STOP THE STEAL!
I am not a fan of Donald Trump, but I can’t help being impressed by the man’s audacity. For an example, take his “stop the steal” campaign where he claims the Democrats “stole” the 2020 election. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has dismissed that allegation as “bull-sh—.“ Still almost half the nation seems to believe it. The final irony is that no one “stole” anything from Trump, but he’s stolen a lot from us.
One example is his 2017 Tax Cut Bill that authorized massive tax cuts almost all of which went to corporations and the wealthy. The Washington Post tells us that, instead of the boom Trump promised, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase the deficit by about 1.9 Trillion dollars over its 11 year life.
That’s lost revenue that might have helped President Biden finance his Build Back Better Bill, including its provisions to help poor kids get better early education and funds to combat climate change. Not one of the 50 Republican Senators voted to support the Build Back Better Bill. They claimed it was fiscally reckless without mentioning that it was the Republican 2017 Tax Act raid on the Treasury that caused the shortfall.
The charge that the Republican party prefers tax cuts to fighting climate change seems an extreme statement, but let’s look at the facts. They are set out in the book Winner Take All Politics (2010) by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The Republicans of the Eisenhower and Nixon eras were not able to directly confront the popularity of the Democratic New Deal, but things started to shift in the Reagan era. Reagan placed cutting taxes at the heart of the GOP agenda and economic message, supplanting the former emphasis of balancing the budget favored by previous Republican presidents.
In the 1990’s Newt Gingrich sounded a new Republican call – “reducing taxes was paramount—a priority to be advanced at every opportunity.” By the 2000’s the GOP tax policy became “astonishingly radical,” seeing “high end tax cuts as the solution to any problem.”
And Republican generosity was even more pronounced in tax cuts for the super-rich. Hacker and Pierson point out that the tax data for 1970-2004 showed that the top 1% of taxpayers were taxed at rates one-third lower than they used to be. The richest .01% did even better. Their taxes were reduced so dramatically that “paying” taxes increased their total wealth because the tax cuts they received exceeded their increase in taxable income. I like to think of it as Republican welfare in reverse.
The Hacker and Pierson book was published in 2010, thereby missing the final act of the tax cut revolution. President Trump’s 2017 tax reduction legislation promised to raise incomes for all by reducing taxes further on the rich. The tax breaks for rich were large and many, but the economic growth promised never appeared.
But tax cuts for the rich was not Trump’s only “steal.” He also attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election and, having failed, appears to have plans to steal the 2024 election. Let’s face up to the fact that Donald Trump is a cynical man who lies with abandon. The New York Times suggests he intends to destroy American democracy if that is his only path to power. We now know that in 2020 Trump attempted and failed to block the peaceful transfer of power to President Biden. And there are signs that he intends to use the same lawless tactics in 2024.
So far the investigation into Trump’s actions has been slowed by the unwillingness of members of the Trump team to cooperate, but still steady progress is being made on several fronts. Here is a series of quotes from the New York Times article highlighted above that give a good summary of how the investigation is proceeding:
“ The so-called green team is following the money trail connected to Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote the baseless assertion that he was the rightful winner of the election, including whether any groups defrauded contributors with false statements about widespread election fraud.”
“ The gold team is scrutinizing any plans Mr. Trump made with members of Congress to try to overturn the election and his pressure campaign on local, state and Justice Department officials to try to keep himself in power.”
“Domestic violent extremist groups, such as the QAnon movement and the militia groups, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are the focus of the purple team. A fourth, the red team, is digging into the Jan. 6 rally planners and the Stop the Steal movement.”
“As they investigate, committee members are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the formal count of the electoral votes.”
So there appears to be a good deal of smoke, but so far no fire, in large part because of the Trump team’s refusal to cooperate. And the investigators are also running against the clock because everyone recognizes that the Republicans might carry both Houses of Congress next November and shut the whole investigation down.
And that is why I am so sadly surprised to see that the public (maybe people like you) so far are paying so little attention to what I would call (at least) the political crime of the Century. Maybe people forget that Adolph Hitler was only elected one time; he never allowed a second election.