On Tuesday we asked half a dozen of the Blue America candidates how eager they are to go on the offensive over the GOP tax agenda. All of them are very eager to do just that. For example, James Thompson, the candidate for the Kansas congressional district centered around Wichita, thinks if the 2018 election iOS decided on tax policies, he'll be the next congressman from KS-04. "If you want to know what will happen to the rest of the United States as a result of Trump's tax reform," Thompson told us Tuesday morning, "just look at Kansas. The so called 'tax reform' being pushed by President Trump and Ron Estes is the nationalization of the same failed trickle down tax experiments of Sam Brownback in Kansas. Our schools and hospitals are underfunded and closing. Our infrastructure, especially in rural areas, is collapsing. Our businesses are leaving our state. Our guards in the prison system are underpaid and overworked in overcrowded prisons. Our police departments don't have the money for proper training and are short staffed. Our mental health care facilities, formerly number one in the country, are now ranked at the bottom. More and more people are falling below the poverty line. These are just a few of the examples of what 'tax reform' did to Kansas. The filthy rich got the tax break goldmine, and the working people of Kansas got the shaft. Supply side economics do not work. Businesses do not hire new employees because of tax breaks. Demand drives business. Rather than trying to get a bigger piece of the pie, how about increasing the size of the pie? Paying a living wage will circulate more money into the economy and create a larger tax base. Finally expanding Medicaid will allow 100,000 additional Kansans to get medical care, again pumping more money into our local economy. We have lost more than 2 billion dollars in the last couple of years as a result of failing to expand Medicaid. Using targeted trade agreements to allow farmers to sell their products internationally while also protecting the wages of our working class people at home will bring more money into our state. Republicans don't want to do this though, they want the pie all for themselves. In Kansas, we say 'pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.' The Republicans are all greedy hogs lined up at the 2018 trough gorging themselves on the slop Trump is feeding them."The next day, Tumpanzee was in Springfield, Missouri promoting his tax plan-- with one lie after another-- at a closed-to-the-public event behind the closed doors of one of his rich campaign donors. Just before Trump spoke, Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, warned the media to “Make no mistake; what Trump and Republican leaders in Congress are proposing is not tax reform. They simply want massive tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations, at the expense of everyone else. And those tax giveaways will be paid for by cuts to Social Security, healthcare, education and other programs that maintain living standards for working families. It’s Trumpcare all over again, and it must be blocked.”When Señor Trumpanzee says he will enact historic tax reform, as he always brags he will, all he's talking about is a fairly standard conservative $5 trillion tax giveaway benefitting the wealthy and big corporations. What there is of a Trump budget shows tax cuts being paid for by $4.3 trillion in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, and other services that help working families get by in the GOP law of the jungle society they envision. He claims his plan will help the middle class but his revisions to the tax code primarily benefit the top 1% of income earners, no one's definition of the middle class. Everyone in the top 1% gets, on average, a nice $175,000 tax cut. Something like 25% of middle-class families would actually pay higher taxes under the Trumpanzee/Paul Ryan plan. Even worse, Trump would pay for his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations by cutting public services working families rely on, such as Social Security, Medicaid, education, infrastructure, nutrition programs and other vital services.Likewise, his bullshit claims that his plan helps small businesses are nothing but a hoax-- another boon for the wealthy. Trump says he's going to lower small business' taxes to 15% but most small businesses already pay taxes at a 15% rate or lower, so less than 7% of business owners would get any tax cut. More than three-quarters of the tax cuts would go to the richest 1% of business owners, who would get an average tax cut of $75,000 each year. These are not Main Street shopkeepers, but hedge fund managers, Wall Street lawyers and real estate developers like Trump, who would lower his own tax rate from roughly 40% to 15%.And Trump was braying in Springfield, as Republicans always do, that corporate and individual tax rates need to be reduced because we have the highest taxes in the world-- a flat out lie Republicans love to recite endlessly. As Americans for Tax Fairness has shown, Americans are not taxed higher than other countries and, as a percentage of the overall economy, Americans pay less in taxes than 30 of 35 other similarly developed countries. And although the official corporate tax rate is 35%, most corporations pay much less because of loopholes. In fact, the Government Accountability Office found that profitable U.S. corporations paid an effective tax rate of only 14% from 2008 to 2012.And when Trump boasted that his plan making deep cuts to the tax rate on accumulated offshore corporate profits will “bring that cash home” to be “reinvested” in the American economy, it's a complete conservative fantasy. The GOP's proposal to tax those offshore earnings at just 10%, instead of the 35% they currently owe, amounts to a $600 billion tax cut for tax-dodging corporations-- a huge loss of revenue that could be used for economy-boosting public investments. When Congress provided a similar tax giveaway in 2004, corporations that brought home their profits cut tens of thousands of jobs and gave 90%-- so 90 cents of every dollar-- in earnings brought home to rich shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.Americans For Tax Fairness: "Recent experience and academic research both show that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are a poor way to stimulate the economy and create jobs. And Trump’s proposed deep budget cuts to infrastructure, healthcare, medical research and education won’t help create jobs, either... Only the richest one of every 500 estates currently pays the estate tax-- the estate must be worth $5.5 million or more to be affected. The only effect abolishing the estate tax will have on American workers is to deprive them of over $20 billion in annual revenue, which pays for public services used by those who haven’t inherited a fortune... Big corporations don’t need a tax cut-- what they need is to start paying their fair share of taxes again.As Sam Jammal, the progressive opponent challenging Wall Street shill Ed Royce-- Royce has taken an astronomical $7,303,507 in bribes from the Financial Sector since coming to Congress in 1993-- told us earlier in the week, he finds "this whole tax reform conversation to represent everything wrong with Washington. Right now, thousands of lobbyists are lining up with their own 'fixes' to our tax system. Everything is centered on how the most wealthy will benefit. None of the conversation is about how we help working families... Tax reform should be about making sure the middle class is still a reality for our community. We should scrap corporate tax reform and focus on reforms that help regular people. This includes increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding deductions on child care, student loans and home ownership, and promoting job creation by entrepreneurs and small business-- not paybacks to the uber wealthy. We can't continue to have an economy where so few can get ahead and so many are falling behind. Everything we are hearing on Trump's tax reform looks like a bad deal for our families. We need to stop this 'reform.'"Matt Cartwright is one of a small handful of progressive Democrats reelected last year in district that Trump won (click on the thermometer on the right for the list). Trump beat Hillary in Matt's largely blue collar Pennsylvania district 53.4% (10 points better than Romney had done) to 43.3% (12 points worse than President Obama had done in 2012). Meanwhile, Cartwright, an assertive and skillfiul champion for working families, was reelected 53.8% to 46.2%, a margin of over 20,000 votes. But the Republican Party is targeting Matt in a big way this cycle. They've recruited a self-funding Wall Street hack, John Chrin, a former managing director at JP Morgan Chase who lives on millionaires' row in swanky Short Hills, New Jersey-- a Wall Street company town. He claims he can run in PA-17 because his paternal grandfather owns a company that owns a landfill in Northampton County. Chrin's mansion is about a two hour drive--more if there's traffic on the I-80-- from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in the district. He lives in Leonard Lance's district although I suppose he can move into his grandfather's company's landfill if the commute to PA-17 gets too arduous for him. Trump's tax plan is tailor-made for people exactly like John Chrin. Above is the new ActBlue "Trump District Progressives" thermometer. It's important; please take a look.Yesterday, Matt, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told us that his "own impression is that in all likelihood, the GOP tax plan will follow the 2017 playbook for major Republican legislation: it will be introduced with much fanfare and loudly ballyhooed by the president. Then, people will read it. These people will include the diligent accountants and analysis at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO will score it and reveal it to be an unabashed giveaway to the wealthiest people in America, an actual tax increase to many middle-income earners, and a drain on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The ensuing public outcry will stun even the most insensate GOP members of Congress, and result in the president blaming GOP congressional leaders and claiming he never had anything to do with it. Then the president will send out an astonishing tweet, on a different subject, so outrageous as to be incapable of being ignored, attempting to get everyone to forget about his festival of legislative failures and broken promises. How long Americans continue to fall for this nonsense is anybody’s guess."Ro Khanna represents a big chunk of white collar Silicon Valley. He also represents the solidly middle and working class blue collar areas in the South and East Bay like Newark and Fremont. He's no more a fan of Trump's tax plan than Matt Cartwright is. He told us that "Trump's $5 trillion giveaway to the speculator class is not just morally wrong but also hurts our economic growth. If we really want to grow the economy at 3 percent, we should use that money instead to give tax credits to working families, to have Medicare for all, to invest in research and development, to provide debt free college and to support apprenticeships, tech courses, and vocational education. The democrats need to make the case that our policies are pro growth and pro American competitiveness. We also shouldn't be afraid to provide a bold $5 trillion plan for investing in our economy as a counter to Trump."Meanwhile, in the alternative universe on the fringes of American society, this is not a parody of the Bannon-Mercer neo-Nazi website, Bretbart. This is an actual Breitbart page from yesterday. This is what the neo-Nazis across America are reading today. And remember, we're talking about people with 2-digit IQs incapable of intellectual discernment beyond that of a slow-witted 8 or 9 year old. And they're armed.
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