Tax bill will not help middle class

To the Journal editor:

Trickle-down economics is a nightmare, according to an item from The Washington Post by Eugene Robinson.

According to the article, “top economic adviser Gary Cohn says the GOP tax plan is going to have ‘trickle-down’ benefits to middle-class Americans. The Republican gospel of cutting taxes and government services to the bone doesn’t lead to economic growth, it leads to crisis and decline. Just ask the people of Kansas.

“For five years, Kansas’ Republican governor, Sam Brownback, conducted the nation’s most radical exercise in trickle-down economics, a real live experiment. It ended up being a shot of poison. Growth rates lagged behind those in neighboring states and the nation as a whole. Deficits mounted to unsustainable levels and services withered.

“Republican leaders in Congress will try to ignore the Kansas fiasco or say Brownback’s implementation was flawed. But that would be unfair. All Brownback did was apply what passes for mainstream Republican orthodoxy these days: Cut taxes, eliminate regulations, shrink government, then stand back and watch as economic growth soars.”

President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, however, threaten to run Brownback’s experiment on a national scale, with predictably disastrous consequences. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney proposes amputational cuts to the social safety nets, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with bureaus such as the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.

And Trump’s “tax reform” plan proposes other cuts to slash the top rate for “pass-through” businesses basically, owner-operated firms such as Trump Organization from 39.6 to 15 percent, and he always claims that if the tax rate bill passes he will be paying more taxes.

The New York Daily (News) published this item on Warren Buffett, who is worth $80 billion, about (how) trickle-down economics is basically a lie.

“The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked in the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on,” Warren Buffett explaining this in an ABC News interview.

Contact your congressman, U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, at 202-225-4735 and have him vote no on this bad bill that is not for the middle-class American people but the rich and corporations.

Philip Pfannenstiel

Marquette