Trump made history: introducing tax cuts made him LESS popular

Politicians love introducing tax-cuts, because they're reliable vote-getters, even if they're structured to blow up later by giving massive breaks to the super-rich and more modest breaks to middle-class voters, resulting in mounting deficits and eventual service cuts.

But Trump has managed the impossible: he signed trillions of dollars of tax-cuts into law and lost in the polls as a result.

Trump managed this feat by handing middle-class and poor people tax bills instead of refunds, while cutting in a tiny number of super-rich people for unbelievably large breaks (and the 99% will get stiffed even harder in 2027, when their taxes go up again).

Bill Black proposes a tantalizing thought-experiment: what if Trump had spread the tax breaks around, giving, say, $5,000 to every household with a combined income of less than $75,000? What if he tailored the breaks to his base, farmers, old people, blue-collar workers (while stiffing poor people)?

Not only would this have stimulated the everloving fuck out of the US economy -- wage stagnation and austerity has left the US with tons of underutilized labor and plant that could churn out tons of goods for these people to buy without any inflation to speak of -- but the Democratic leadership would have hated it, because Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of the "paygo" crowd are crazy deficit hawks who don't want any unfunded liabilities in federal budgets.

The result would have been a huge PR win for Trump and a massive PR hit for the Democratic establishment. Read the rest