Dear editor,
The GOP shut down the government in 2013 over cutting spending and not raising the debt ceiling, but it seems OK now to add over a trillion dollars to the national debt for tax cuts?
President Reagan and Reaganomics-101 almost tripled the national debt with corporate and high-income tax cuts to create some short-term middle class (trickle-down) job security and wealth. "Trickle-down," however, long-term defies the gravity of this philosophy and in reality creates an economic percolation-up from the middle-class. The middle class then becomes saddled with even more tax liability long-term.
One obscure line within this 500-page tax bill, according to Bernie Sanders, will give $600 million in tax breaks to hedge fund managers with established residences in the Virgin Islands. Elimination of the inheritance tax (currently affecting couples with assets of $11 millon or more) along with the alternative minimum tax (which ensures the very wealthy pay some taxes) will bring billions in economic tax-relief benefits to the Trump family and others like him.
Sanders also mentions the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands as being a tax shelter for some 20,000 corporations. It’s only a five-story building, which Trump and many of his cabinet appointees have accounts there. One of which [belongs to] the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who failed to mention on his financial disclosure form his $100 million account there.
This current tax-cut philosophy reminds me of the Bush II multiple tax cuts and how we went from a balanced federal budget (at the end of Bill Clinton’s term) to the middle class eventually bailing out major corporations and banks.
This GOP philosophy of unbridled spending, replete with mostly big-boy tax cuts, left Obama with having to catch a falling economic knife, dropped from the top of the Washington monument. It took two years into Obama’s administration before the economy finally turned around nationwide. Unemployment here in Florida peaked at 12 percent.
The GOP tax plan will eventually cut Social Security and Medicare benefits to help pay for these huge tax cuts. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has made his desires to do this very clear since his college years. However, the SS trust fund is not an entitlement. My employer and I paid into this trust fund and Congress feels free to borrow/rob from it periodically (ie. Bush II borrowing, according to Politifact, $708 billion from the SS trust fund to pay for wars and bailouts during his term).
Wouldn’t cutting from SS and Medicare be no different than cutting from military retirements and Tricare? So why does the GOP insist on these kinds of tax cuts for mostly the rich?
Sen. Lindsey Graham said on the radio last week, "We have to pass tax reform or the Republican party will lose funding from its supporters."
Isn’t it time for taxpayers to fund campaigns? Politicians are puppets of the rich and not "we the people." Where are the likes of Sen. John McCain when we need them? He used to push for campaign finance reform a decade or so ago.
I say leave the taxes on the super-rich in place and insist that Congress start funding their own campaigns with our tax dollars.
Do we really need campaigns, like this recent Roy Moore campaign, spending tens of millions of dollars for a job that pays $174,000 a year?
Think about that.
That makes about as much sense/cents as selling fake spaghetti and calling it an im-pasta!
BILL CALFEE
Milton
What's your view? Write a letter to the editor.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Leave taxes on the super-rich