Why Republicans Love to Offer You Tax Cuts

A basic but underappreciated explanation.

The all-cherry economic diet. (Photo: Getty)

Sometimes I get the urge to make a point about a very basic aspect of America’s political landscape. “This is too basic to write a piece about,” one voice in my head tells me. But then there is the other voice in my head, asking “If it’s so basic then why the hell is it an affliction that has plagued our political system for hundreds of years despite being a big scam?” Which is a fair point, you know? So today I am going to write a modest piece about something that is familiar, but also something that perhaps calls for a little clarification, so that we may try to proceed with dismantling it in the most effective manner.

Republicans love tax cuts. Stereotypically, progressives offer big plans for government services to be built and Republicans offer to take taxes away. Donald Trump is like what would happen if you regressed the typical Republican to the age of five and gave him a bunch of speed and then told him to unveil his economic policy. He has just been running around offering tax cuts to any damn group that happens to be in front of him. Service workers? No tax on tips! Salaried workers? No tax on overtime! Old person? No taxes on Social Security! Active duty military? No tax! Veteran? No tax! Police or firefighter? No tax! He has devolved into a drunken crank leaning out his car window and swinging a bat labeled “NO TAX” at each passing mailbox. Bemused economists have calculated that Trump’s plans would exempt more than 90 million Americans from taxes, costing the government trillions of dollars. Trump claims the money would all be replaced by tariffs, which is a little like saying you are going to quit your job but replace all your income by charging your friends an entry fee to come into your apartment. It probably won’t work out the way you imagine.

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Of course, “doing the math” is not a thing that weighs heavily on the minds of most Trump voters. (Nothing I write should be construed to mean that Democratic voters, who have their own forms of magical thinking, are immune from any of this. We’re just focusing on one thing at a time here.) But on taxes, as in most things, Trump is just a more garish version of the Standard Issue Republican, a version less concerned with covering up what he really means. Right wingers loved touting tax cuts as the solution to all economic woes long before Trump, and they will still be doing so long after Trump’s meatloaf-encrusted arteries finally put him in the ground. Why?

Most obviously, the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of the rich and tax cuts help the rich. I think everyone who has thought about it for two seconds already understands this. Tax cuts—along with government contracts for businesses—are the most straightforward return on politics-as-investment. Wealthy people can spend a few million dollars on political donations and be rewarded with many times that amount in tax cuts when their favored candidates take power. Consider the fact that the price tag of a US Senate campaign is in the tens of millions and an entire presidential campaign is something like a billion dollars and you can see how attractive an investment political donations are for people whose wealth is in the nine or ten or eleven figure range. Shaving, say, ten percent off your annual taxes, or, even better, preventing something like a wealth tax from being imposed, will offer a billionaire a far better return on his investment in politics than any investment in the stock market ever could. Not even close!

Trump’s first term tax cut plan is illustrative of the trick of all tax cuts. “Households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).” Trump’s current tax proposals are even worse: “If these proposals were in effect in 2026, the richest 1 percent would receive an average tax cut of about $36,300 and the next richest 4 percent would receive an average tax cut of about $7,200. All other groups would see a tax increase with the hike on the middle 20 percent at about $1,500 and the increase on the lowest-income 20 percent of Americans at about $800,” says the ITEP. Regular people get a little money back and that sounds nice as long as they don’t think about how much money rich people are getting back. Getting regular people to swallow the idea that tax cuts are “fair” is one of the greatest successes of right wing economic propaganda. It’s all very “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.” The need to maintain that myth is the fuel that rustles up the funding for a huge amount of the right wing media apparatus.

Patron saint of assholes.

I’m not going to dwell on that motivation for Republican tax cuts, because if you are reading this publication you probably figured that out a long time ago. The point I want to make here is about the other main motivation for Republicans to offer everyone tax cuts—one that I think is somewhat less appreciated.

Once you understand the Republican Party not as some sort of genuine conservative political project but rather as an unwieldy machine for serving the interests of capital, it all makes more sense. There is an entire underlying belief among the true clientele of right wing political parties that government spending is bad because it comes out of their pockets and goes into the pockets of other people. For those who are already rich, there is no need for public services, public schools, public health programs, etcetera, because if you are rich you can buy all those things on the private market. Distilled capitalist logic tells the rich that the only government functions that benefit them are those that serve to protect capital, meaning law and order and military spending and associated measures necessary to enable rich people to maintain their wealth. All other government spending is seen as a straightforward tax on the rich for the benefit of the less rich. This view is at the heart of all “small government” beliefs. It gets presented as, like, cowboys who want to roam free, but it is really “rich private school parents who don’t want to pay for books for the poors.” This is not wholly rational—patient liberals are always making the “enlightened capitalism” argument, that the rich should be generous so society doesn’t fall apart around them—but there exists in this country a hefty base of wealth that believes completely in unenlightened capitalism, a zero-sum game which they have won.

All of that is not a seductive political message to the majority of voters, who are not rich, and whose votes are needed by the rich if they want their preferred party to win. So here is where the affinity for tax cuts come in. It’s not just that tax cuts save the rich money personally. It’s not just that tax cuts are a superficially appealing thing to low-information voters who just see it as a few extra bucks in their pockets. It is that tax cuts are a way of offering voters the illusion of government benefits without requiring any contribution from rich people. They are offered as a replacement for government programs that would require funding that would ultimately have to come from people with the most money who can pay the most taxes. The basic Republican economic proposition is not “the government will be helpful to you, and also we will cut your taxes”; it is “we will cut your taxes instead of making the government helpful to you.” This proposal is great for those who do not need government assistance in the first place. It is awful for those who do. The art of Republican rhetoric, therefore, is to cover up the fact that tax cuts are not an act of giving you more money but rather an act of giving you less of everything else.

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Please meditate on the contrast between “I will build good schools, and good childhood nutrition programs, and affordable housing, and accessible higher education, and I will pass regulations to ensure a clean environment, and I will stop businesses from exploiting workers, and I will pass laws to enable strong unions to raise your wages, and I will raise the minimum wage, and I will provide public health care, and adequate Social Security, and I will do all of this in exchange for a very modest portion of your income, because we will be taking most of the money for it from very rich people, who can easily afford it,” and, “Hey wouldn’t ya like a few bucks more in your paycheck? Sounds nice, right? [DISCLAIMER READ REALLY FAST: But none of that other stuff.]” Those are the two visions on offer.

Republicans love to campaign on promises of tax cuts in lieu of everything else. What is presented to voters as “keeping the greedy government out of your pocket and letting you take home more in your paycheck” is in fact primarily an act of dismantling the funding for the parts of government that do not protect the interests of capital. They are the political equivalent of someone chopping your house to pieces with an axe and then offering the remains back to you under a sign that says, “Free Firewood!” This is the facet of the tax cut scam that it is necessary to make the public appreciate. History shows that plenty of regular people are happy to vote to take their own little tax cut even if they know that rich people will get back more than them. That willingness, though, depends on regular people remaining unclear on the fact that tax cuts are not the cherry on top of a sundae at the end of a hearty meal; they are the offer of a cherry instead of a hearty meal.

Yes, all of this is rooted in greed. Or, more neutrally stated, it is rooted in the natural incentive that capitalism creates for wealth to protect itself and serve its own interests. But recognizing the sleight of hand inherent in the way that tax cuts are wielded as a political weapon is an important part of pushing back on the bullshit.

Capital, by the way, is agnostic on party labels. All it wants is the results. The Democratic Party is not immune from sliding into this trap, if capital finds it to be a more hospitable home for its program. Beware Democrats who fall in love with “market solutions” and “public-private partnerships” and other code words that may indicate the onset of an infection of Right Wing Economics. Next thing you know they’ll be offering you tax cuts and not a damn thing else. Stay vigilant out there.

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More

• Other Very Basic Explanations of Political Things: Look: Republicans Do Not Want Unions to Exist; How the “Working Class Republican” Scam Works; How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself.

• I have a piece in In These Times this week about the underlying and little-discussed problem facing unions in this election—namely, the fact that four years of a very pro-union president did not stop the decline of union density, and we need to stop acting like elections are going to solve what is in fact a problem rooted in a lack of organizing. I also appeared on Ana Marie Cox’s podcast to talk about labor and the election. Good podcast! Check it out.

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