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Suggested Strategy: Fight Musk’s Attacks On Government By Focusing On Gop Tax Cuts For The Rich [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-07
There are a number of nefarious motives behind the Musk/Trump effort to slash and/or shut down numerous government programs and agencies. These include ideological objectives (e.g., the longstanding right-wing objective to shrink government) as well as personal financial gain from weakening several government regulatory functions (e.g., Musk and his companies are facing numerous current federal regulatory investigations…including by agencies he is attacking in this effort).
But most importantly, THE DOMINANT PUBLIC-FACING RATIONALE for this destruction of so many government programs is that “we can’t afford it”… that these wasteful costs lead to our huge budget deficit…and inflation…etc.
What is entirely missing from the whole debate is that the real reason for our large budget deficit is that the tax rates for billionaires and large corporations have been repeatedly slashed over the past 50 years.
During the “roaring 1950’s and early 1960’s” (the golden age for middle class America) the top income tax bracket on the highest earners was 91%, and the top corporate tax bracket was 52%. After various Republican tax cuts under Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump, the top individual tax bracket was slashed to 37% and the top corporate tax bracket to only 21% (and Trump has talked about further cutting that corporate rate to only 15%)!
It is simply a fact that those tax cuts are the central cause of our current budget deficit. Were those corporate and high-income tax rates returned to their pre-2001 levels (not to mention their pre-1980 levels), we would not only be able to afford every one of the programs Musk is attacking, we would run a budget surplus.
Bottom line: There is absolutely no need for all the human suffering that Musk and Trump are creating by their extreme attacks on government employees, programs, and agencies… if the nation pursued tax fairness instead!
Democrats need to re-focus attention on these huge tax give-aways to the rich, and take away the primary rationale that Musk/Trump are using for these attacks on government services. We should not allow the literally world's richest person to devastate our government services so that he and his billionaire cronies can get even more tax cuts.
Finally, as a bonus, educating the public about this tax fairness issue and history will also serve us well in opposing the new huge tax cuts that the GOP will soon be proposing in their budget reconciliation legislation.
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[1] Url:
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