J.C. Moore Online

Current Events from a Science Perspective

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act (TJCA) really did a job on the American people. The results were predictable. A similar tax cut in Kansas in 2012 was a disaster for Kansas. It benefited the rich, led to a stagnant economy, took money from infrastructure and schools, and put Kansas far in debt. States cannot run a deficit, so Kansas finally had to make up for it in 2017 with the largest tax increase in Kansas history.  

The TJCA was based on the trickle-down theory which, as experience has shown, increases public debt and makes the wealthy wealthier – at the expense of the middle class and low wage earners. The CBO estimated that the TJCA would increase the national debt by almost $1.9 trillion over the next 10 years. It cut the corporate tax rate from 39% to 21% and allowed companies to bring their intellectual assets (GILTI) back to the United States at an even lower tax rate. Those who profited the most were the wealthy and corporations, as it gave permanent tax cuts to corporate profits, investment income, inheritance taxes, estate taxes, and preferential tax treatment to pass-through income*. Some banks, for instance, will pay far less than the 21%. Some of the tax cuts went to the middle class, but they will sunset in 2025 while the tax breaks for businesses and corporations do not sunset.

What is better than lobbying? It is electing Legislators who the large corporations can depend on to cut their taxes. For Republicans, adding to the national debt has always been anathema. Sadly, it was a Republican President and Legislature who passed the TJCA. The chart above lists some of the corporations who donated heavily to Republicans who they could depend on to vote to cut their taxes. It also lists the amount they gained from the tax cuts. Those corporations received about a 6000% return on their investments in electing compliant politicians. Not bad, especially when your bank pays you about 2%. Not only that, but the New York Times reported that there were 55 very profitable companies, such as Nike, FedEx, and Duke Energy, that paid no taxes at all last year. Considering subsidies, some of them had an effective tax rate of as much as a -50%.

Also, the US subsidizes oil and gas companies so that investors never lose. Every year, the U.S. federal and state governments pour around $20.5 billion in subsidies into the oil and gas industry. New research, published in Environmental Research Letters, puts a value on the effect that the16 tax breaks and exemptions will have on the 1,000 U.S. oil and gas fields projected to be built before 2030. The paper found that if fossil fuel prices stay high, most of the subsidies — 96 % in oil, 87% in gas— will go directly to the pockets of investors as profit. And if prices go down, these subsidies will help 60% and 74% percent, respectively, of new oil and gas fields to remain profitable.

So there you have it. If you’re wondering why you pay so much in taxes yet receive so little back, it is because your state and federal governments give away so much money to help the wealthy and profitable companies become wealthier and more profitable. Please consider that when you vote.

*A recent study by Treasury economists found that the top 1% of Americans by income have reaped nearly 60% of the billions in tax savings created by the pass-through provision. And much of that went to the top 0.1%. 

In his internationally renowned work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,  Thomas Piketty says that extreme economic inequality can only be sustained by “apparatuses of justification.”  He states, “ The existence of such “apparatuses” can hardly be disputed; the notion that wealth rightly belongs to those who possess it, no matter the means by which they acquired it or the needs of others around the world, is certainly well within the mainstream of contemporary thought, especially in North America and Europe. Ideas such as this did not, however, permeate contemporary culture on their own. They are derived, developed, and distributed by corporations, government offices, “independent” think-tanks, etc.” Two apparatuses of justification that immediately came to mind are trickle-down theory and the lies created by the Cornwall Alliance.

The trickle-down theory claims that the best way to promote economic prosperity for everyone is to give tax breaks to large corporations and those already wealthy. The idea this promotes is that they will create jobs and provide opportunities for those less well off. It was tried on a large scale in the United States under Reagan, Bush ll, and Trump. Over the years, many poor and middle class citizens have voted for politicians advocating trickle down theory. It is a flawed theory, wealth actually flows upward and pools at the top.  Meanwhile, after 40 years, they are still waiting for their share of the wealth trickle-down. The wealthy have become wealthier, the poor poorer, and the economic inequality in the United States has grown to unacceptable levels, as shown in the graph below.

After all that time, many Americans still do not realize how they have been fooled, as the chart below shows.

The Cornwall Alliance was originally started to help the poorer countries adapt to climate change. When E. Calvin Beisner took over as its spokesman, he interpreted that to mean that the Third World countries needed to use more fossil fuels. Never mind that they do not have the infrastructure or wealth to acquire and use them. Under his leadership, the Cornwall Alliance has become funded by dark money, most of which can be traced to fossil fuel companies. Who else? Beisner created the Green Dragon Monster, which he uses to represent environmentalists who want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. He uses “climate alarmist” to represent the 99.5% of climate scientists who have shown that climate change is caused by man’s activity, and “climate doomsayer’ for those who agree with scientists that global warming is harming the Earth.

Beisner uses religious arguments to reach out to conservative Christians and solicit donations. There is little evidence that the money goes to the poor, being used mostly to pay himself to distribute his message. He interprets, “God giving man dominion over the earth ”, Genesis 1:26-28, to mean that God has given man the right to exploit nature as he pleases. Apparently, he has very little understanding of ecology. Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si, says that “climate change is real and mainly a result of human activity.” “The problem is urgent. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.” Beisner claims that Pope Francis was just wrong, probably news to most Catholics.

Beisner’s position is even at odds with his own Presbyterian faith. The Presbyterian Church is now recommending divestment from fossil fuels and it was one of the first churches to address global warming. The Presbyterian Church first noted its “serious concern over global warming at the 1990 General Assembly, when it warned that the global atmospheric warming trend (the greenhouse effect) represents one of the most serious global environmental challenges to the health, security, and stability of human life and natural ecosystems’’.

There are many other examples of apparatuses of justification. You may recognize them by their tendency to label their opponents with unflattering terms; by their opposition to scientific research; by their derision of mainstream religious leaders; and, by their distortion of the truth. Ask yourself, “Who profits from their message?”, and if it is a special interest group, recognize it for what it is. And above all else, vote for the political candidates opposed to those special interest groups.

© 2021 – J.C. Moore, All rights reserved.

Aristotle, when comparing forms of government, pointed out some of the problems in a democracy. When the poor gain too much power, they will enrich themselves out of the public treasury and the nation will become poor. If the wealthy gain too much power, then the nation will become an oligarchy and the poor will suffer. Oligarchs insist that citizens be treated differently based on wealth, and they argue that wealth is a sign of virtue and merit, and that the poor are poor because they lack those qualities.  Aristotle concluded that: “A large middle class is absolutely essential for a stable and well-run government because the middle class do not covet rule, are not envious, foster friendship because of their similarity, and can act as neutral arbitrators between the rich and the poor.” –  Aristotle’s Politics

There is ample evidence that the middle class in United States has declined sharply, while the country has moved toward oligarchy, allowing the wealthy to enrich themselves at the expense of the middle class, the poor, and also the nation. The chart below shows how the income is now divided in the United States, with the top 1% owning 38% of the wealth and the top 20% owning 82% of the wealth. Not only is the distribution of wealth much worse than what people consider ideal, it is even much worse than what they think it is.

According to Senator Bernie Sanders:

“While the very rich get richer, the middle class continues to disappear and we now have more people living in poverty than ever before.  Despite huge increases in technology and productivity, tens of millions of workers are finding it harder to feed their families, pay for health care, send their kids to college or put aside savings for retirement.” In recent years,  95% of all new income has gone  to the top 1%, we have seen a huge increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires. While the average American is increasingly unrepresented in  the political process, the very wealthy are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to justify their wealth and to convince voters to elect candidates who will further their interests.”

The  wealthy consider the money an investment which has paid off handsomely. It has bought tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies. Many wealthy Americans are even reaping the lions share of many federal programs that were intended to help the poor and disadvantaged. 

Trickle Down economics  is behind the redistribution of wealth that began during the 1980’s, as shown in the chart at the right. When President Reagan came into office in 1980 the top tax rate was 60%, a rate which the wealthy thought was much too high. Arthur Laffer developed the supply side arguments that led to taxes being cut using the Laffer Curve . Mr. Laffer convinced the Reagan Administration that lowering the tax rate would give the job creators more money to invest, which would stimulate the economy and lead to greater tax revenue. Reagan cut the top tax rate to 28%, which put more money in the hands of the wealthy, but little of it trickled down. The economy grew at 3.5%, a lower growth rate than when tax rates were higher, the wealthy got wealthier,  and the national debt almost tripled. The graph at the right shows a narrowing of the income gap when the Clinton administration raised taxes and a widening gap after the 2003 tax cuts.  

Following Laffer’s trickle down theory put the U.S. on a slow spiral into debt,  austerity, and income inequality. Tax rates are now clearly too low  and, according to the Laffer curve, raising taxes should stimulate the economy. Certainly, raising taxes sufficiently would end our national debt problems and the shameless practice of using the national debt for political purposes. However, Congress thinks the problem is that we have not cut taxes enough, and Paul Ryan has proposed a Congressional budget that would further decrease tax rates. Paul Ryan has proposed  reducing the top tax rate to 25%. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated Ryan’s budget would add $5.7 trillion to the deficit over the next decade and would increase the after-tax income of the top 1% of citizens by 18%.  His budget is a case of ideology trumping practical economics.

 Jobs: Congressman Ryan is still working under the assumption that trickle down economics works, and he argues that further tax cuts would create jobs. That argument is discredited by Nick Hanauer, a billionaire who has helped start many companies. He explained on Ted.com that the rich aren’t the job creators, as job creation now comes from demand, and the demand would come from a large  numbers of middle class consumers, a person making 1000 times as much as the average citizen does not buy 1000 times as much stuff. When someone calls themselves “job creators”‘, they are making a claim as Aristotle pointed out, on their virtue – the status and privileges they think they deserve.  Mr. Hanauer says the 15% taxes that capitalists pay on interest, dividends, and capitol gains and the 35% the ordinary citizen pays on their job earnings is hard to justify. He points out that of the inequality has been justified by the fallacy that ” as taxes on the rich go up, job creation will go down”. His data shows the opposite to be true. He concludes that demand grows the economy, and taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is the best thing we can do for the middle class, the poor, and for the rich as well.

The IMF: Clearly, there are both sound economic and moral reasons that countries need to act for the common good by correcting income inequality. While the Pope acts to change hearts, the countries’ leaders need to act to make fairer economic policies, raise taxes, and cut out loopholes. The Guardian of financial orthodoxy, the International Monetary Fund, typically calls for nations in difficulty to slash public spending to reduce their deficits. But in this year’s Fiscal Monitor report, subtitled “Taxing Times”, the Fund advanced the idea of “taxing the highest-income people and their assets to reinforce the legitimacy of spending cuts and the fight against growing income inequalities.” There is both a moral and an economic imperative to do so.

(c) 2014 J.C. Moore