Paws or Claws: against Reaganomics

Dani Gonzalez, Editorial and Opinion Editor

In the fiscal year 1982 President Ronald Reagan signed a tax bill that put forth a 30 percent tax cut concentrated on the wealthy.  The idea was they would invest money saved from taxes into their business and create more jobs lower down.  This later became known as the “trickle-down economics” or more commonly Reaganomics.

The basic concept is to cut taxes on corporations and the rich, who will put this extra money back into their companies, creating more jobs and money for the lower classes, so they can put this money back into the corporations in exchange for goods and services.

President Trump has a similar plan as Reagan.  Hillary Clinton even nicknamed it “trumped up trickle-down” during the 2016 election.  He has failed to take into account the historic failure of the plan.

In the 80’s America entered into a recession but the value of the American dollar went up.  The economy stabilized and showed national growth but this short lived boom left a mess for future generations to clean up.  President Reagan tripled the national debt and cut important programs like social security.

Trump cut the taxes on businesses by 15 percent, raised taxes on the bottom bracket by two percent, and cut taxes on the highest bracket by 4.6 percent.

He also eliminated personal deductions and secondary standard deductions on the bottom 10 percent.  Though his elimination of the estate tax or “death tax” is being praised, the tax only effected inheritance totaling $5.49 million or more.

President Trump’s plan only benefits the wealthy, as much as the GOP have tried to deny it. The bottom 95 percentile after-tax incomes increase between 0.5 and 1.2 percent while the top 1 percent would see an increase of 8.5 percent.

If congress passes this bill, America’s deficit is estimated to go up 2.4 trillion dollars after the first decade.  Trump wants to run America like a business, but America is not a business, it is a nation with living people who are struggling to make ends meet.  The CEOs of America cannot sit pretty like the CEO of Walmart while the working class dies.