By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, April 22, 2019
Pretty much every major outlet has now noted that the
Democrats have been successful in their attempt to cast the 2017 Trump-led tax
cuts as a tax increase. Here’s the New York Times on the topic:
To a large degree, the gap between
perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and
misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad
middle-class tax increase.
Per the Times,
The messaging stuck. In December
2017, polling for The Times by SurveyMonkey showed that nearly two-thirds of
Americans — and three-quarters of Democrats — did not believe they would get a
tax cut from the new law. In this month’s poll, three-quarters of Democrats
again said they did not think they got a tax cut from the law, and the overall
share of Americans who said they had benefited rose only slightly from the 2017
expectations.
This, of course, does not comport with reality:
The Tax Policy Center estimates
that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid
more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.)
This is a problem for the Democrats.
Electorally, there is perhaps some short-term advantage
to be gained from neutralizing — or even reversing — one of Trump’s re-election
talking points. But, in the long run, the approach the Democratic party has
taken here will be a lot less useful, because, in the long run, the Democratic
party’s long-term aim is not to stick it to Donald Trump but to advance its
political agenda. By attacking the tax cuts from the right, it has made that aim much, much more difficult to achieve.
In addition to their ever-present complaints about “the
rich!” the Democrats’ attack on the 2017 tax cuts had three major prongs:
1. Taxes on the middle class were increased, and this is
bad;
2. Some wealthier Americans in higher-taxed states saw
tax increases, and this is bad;
3. Some of Trump’s tax cuts will expire in 2027, and this
is bad
The first of these attacks is an explicit, deliberate,
outright lie. The second and third are essentially correct. What all of them
have in common, however, is that they are all anti-tax arguments. This is a big problem for a Democratic party
that cannot achieve its vision for America without raising taxes and spending —
not just on “the rich,” but on the middle class, too.
Structurally, Trump’s cuts present an obstacle to the
Democratic agenda — an obstacle that, eventually, will need to be removed.
Quite how the Democrats intend to go about that from their present position is
unclear. If, as seems to have happened, Congress can broadly lower taxes and voters can still be
convinced that they were raised,
there will presumably be hell to pay if Congress actually raises them.
What, one wonders, would the messaging be? “Trump raised
taxes, which was wrong, so we are . . . raising them more?” “Rich people get
all the breaks, so we are reinstating the SALT deduction?” “Trump’s tax cuts
expire in 2027, which is bad, so we aren’t renewing them?”
Sure, the lie has worked. Congrats! But when the cuts are
extended come 2027, we’ll all know why.
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