"Beware of conservative bullshit -- [...]In 1980, while running for the Republican presidential nomination against Reagan, George H.W. Bush called his competitor’s claim that the country could cut taxes but not add to the national debt “voodoo economics.” In 1991, Bush, by then president, went along with a Democratic plan to raise the top tax rate for the richest Americans from 28% to 31% to stem the red ink. Though top rates remained far below what they were when Reagan took office, any tax increase was anathema to large swaths of the Rpublican party. Bush paid the price when he lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton."
As average people struggle, the wealthy and big businesses benefit.
Jim Steele by James B. Steele November 29, 2022
[...]
It wasn’t just a result of lowering the top rate to 35%.
For decades, dividends paid to shareholders — predominantly wealthier people — were taxed like salaries and wages. But the 2003 law created a new category called “qualified dividends.” What constituted such a dividend was complicated, largely how long the stock was held, but its main benefit was that it would be taxed at 15% rather than 35% for upper-income people.
An auto worker in Detroit who received $5,000 in qualified dividends might have saved $500 under the new law. An auto executive who received $100,000 in such dividends would have saved $20,000.
This tax break, narrowed since then but only modestly, has cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $350 billion since 2004. Upper-income taxpayers have benefited the most. In 2019 alone, it was worth $16.2 billion to taxpayers earning $1 million or more.
To put that $16.2 billion in perspective: It’s the equivalent of the federal income taxes paid by everyone earning $50,000 or less in California, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin — combined.
President Barack Obama later signed legislation that made the tax break permanent, but he also steered tax increases through Congress, pushing the top rate back to where it had been under Clinton as well as imposing a surtax on investment income and hiking Medicare taxes for high earners to help pay for the Affordable Care Act.
All this led to what would be the signature legislative triumph of the Trump presidency, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The sheer magnitude of the tax cuts it gave to the wealthy and corporations made the law the most significant since the Reagan era.
The arguments for it sounded very familiar.
“I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue neutral,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared after the bill’s passage. “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.”
Instead, with its generous tax cuts for individuals and companies, it gushed red ink. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2018 that it would add $1.9 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
In 2019 alone, the tax cuts cost the U.S. Treasury $259 billion. Virtually half that money flowed to those earning $200,000 or more, according to data from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Workers earning between $50,000 and $75,000 that year got a tax cut of $840 on average. Those earning $1 million or more? Over $64,000.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
