Saturday, April 10, 2021

The trickle has been reduced to a drip

[T]he White House intends to pay for infrastructure investments in part by raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

For many Republicans, this represents an outrageous and intolerable attack on free enterprise.

[...]

Increasing the corporate tax rate is popular with the American mainstream, but no one seriously expected executives, en masse, to start endorsing the president's proposal.

But there's an element to this that too often gets overlooked: the Republican plan that lowered the corporate tax rate in the first place didn't work.

It was four years ago when Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which led Republicans to make bold boasts about the policy's many benefits. By cutting the corporate rate, Republicans insisted, Americans would soon see vastly greater business investments, improved private-sector hiring, higher wages, and a policy that paid for itself.

  MSNBC
Republicans have been saying that ever since Reagan introduced "trickle down" economy. It has never done anything but trickle, and it never reaches the bottom. It works as planned, though: make the workers and the guys at the bottom believe the bullshit, and enrich the fat cats.
The corporate tax cut didn't improve business investments, didn't fuel private-sector hiring, didn't improve wages, and didn't pay for itself. Stock buybacks, however, soared.

[...]

Republicans and private-sector opponents of the American Jobs Act are now demanding the maintenance of a corporate tax break that failed.

In other words, Biden is effectively saying, "The tax break didn't work, so let's invest the money in infrastructure," to which the right is effectively responding, "It doesn't matter if the policy didn't work, we just want to keep the money."
Trump made it acceptable to Republicans to say the quiet part out loud.

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

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