, not this time. Not one Democrat voted for them. Not one.

That's why the Democrats and progressive left have become so utterly unhinged. They've failed to stop the one thing that might deny them a chance to retake both houses of Congress in the 2018 midterm elections: an economic boom.

When the economy really begins cooking, with the economy growing close to 3%, hundreds of thousands of new jobs being created and workers seeing more in their paychecks, how will they explain that to their constituents?

Obama Lies vs. Trump Lies

How quickly NY Times forgets Obama's lies and frauds
James Bovard
The Hill
December 18, 2017

Donald Trump has been flogging the truth and twisting facts since the day he arrived in the Oval Office. But anyone who expected more candor from him as president than on the campaign trail was criminally naive. The real mystery nowadays is why the media seeks to expunge the falsehoods of prior presidents.

“Trump’s Lies versus Obama’s” was the headline in a Sunday Review New York Times piece aiming to drive a final coffin nail into Trump’s credibility. The Times claimed Trump has already “told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire (8-year) presidency.” The columnists seem so distraught that it is surprising the article is not in all caps.

But the Times’ list of falsehoods is itself a charade with gaping Montana-sized holes.

Has the Times forgotten about Edward Snowden? Obama responded to Snowden’s stunning revelations of the National Security Agency’s vacuuming up millions of Americans’ personal data by going on the Jay Leno Show and proclaiming: “There is no spying on Americans.” But NSA’s definition of “terrorist suspect” was so ludicrously broad that it includes anyone “searching the web for suspicious stuff” (maybe including presidential lies). Obama’s verbal defenses of NSA spying collapsed like a row of houses of cards.

In early 2009, Obama visited Mexico and, in a spiel calling for the renewal of the assault weapon ban, asserted that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States.” This vastly overstated the actual problem, since that statistic measured only firearms that Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing.

His administration then acted as if 90 percent was a goal, not a lie, launching a secret Fast and Furious gunwalking operation masterminded by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency, deluging Mexican drug gangs with high-powered weapons. At least 150 Mexicans were killed by guns illegally sent south of the border with Obama administration approval.

Obama’s animosity to the Second Amendment spurred some of his most farcical whoppers. In July 2016, Obama asserted: “We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” Glocks are the Lexus of handguns, and a person could buy hundreds of volumes of used books via Amazon for the price of a Glock.

A year earlier, Obama bewailed “neighborhoods where it’s easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable.” Obama never offered a single example of a locale where carrots are rarer than .38 Specials. But his false claim helped frighten clueless suburbanites to support Obama’s anti-gun agenda.

The Times column lists only one Obama falsehood on the Affordable Care Act: “If you like your doctor, you'll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan.” Obama’s dozens of variations and recitals of this lie were disregarded. The Times also ignored the fact that the ObamaCare legislation was carefully crafted to con Congress and the public. As its intellectual godfather, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, explained:

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to get this thing to pass.”

To revile Trump, the column also struggles mightily to resurrect George W. Bush’s credibility. The Times concedes that Bush sought to justify attacking Iraq “by talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist.” This vastly understates the role of official deceit in hustling that war.

In early 2003, Bush’s speeches continually warned, “If war is forced upon us....” There was never any truth to war being “forced upon us” (except by the White House) but that phrase helped Bush panic audiences still jittery after 9/11. The Center for Public Integrity, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes, compiled a list of 935 lies by Bush and his top appointees on Iraq. Perhaps to preserve the column’s lofty tone, the Times omitted any mention of Bush’s four years of brazenly false denials of authorizing a worldwide torture regime.

The Times’ comparison of Trump and other presidents implies that all lies are equally damnable. The Times ignored all the Obama false promises used to justify his troop surge in Afghanistan (which resulted in more than a thousand dead American troops with nothing to show for the sacrifice) and bombing Libya (which now has slave markets). But killing vast numbers of human beings should require more due diligence than assertions on federal spending for peanut subsidies.

The Times asserts that Trump is seeking to “to make truth irrelevant,” which “is extremely damaging to democracy.” But democracy has also been subverted by the media’s long history of ignoring or absolving presidential lies. For more than a century, the press has groveled the worst when presidents dragged the nation into the biggest perils.

Trump’s lies deserve to be exposed and condemned. But Bush’s and Obama’s lies help explain why only 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government at the end of Obama’s reign. Pretending America recently had a Golden Age of honest politicians encourages the delusion that toppling Trump is all that is necessary to make the federal government great again.

James Bovard is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of 10 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 

A successful year for President Trump

In case you have not heard (and where would you hear it anyway?), President Trump has had a very successful year. Conrad Black provides an excellent summary.

Ho, Ho, Ho. Jolly Good Year Shapes Up for Trump In Defiance of Doomsayers

Conrad Black

The New York Sun

December 19, 2017

Those who are still predicting that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and endangered creatures. It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are so infrequent and tentative that it is hard to remember how far participants have come since the music started.

Two years ago, virtually the entire commentariat, and most of its readers and listeners, were splitting their sides at the gigantic impending farce of the Trump candidacy for the Republican nomination. Eighteen months ago, those same people had almost entirely shifted their immense mirth to the mighty Hillary Clinton avalanche that was already starting to rumble down whatever it was that President Obama renamed Mount McKinley.

The BBC was asking itself (i.e., its viewers, including any Americans watching its World Service) whether Mr. Trump was going to pull out then, to avoid the unprecedented thrashing he was about to receive at the polls (which none of the polls, even the more rabidly anti-Trump polls, then predicted). Wacky leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, with the unshakeable confidence in mind-reading that seems never to desert such people, announced that Trump would quit because he never wanted or expected to be nominated, and it was all a joke that had got out of hand.

These were not unrepresentative opinions. Mr. Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama, the national press, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley. Of course the Trump campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.

On Election Night, Nobel prize-winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.) The alarms about effective Russian intervention in the election and the confected creation of the Trump collusion myth were born with indecent haste.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, was soon solemnly announcing that there had been a thousand Russian agents actively assisting the Trump campaign in key swing states and that they had delivered Wisconsin, a complete fabrication (if he really believed this whopper, I have some oceanside property in Oklahoma to sell him).

A year ago, efforts were still underway on recounts, especially in Wisconsin (which resulted in increasing Trump’s margin of victory by 131 votes), and there was national television advertising, costing millions of dollars, directed at the 306 people who had been chosen to cast Electoral College presidential votes for Trump, to break their pledges. (Seven electors did so and voted for third candidates, but five of the defectors were from Mrs. Clinton.)

Plans were underway to disrupt the inauguration, and engage in widespread civil disobedience; the new Democratic National Committee chairman pledged “scorched earth” obstruction; Bruce Springsteen, singing to bemused Antipodeans in Perth, Australia, crooned, “We are the Resistance”; Madonna (who had generated a slight rise in Trump’s poll numbers by promising to fellate wavering male voters who went for Hillary Clinton) spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House.”

Veteran black-activist congressman John Lewis said President Trump was “illegitimate,” and the ancient and unfeasible congresswoman Maxine Waters screamed “Impeach 45,” for causes that would become apparent as the process proceeded. Talk shortly turned to that option.

As the president and his wife and party left Washington on May 19 for Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and Brussels, ABC political commentator Nate Silver rated the chances of impeachment at between 25% and 50%, and David Gergen — a former assistant to Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and a knowledgeable man until he joined CNN and was infected by acute Blitzeritis — said, “We are moving into impeachment territory.”

A long sequence of crises was fanned by the Trumpophobic press: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Statue of Liberty were (according to Mr. Schumer) weeping over the fate of Yemenis and Libyans not allowed onto aircraft bound for the United States. The president’s expressed thought over the Charlottesville riot — that Antifa and the extreme section of Black Lives Matter that applauded the killing of white policemen might be as odious as the Klan and American neo-Nazis — was proof that Mr. Trump was a quasi-genocidal racist and apologist for slavery.

Mr. Trump virtually dismantled NATO by not specifically mentioning the collective-security clause in his speech there; was signing the death warrant of the planet when he pulled out of the asinine Paris Climate Agreement; was going to blow up the world with Kim Jong Un; and so forth, ad nauseam.

All the while, the Russian-collusion fraud festered and grew, born of Clintonian denial and frenzied finger-pointing, and reinforced by the Steele dossier — a pastiche of scurrilous gossip and malice from the most dubious sources, including in the Kremlin, cited by Mrs. Clinton in her absurd memoir of the election as proof of her opponent’s treason.

Mrs. Clinton writes how she was betrayed by the country and most people in it, but not by the husband with whom she has enjoyed a storybook Pleasantville marriage. It only emerged after the publication of her book that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had commissioned the Steele dossier, and had spent $10 million on it from Democratic campaign funds. (According to former party chair Donna Brazile, Mrs. Clinton had rigged the nomination from her rival Bernie Sanders.)

The Clinton campaign desperately shopped the Steele dossier to the American press in the last days of the campaign. This was the all-time dirty trick of U.S. political history, and when the rock was lifted and she was exposed as the sponsor of it, Mrs. Clinton instantly switched gears and called it “campaign information.”

This last year, after the year of his nomination and election, has been the second round of Donald Trump’s war to crush and expel the American political establishment. This year he has won over the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to toil in the enactment of his program.

Together they have achieved the greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80 percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4% GDP growth next year.

The Obama apologetics that a flatlined economy with a shrunken work force and a burgeoning multitude of Medicaid-sedated idleness was the new normal has been debunked; it is the abnormal recent past.

For all of these and many similar reasons, the assertions of even fair-minded and perceptive commentators that Mr. Trump has done poorly in holding only between 37% and 40% popular approval is mistaken. Considering the sustained assault of 90% of the press, in which the normal honeymoon for a new president has been replaced by a daily press assassination squad, he has done well.

In the post-Watergate era of the criminalization of policy differences, instead of waiting a while before firing the nuclear option as accusers had with Nixon, Reagan, and President Clinton, Mr. Trump’s enemies fired this blockbuster after a few months. Undismayed, he has ripped open the facade of the Justice Department and the FBI and exposed morally corrupt hacks within, while heaping praise on the FBI rank and file.

At year’s end, his enemies, battered and almost unrecognizable from reruns of their gamecock assurance of a year, let alone two years, ago, are reduced to the shabby jobbery of claiming he is about to fire the special counsel. Mr. Trump has cooperated entirely with the special counsel, who has illegally seized evidence from the General Services Administration, recruited and tolerated hysterically anti-Trump people on his staff, and relied on the unspeakable Steele dossier, while a senior Justice Department official has been caught red-handed in improper contact with Steele, with whom the official’s wife worked during the election preparing the anti-Trump dossier.

Donald Trump was a joke until nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; he has had a very successful year. His enemies have been weighed in the balance and they have been found wanting. They shall have their reward. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers, especially the president and Mrs. Trump.