This piece leaves me with a thought about the selling of tax cuts. There has always been an element of fraud in the conservative sales pitch, but it has gotten worse over time 1/ nytimes.com/2018/08/18/us/…
There have been three big tax cuts since the rise of movement conservatism. The first, Reagan's, was sold with the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would pay for itself, but was actually intended to starve the beast 2/
The second, Bush II's, was in part sold the same way. But it was also sold under the pretense that it was mainly a cut for the middle class, and the White House engaged in systematic obfuscation and misrepresentation of its own policies, a corruption of analysis that was new 3/
Now comes Trump, and both earlier forms of fraud were repeated. But there's more: in the case there's a new level of outright bad faith. The architects of the Trump cut told the general public that it would all go to wages, not profits; but meanwhile 4/
They raised millions of dollar from wealthy donors, who they assured (correctly) would be the big winners. The point is that if tax cuts were passed through to wages as promised, there would be no reason for stockholders to give money in gratitude 5/
So it's been bad faith from the beginning -- but even worse faith now than before 6/
