Hello, Suckers

By now you’ve surely seen the ad. A middle-aged blue collar guy is shown with a metalworking machine shop in the background where sparks fly and fork lifts maneuver. He laments “the thousands of jobs like mine” that have been “lost to China.” Why? “Because America’s tax code is so complicated we can’t be competitive.”

Lest you mistake this for truth, let the viewer beware. It is part of the push by right-wing fat cats to pass what Republicans are calling tax reform. They claim it is a plan to create jobs. In fact, it’s the same old trickle-down tax breaks for the wealthy. They do often create jobs, for the builders of their yachts, for their portfolio managers, their Wall Street bankers, and in low wage factories in places like China, India and Mexico.

But few would vote for that beside the plutocrats. So, a propaganda campaign is necessary to motivate those who won’t benefit from such a “reform.” Thus, billionaire Trump is out pretending the Ryan tax plan will help blue collar workers like the guy in the ad. But the ad is fiction, and the plan is a con.

If you read the fine print, you will learn that the ad was paid for and contrived by the American Action Network. It promotes the interests of the monied elite, whose aim in life is to keep their millions and billions from being taxed and trickling down to anyone but their heirs.

The Action Network is run by former Nixon and George H.W. Bush henchman Fred Malek, who went on to run Marriott Hotels and Northwest Airlines. Co-conspirators on the letterhead are former Republican Senator Norm Coleman, who favored elimination of the estate tax and cutting of the capital gains tax, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an anti-tax economic advisor to George H.W. Bush and John McCain.

These front men provide a patina of conservative respectability to the con, but a look at the donors to the American Action Network tells you who’s calling the tune — The American Petroleum Institute, The American Natural Gas Alliance, The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Karl Rove’s right-wing propaganda mill, Crossroads GPS, which shares office space with American Action Network and a similar roster of donors, and the Donor’s Trust — a Dark Money front for groups like the Koch, Bradley, and Olin families who constitute a libertarian, anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax billionaires’ cabal.

Similar ads are being run by the like-minded Job Creators Network headed by Bernie Marcus, the billionaire founder of Home Depot who once demonstrated his friendliness to the working class by opposing a bill to permit unions to organize retail workers saying it would mean “the demise of a civilization,” and that any retailer who didn’t fight it “should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs.” His Job Creators Network is funded by he and three dozen other CEOs sharing the same anti-tax, anti-entitlements, anti-labor philosophy as he American Action Network’s backers.

But, of course, the goal of neither group is philosophical, but is pure self-interest. They want their businesses to be regulated less and their wealth to be taxed less. Help for the middle and working classes, good jobs at good wages, and Making American Great Again are just a part of the grifter’s patter, aimed at getting the marks (the rest of us) to favor policies that will actually do nothing to improve our lot in life, but a plenty to feather the already luxurious nests of the donors.,

Too harsh? Well, here’s what the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center makes of the tax plan these groups are backing, the one that the ads say will save the metal worker’s job and keep China at bay. According to its analysis, the Republican tax plan would cut the corporate rate from 35% to 15%, eliminate the estate tax for couples worth over $10 million, lower the capital gains tax on those whose income derives from investments, but would do nothing for our metal worker or anyone toiling like him for wages.

To help pay for these huge tax cut, however, government spending would be cut on programs and parts of the tax code that really do benefit the working and middle classes — like deductions for charitable giving, mortgage payments and state and local taxes.

The analysts conclude that the plan would make economic life worse for 84% of taxpayers. The working class would lose an average of $1,500 a year, the poor an average of $2,250. By contrast, the top 1% of taxpayers, who make $465,000 or more a year, would get a tax break worth an average of $172,000 a year, and the top one tenth of one percent — Bernie Marcus, Charles and David Koch, and the other donors behind the ad — would get an average tax break of $935,000 a year.

Good for them, but not for the rest of us. Over ten years, depending on which programs were cut to pay for the tax breaks for the wealthy, the measure would increase the national debt by between $3.5 trillion and $7.8 trillion, a bill that the kids of the blue collar guy in the ad will get stuck with.

If the Job Creators Network and the American Action Network, Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had a theme song to accompany their tax plan, it would surely be this.

In the winter, in the summer
Don’t we have fun?
Times are bum and getting bummer
Still we have fun.

There’s nothing surer
The rich get rich and the poor get poorer
In the meantime, in between time
Ain’t we got fun?

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