Here they come again: Trickle-down Republicans

For decades, they've claimed tax cuts will supercharge the economy when, in fact, all they do is make the rich even richer.

Einstein is said to have quipped: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” That’s a perfect description of Republicans in Congress and Trump World plutocrats: They keep pushing tax cuts for the rich because, they’d have us believe, the money will trickle down to the provinces, creating jobs, closing the gap between rich and poor, and fueling social mobility.

They said it when Reagan was president.

They said it when W. was president.

They said it when Trump was president the first time, and they’re trying to do it again.

Republicans on Tuesday pushed through the House a sprawling budget resolution that calls for hundreds of billions in spending cuts — most likely including big cuts to Medicaid in both red and blue states — in order to fund more tax cuts that mostly favor corporations and the wealthy.

Sound familiar? It should. We’ve seen this before, and it’s about the only thing you can count on congressional Republicans to do.

Republicans and conservative think-tankers hate the term “trickle-down economics.” But that’s what it is.

Or what it’s supposed to be.

Americans in low- and moderate-income households are supposed to benefit from tax cuts for the rich and corporations because, presumably, they will invest their tax savings and create jobs and seed prosperity.

But it never works out that way.

Go back to Reagan and Reaganomics. His own budget director, David Stockman, said “supply side economics” was just a fancy term for “trickle down,” and he knew it was a fraud in the first year of the Reagan presidency.

“The hard part of the supply-side tax cut [was] dropping the top rate from 70 to 50 per cent — the rest of it is a secondary matter,” Stockman said in a revealing interview in late 1981. “The original argument was that the top bracket was too high, and that’s having the most devastating effect on the economy. Then, the general argument was that you had to bring down all the brackets. But, I mean, [the Reagan tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”

The Reagan years brought us the end of the Cold War but they also wrought massive federal budget deficits and marked the start of 40-plus years of growing income inequality.

The Reagan years were great if you were rich, and that was confirmed decades later in a 50-year study of tax cuts by the London School of Economics.

Researchers found that, instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts just helped the rich get richer.

"Based on our research, we would argue that the economic rationale for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak," said Julian Limberg, a co-author of the study and based at King's College London. "In fact, if we look back into history, the period with the highest taxes on the rich — the [post-World War II] period — was also a period with high economic growth and low unemployment."

A long study on the effect of the tax cuts enacted while George W. Bush was president found the same: High-income taxpayers benefited most from the cuts. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the top 1 percent of households “received an average tax cut of more than $570,000 between 2004-2012 (increasing their after-tax income by more than 5 percent each year). Despite promises from proponents of the tax cuts, evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”

An analysis of the Bush tax cuts showed that most of its benefits accrued to the top 1%. Millionaires saved millions in taxes.

See a pattern here?

The Trump tax cuts of 2017 mostly benefited corporations and the wealthy and the resulting budget deficits added $1.6 trillion to the national debt.

In December, with the nation facing a second Trump term, the Congressional Budget Office said extending his 2017 cuts would have no positive effect on the U.S. economy and will cost about $4 trillion over the next decade.

But, of course, the Republicans are back with the same old plan — cut spending, especially the spending that helps lower-income people (Medicaid, for example), so they can give their rich benefactors another tax cut.

It’s an insane cycle that, as I’ve demonstrated, goes back long before Trump: Republicans get majority power and cut taxes, ballooning deficits and the national debt. They claim the cuts will supercharge the economy when, in fact, all they do is make rich people richer.

Trickle-down is a myth, but Republicans, who have no good ideas and no interest in governing, keep throwing it out there. Einstein was right.