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Here now where the GOP and Fox live in a land of deficit denial and delusion [1]
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Date: 2023-01-30
To be clear, this is what the Federal Deficit has looked like for the past 23 years.
Federal Deficit from 2000-2022
As you can see in the year 2000, the deficit was Negative. The Budget was balanced, we were running a slight surplus of $131 Billion. And then what happened?
The Bush Tax cuts happened.
In two years by 2002 that $131 Billion surplus had turned again into a $370 Billion deficit — a shift of almost a half $Trillion. To be fair, over the rest of the Bush presidency, the deficit slowly shrank, mostly as the economy grew. The dot com crash which had prompted Bush to implement his tax cut eventually ended. Jobs came back and tax money flowed into the government bring the deficit down to just $160 Billion by 2007.
Then 2008 happened with the Housing Crisis and Crash. That year the deficit sprang back up to $450 Billion, and then in 2009 with massive jobs losses and emergency spending to save many companies including the entire U.S. Auto industry it skyrocketed to $1.42 Trillion.
The recovery following that crash was slow and anemic, but it did happen.
By 2015 the deficit had shrunk back down to $440 Billion which was back down to where it had been seven years earlier in 2008. That’s an improvement and deficit reduction during that period of about $990 Billion.
This is where the GOP started to mess things up.
The House had been taken back by the GOP in 2010 and after his failed attempt to become Vice President Speaker Paul Ryan used the debt ceiling threat to hammer out a “bipartisan” budget deal that included almost a half $Trillion in tax cuts.
As a result, the deficit began immediately to rise again going back up to $590 Billion by 2016 and continuing to rise each year after that.
That was during Trump’s term where yet again, the GOP passed yet another tax cut which added an estimated $2 Trillion to the debt over the next ten years. It was supposed to “trickle down.” By 2019 it was clear that It didn’t.
Two years ago, President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). At the time, the Trump administration claimed that its corporate tax cuts would increase the average household income in the United States by $4,000. But two years later, there is little indication that the tax cut is even beginning to trickle down in the ways its proponents claimed. In selling the large corporate tax cut to Congress and a skeptical American public, the Trump administration claimed that corporate tax cuts would ultimately translate into higher wages for workers. The tax cuts would trickle down to workers through a multistep process. First, slashing the corporate tax rate would increase corporations’ after-tax returns on investment, inducing them to massively boost spending on investments such as factories, equipment, and research and development. This investment boom would give the average worker more and better capital to work with, substantially increasing the overall productivity of U.S. workers. In other words, they would be able to produce more goods and services with every hour worked. And finally, U.S. workers would capture the benefits of their increased productivity by successfully bargaining for higher wages.
That simply didn't happen. Instead, corporations used their newfound extra tax money to implement stock buybacks which increased their stock dividends but didn’t improve the wages or conditions for their baseline workers by a single iota.
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