We all knew what would happen with Donald Trump’s tax scam — it was a huge giveaway to the richest Americans, borne on the back of working Americans. At first, the GOP claimed that the small increase some saw in their paychecks was just the beginning of a windfall of benefits for the average person. Now, however, with taxes being filed, the scenario so many warned about is coming true: higher taxes and smaller refunds for many Americans. We begin today’s roundup with Jeff Spross at The Week and his writeup of the disastrous consequences of the GOP tax plan:
The Republican tax cut is the gift that keeps on giving ... to Democrats.
The 2017 law was supposed to boost workers' wages, create jobs, and drive more investment — and as we've known for awhile, it's done none of that. But now we can add two more failures to the creatively-named Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA): It hasn't encouraged corporations to return their profits from overseas, and it's probably hiding a nasty surprise for many Americans come tax season. [...]
Tax day isn't until April, but the average refund is already down more than 8 percent compared to last year. Anecdotal evidence is also rolling in that people who expected refunds are getting hit with extra tax bills instead. An intrepid Twitter user even compiled a collection of Trump supporters doing their taxes and discovering, to their horror, that their year-end tax bill went up.
Kathryn Kranhold, writing at NBC News, details how the bulk of the tax cut’s benefit went to big corporations for corporate buybacks, not bonuses or raises:
Bonuses have registered less of an impact, increasing just 2 cents an hour in the first nine months of 2018, according to Lawrence Mishel, former president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.
The increase was "imperceptible," Mishel wrote in December on EPI's blog. "Whatever growth in bonuses has taken place is not necessarily attributable to the tax cuts, rather than employer efforts to recruit workers in a continued low unemployment environment."
By all accounts, companies poured a hefty portion of the tax windfall into buying back shares, a move designed to at least temporarily boost stock prices, which benefits executives and other large stockholders. And buybacks, evidently unlike bonuses or wage increases, will certainly continue...
At Fast Company, Danny Feingold interviews private equity investor Leo Hindery:
CM: The Federal Reserve found that 40% of Americans cannot afford an unexpected expense of $400. How do we reconcile that with the traditional markers that show a healthy economy and healthy job market?
LH: It’s indisputable that real wages are much lower than they should be. Women’s and men’s ability to save for the catastrophic event that might confront their families is less than marginal, it’s dangerously low. And the wrong people have been the beneficiary of the Trump tax and economic plan. What is so concerning to me is that we saw nothing [Tuesday] evening that was verifiable. It ranged from the absurd to the outright lie. And you pick up a newspaper today, and you don’t get the sense of criticism for that lying that I hoped we would see.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman and his encouragement to Democrats to think big:
Republicans never actually cared about debt; they just pretended to be deficit hawks as a way to hamstring President Barack Obama’s agenda. And many centrists have turned out to have a double standard, reserving passionate concern about debt for times when Democrats hold power. [...]
I’m not saying that Democrats should completely ignore the fiscal implications of their actions. Really big spending plans, especially if they don’t clearly involve investment — for example, a major expansion of federal health spending — will have to be paid for with new taxes. But if and when Democrats are in a position to make policy, they should be ambitious, and not let the deficit scolds scare them into thinking small.
The Washington Post argues against another Trump shutdown:
FEW AMERICANS are much interested in the minutiae of congressional bargaining, but plenty are dead set against another descent into the dysfunction of a government shutdown. As congressional negotiators struggle to break an 11th-hour impasse in talks over border security, once again threatening funding for parts of the government, they might keep in mind the stakes. The lives of hundreds of thousands of federal workers would again be upended in the event of another shutdown, following the record five-week closure that ended Jan. 25. Americans’ already meager respect for their government would diminish further. The image and prestige of the United States itself would be further battered as people around the world took in the spectacle of a nation incapable of fulfilling basic functions of governance.
And at The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin gives us his latest analysis on the Mueller investigation and its cast of characters:
The Stone indictment reads like a political black comedy. It stars a pair of mismatched operatives, Stone and the right-wing author Jerome Corsi, who, without formal connections to the Trump campaign, went on a transatlantic quest for dirt. Mueller’s indictment does not charge Stone with any involvement in the hacking, but accuses him of lying to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his (and Corsi’s) efforts to pry loose the hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks. Stone is also charged with trying to coerce Randy Credico, a New York media figure and a sometime friend of Stone’s, into joining his efforts to interfere with the work of the House committee. According to the indictment, Stone, in order to prevent Credico from sharing what he knew, sent menacing e-mails to him, including one that said “Prepare to die,” followed by an expletive. He also threatened to steal Credico’s thirteen-year-old therapy dog, a Coton de Tulear named Bianca.