Trickle Down = Someone Pissing on Your Leg

If you want to spot the moment in time in which the Republican Party first rejected the empirical and embraced unreason as a political identity, don’t look to the Religious Right, look to the day Reagan and his people took supply-side economics seriously. That’s the first bowlful of monkeybrains that the GOP ate. That’s where the prion disease first took hold. Supply-side never made sense as economics; when George H. W. Bush called it “voodoo economics,” he said the truest thing he ever said in public.

  Charles P Pierce

And we know this, because we had the grand Reagan economy that did fck-all for the middle class, and ultimately, the national economy. And yet, here we are, pretending again that it will do wonders.

If you don’t believe me, believe the guy who first promulgated this nonsense to President Ronald Reagan, and who appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post.

Based on this logic, tax cuts became the GOP’s go-to solution for nearly every economic problem. Extravagant claims are made for any proposed tax cut. Wednesday, President Trump argued that “our country and our economy cannot take off” without the kind of tax reform he proposes. Last week, Republican economist Arthur Laffer said, “If you cut that [corporate] tax rate to 15 percent, it will pay for itself many times over. … This will bring in probably $1.5 trillion net by itself.” That’s wishful thinking. So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting. In reality, there’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.

From the guy who gave us trickle down economics:

I swear I don't think I'm wrong when I opine that what the GOP and corporate elite are trying to do these days is to amass all the wealth they can, in whatever way they can, knowing that the whole shebang is racing toward a collosal collapse in the near future, and they want to be set when that happens. Screw the rest of us.

Back to Charlie:

The Deficit, which pops up every time there’s a Democratic president and/or every time the country’s real owners pull the strings of their legislative marionettes. In fact, one of them pretty much gave the game away in The New York Times on Thursday.

A new tax cut is emerging to rival those of the Bush years, and the deficit hawks have hardly peeped. “It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led,” said Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of about 150 conservative House members. “It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.”

And there you have it: they squeal about deficits when the Democrats are in charge. It's a great "talking point" - but it has no other validity.

And here's what the trickle down guy says about what, if anything, actually promoted growth in the Reagan years:

First was the sharp reduction in interest rates by the Federal Reserve. The fed funds rate fell by more than half, from about 19 percent in July 1981 to about 9 percent in November 1982. Second, Reagan’s defense buildup and highway construction programs greatly increased the federal government’s purchases of goods and services. This is textbook Keynesian economics.

Third, there was the simple bounce-back from the recession of 1981-82. Recoveries in the postwar era tended to be V-shaped — they were as sharp as the downturns they followed. The deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.

Finally, I’m not sure how many Republicans even know anymore that Reagan raised taxes several times after 1981.

[...]

Today, Republicans extol the virtues of lowering marginal tax rates, citing as their model the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered the top individual income tax rate to just 28 percent from 50 percent, and the corporate tax rate to 34 percent from 46 percent. What follows, they say, would be an economic boon.

[...]

But there is no evidence showing a boost in growth from the 1986 act. The economy remained on the same track, with huge stock market crashes — 1987’s “Black Monday,” 1989’s Friday the 13th “mini-crash” and a recession beginning in 1990. Real wages fell.

[...]

The flip-side of tax cut mythology is the notion that tax increases are an economic disaster — the reason, in theory, every Republican in Congress voted against the tax increase proposed by Bill Clinton in 1993. Yet the 1990s was the most prosperous decade in recent memory. At 37.3 percent, aggregate real GDP growth in the 1990s exceeded that in the 1980s.

Despite huge tax cuts almost annually during the George W. Bush administration that cost the Treasury trillions in revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office, growth collapsed in the first decade of the 2000s. Real GDP rose just 19.5 percent, well below its ’90s rate.

  WAPo

Tax cuts for the rich and the corporate have only one aim and one result: More wealth into the hands of the rich and the corporate. How can that not be obvious?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.