Premature Freak Out

I love the reaction to Trump’s tax cut plan. Republicans are thrilled but mostly don’t have much to say because the plan is largely incomplete, but the liberals and Democrats have gone utterly nuts, screaming about “$2 trillion in lost revenue” and “massive enrichment for the rich” and incredible increases in federal debt.

Of course Democrats have spent the last eight years saying that federal debt didn’t matter for all sorts of rather bizarre reasons, but now suddenly a large federal debt is a disaster. What happened to change that? Oh, yes, right.

One of the arguments Democrats use is that the federal deficit has been reduced under Obama to only $600 billion, which strikes me as a pretty weak argument, only $600 billion, but whatever smoke and mirrors they want to use, the national debt increased in the last fiscal year by $1.487 trillion and that, friends, is the real current federal deficit. But Democrats don’t lie, only Republicans do. Remember that in November of 2020.

Will corporations pay less tax, as Democrats are hyperventilating about? The proposal is to cut the rate from 35% to 15% and eliminate deductions, and that’s all we know about the plan. If it turns out to be that simple, then corporations would go from paying an average of 12%, as they do now due to deductions, to 15% since the deductions would be eliminated. Is that what will happen? Maybe, or maybe not. Let’s not start screaming until we know.

Will the rich be further enriched by elimination of the alternative minimum tax? Of course not. The AMT is in place to assure than too many deductions do not result in an unfairly low actual tax, and deductions will have been eliminated, so the AMT is simply no longer needed.

The number of brackets will be reduced to three, but no income ranges have been proposed for those brackets, so there is simply no way possible to calculate the revenue that will be produced by the new plan. It may be fine, with a whole host of deductions eliminated, or it may be a disaster. We don’t know, and here too we should wait to start screaming until we know what we are screaming about.

The party of the left continues to act like children, and not very bright children at that.