John Lawrence, Author of Domeocracy
Mr. Lawrence tells us to “follow the money,” i.e., taxes not paid!
“Despite his being guilty of sexual abuse, cheating taxpayers, paying off porn actresses to swing the 2016 election, stiffing legions of employees and contractors, multiple bankruptcy declarations and uncontested violation of at least seven of the Ten Commandments, conservative bigwigs are nonetheless supporting Donald Trump’s re-election campaign with enormous amounts of money. They are willing to entrust the presidency to a man none of them would hire as a filing clerk; in fact, they wouldn’t trust him with the key to the filing cabinet.
“Why would they do that? It is taken for granted that the desire to populate the U.S. Supreme Court with pro-business Clarence Thomas cronies provides them with the singular justification for overlooking Trump’s manifest flaws, any one of which would be (and has been) fatal to any other candidate.
“But there is a more immediate explanation behind big rollers like Timothy Mellon (a racist-spouting grandson of 1920s Republican Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was widely blamed for ignoring the imminent Depression in 1929) shelling out tens of millions of dollars for a candidate they must know is not only stupid and cynical, but dangerous. Trump is a good investment.
“One of the first (and certainly most consequential) decisions of whoever wins the 2024 election will be whether to extend all or a portion of the 2017 Trump tax cuts that have enhanced the wealth of the obscenely rich and added trillions of dollars to the national debt. Trump has promised to extend the cuts; Biden has promised to repeal them, at least those for the ultra-rich. Therein lies the only distinction between the candidates that matters to America’s plutocracy.
“The imminent expiration of the Trump cuts recalls the 2011 cutoff for the egregiously unfair tax cuts approved by George W. Bush and his Republican Congress in 2011. Like the Trump cuts, Republicans fudged the cost of those tax cuts in two ways: First, they abandoned the Democrats’ “Pay As You Go” rules that would have required offsetting the cost of the tax cut instead of pretending (against all evidence and the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis) that they (like Reagan’s cuts in the 1980s) would magically pay for themselves. Second, the tax cut laws were written so that they would end after ten years. Had those cuts been continued beyond a decade, the original laws could not have been approved because in the 11th year, they would have scored, for budget purposes, as the big deficit creators they were.
“So instead, Republicans pretended the laws would simply disappear after the 10th year, which in effect meant taxes would go up in the 11th year for virtually every American. Republicans were betting that even if they were not in control of the White House or Congress in the 11th year, whoever was would have no choice but to continue the cuts rather than face public disapprobation for “raising taxes.”
“In 2011, President Obama and Congress (a Democratic Senate and Republican House) blinked when confronted with this so-called “fiscal cliff” that spelled across-the-board termination of the tax cuts. Facing an imminent election, neither party wanted the responsibility for “raising” taxes, and so a one-year extension was agreed to. Following the 2012 election in which the same party configuration existed, Obama and Democrats forced Republicans to abandon the tax cut for upper-income Americans by threatening to let the middle-income cuts also expire, which they could then blame on Republicans wishing to protect tax cuts for the rich. However, Obama caved into a Republican demand to weaken the estate tax applied to multi-millionaires (stigmatized by Republicans as the “death tax,” which they had preferred to repeal altogether) that showered hundreds of billions of dollars on the very same elite who lost their tax cut. (Obama even agreed to permanently index the estate tax change to inflation, meaning the super-rich who mainly benefit will continue to shield the inheritances that benefit their spawn like Timothy Mellon.)
“Trump’s tax cut also expires after 10 years, costing taxpayers an estimated $4 trillion with the richest 1% pocketing nearly 24% of the cuts while the bottom 60% of taxpayers received about 14%. While the distribution to middle-income taxpayers has been paltry, the fact is that tens of millions of Americans got something from those cuts, and you can count on there being enormous reluctance in Congress, whoever is in charge in 2025, to allow them to expire in their entirety; that means additional trillions of dollars of debt, as always occurs when Republicans enact massive deficit-producing tax cuts and Democrats lack the courage to insist on their repeal (thus reinforcing Republicans’ demand for slashing domestic spending to compensate for the deficits exacerbated by the tax cuts).
“Moreover, if Republicans end up with Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, they can extend the 2017 cuts for another decade through the budgetary “reconciliation” process that would prevent Democrats like Wyden from filibustering the extension. That is the very same parliamentary legerdemain used to enact the Trump cuts in the first place (and the one by which they came within a single vote of repealing the Affordable Care Act)!
“Billionaires will continue to pour money into the Trump campaign now that he is the certain nominee because what really matters to them is getting those 2017 tax cuts extended for themselves. They couldn’t care less about the impact on the deficit or whether the average taxpayer gets a quarter in the process any more than they care about a border wall or the survivability of Ukraine. It’s all about the bucks with them; it always is.”
- John Lawrence worked on Capitol Hill for 38 years, including serving as Chief of Staff for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Learn more at Emily Heil’s special for The Washington Post: Capitol Hill aide, John Lawrence, retiring after 38 years. John Lawrence’s book, the Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership 2005-2010 is scheduled for a September release in paperback; you can pre-order it now !