With Trump and Congress promising to deliver another $1T in tax cuts before year end 2018, with the US Budget Deficit and Debt projected already to exceed $1T a year, annually for the next decade ($32T US debt by 2028), and with the interest on the debt forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to reach $900 billion a year by 2028–the true dimensions of Trump’s 2018 tax cuts for multinational corporations, businesses, investors, and the wealthiest 1% households requires detailed understanding.
In 2019 Trump-McConnell will next try to pay for it by cutting social security, medicare, education and other programs, while the Fed will keep raising interest rates (precipitating the next recession) to try to pay for the $1T deficit in the interim.
The mainstream media keeps repeating the Trump 2018 Tax cuts amount to only $1.5 trillion. But that’s not the actual tax cuts. That’s the official projected impact on the budget deficit.
But even that official projection is grossly underestimated, since it assumes a GDP annual growth rate of 3.5% plus for every one of the next ten years with no recession in between.
Moreover, the $4T-$5T tax cuts for the rich and their businesses includes offsetting tax hikes on the middle class of $2 trillion over the next decade–eliminating exemptions, deductions, plus other hikes on middle class households. The $2T in middle class hikes begin in earnest in 2019 and accelerate after 2024–while the business/investor tax cuts grow larger over the decade.
So the actual dimension of the Trump 2018 tax cuts for investors and businesses is $4T-$5T, not $1.5T (i.e. $4-$5T minus the $2T tax hikes on middle class plus the phony growth assumptions of 3.5% GDP with no recession).
Mainstream media may be engaging in ‘fake news’ but Trump media and politicians are engaging in ‘bald-faced lying’. A plague on both their misrepresenting reality houses!
Watch and listen to my video interview (1 hr.) with ‘Smart Talk’ station host, Ed Dodson, of the Henry George Society, this past summer, not available on podcasted video.
Dr. Jack Rasmus, Ph.D Political Economy, teaches economics at St. Mary’s College in California. He is the author and producer of the various nonfiction and fictional workers, including the books The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy From Reagan to Bush, Clarity Press, October 2019. Jack is the host of the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network, and a journalist writing on economic, political and labor issues for various magazines, including European Financial Review, World Financial Review, World Review of Political Economy, ‘Z‘ magazine, and others.
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