You say that we "can't afford" education, jobs training and healthcare for our own people??? Get real.The US government just spent $5.6 TRILLION on destroying other nations, and another TRILLION giving the mega-rich a permanent tax cut. Your tax cut btw is temporary [with full sourcing]
Illustration: Village Voice, Diary of an Extrovert
My Sources On My Statement --
The post-9/11 US spending on war is already at $5.6 trillion according to the heavily-researched November, 2017 Cost of War study published by Brown University.
The Trump tax plan meanwhile cost the US $1.5 trillion in federal income. According to the Tax Policy Center, federal revenues "will fall by $6.2 trillion over the first decade before accounting for added interest costs and macroeconomic effects. Including those factors, the federal debt would rise by at least$7.0 trillion over the first decade and by at least $20.7 trillion by 2036." So very, very, very conservatively speaking, I said "another trillion giving the mega-rich a tax cut".
Eighty percent of that overall tax cut goes to global corporations making mega-billions and to their owners. According to a Forbes analysis of the study, "In 2027, TPC projects, 80% of the dollar value of the tax cut would go to the 1% and 40% of the benefit to the 0.1%. Meanwhile, 60% of families earning $150,000 to $300,000 and nearly 30% of those earning $50,000 to $150,000 would pay more under the Trump plan than under current law."
"As a group, those in the 80th to 95th income percentile would see small net tax increases." The individual Trump tax cut of each of us within the 95% is moreover temporary, getting you past the next presidential term. Afterward tax will be higher than today.
It does not trickle down. A new analysis of all Fortune 500 companies reported in Newsweek in fact "found only 4.3 percent of workers will receive a one-time bonus or wage increase tied to the business tax cuts, while businesses received nine times more in cuts than what they passed on to their workers, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, a political advocacy group devoted to tax reform. The analysis also found that companies spent 37 times as much on stock buybacks than they did on bonuses and increased wages for workers."
Meanwhile, you lose government services "to pay for it."
YET ALL ALONG THERE IS AS MUCH MONEY AS THE GOVERNMENT OPTS TO SAY THAT THERE IS
Money is not magic, but it is an illusion, printed by the US treasury from an inexhaustible supply of paper and ink, its value manipulated by the Federal Reserve. The Fed for example dealt with the hundreds of billions lost by inept or criminal global bank management in 2007, which had sent the entire world into a depression...by deciding to "forgive" the global banks debt, erase it from the books!
To do that, the Treasury printed trillions of new US dollars, calling it "quantitative easing", and then the Fed pumped into the global banking economy, erasing the banks' debt.
Note that the Fed, Congress or a president could just as easily have erased student debt or forced the banks to pass along the rescue to homeowners and small businesses, for example erasing interest from mortgages on primary residences, jump-starting the Main Street economy, saving million of families their homes. Instead -- according to President Barack Obama himself -- 95% of the famed Obama recovery went to the uber-wealthy, the top 1%, only.
Note moreover that the increase in the number of dollars was inflationary, making each dollar worth less, wiping out the tiny gains in wage levels. Now Trump quits taxing the billionaires and their pet global corporations. Yet all nations including ours keep subsidizing those financiers and globals, giving the fossil fuel industry alone $10 million a minute.
That's all day every day, according to the IMF! Beginning with NAFTA, this gigantic Clinton/Bush /Obama /Trump transfer of wealth -- from ordinary individuals, from our nation, to global corporations -- masquerades as a kindness to you, while the nation crumbles.