President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on December 22, 2017, displaying his signature on the Republican tax overhaul package.Mother Jones illustration; Evan Vucci/AP
As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
President Donald Trump was lying profusely about his administration’s most notable achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), even as he sat down to sign the bill into law in 2017, a few days before Christmas.
“As you know, we had the largest tax cuts in our history just approved,” he remarked at the “rush-job” Oval Office signing ceremony, from which the usual gaggle of fawning Republican legislators was excluded—the souvenir pens were instead offered to the lucky few reporters on hand. “This is bigger than, actually, President Reagan’s.”
Uh, not even close—though it was the biggest corporate cut. Thanks to his tax bill, Trump went on, corporate America was already “making tremendous investments. That means jobs; it means a lot of things. And we’re very happy. So that’s AT&T, Boeing, Sinclair, Wells Fargo, Comcast, and now many other companies.”
The rich are feasting on America’s economic pie. Republican tax cuts have set them on a steep upward wealth trajectory, far and away from the “little people.”
The executives sure were happy. The legislation slashed corporate income taxes dramatically, from 35 percent to 21 percent. Not surprising, given that, according to the nonprofit Public Citizen, more than 7,000 lobbyists—on behalf of a who’s who of Corporate America—helped hammer out the bill’s details. That’s 13 lobbyists per lawmaker.
And what did these joyful companies do with their windfall? Build new factories? Hire more workers? Raise wages? Stimulate economic growth? There was some of that, sure. But the cuts came “nowhere close to paying for themselves,” the New York Times later reported, and have added more than $100 billion a year to the deficit.
Just about every Republican president since Reagan has relied on the same debunked theory to advance tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans. It’s called supply-side (or “trickle-down”) economics. The idea is that if we give rich folks more money, they’ll invest, build companies, and create good jobs. The economic benefits will then trickle down to what the late New York heiress Leona Helmsley—whom the press nicknamed “Queen of Mean”—allegedly called the “little people.” (That fun fact emerged during testimony at her 1989 trial for tax evasion—where she was found guilty. Helmsley died in 2007, famously leaving $12 million to Trouble, her pampered little dog, but........