The Trump Tax Cuts Have Been VERY GOOD for America's Richest Families. How About You?

 Yes this is your President and his family.  Just like yours, yes? 

Check out David Cay Johnston's report on how the Trump tax cut made the rich richer and the rest of us...not so much:

The Super-Rich—You Know, People Like The Trumps —Are Raking In Billions

Our Analysis of IRS Data Shows His Presidency Has Been Very Good for the Richest Americans.

By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief

David Cay Johnston

If you are in the 99% here is how well you are faring under Trump policies compared to the 1%: for each dollar of increased income that you earned in 2018, each One-Percenter got $88 more income.

Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01% of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household. Let’s call them the Platinum-Premiere-Point-Zero-One-Percenters

The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich.

Ponder that.

For each additional dollar you earned in 2018 compared to 2016, each of the Platinum-Premiere crowd got an additional $2,215.

The bottom line: with Trump as president it’s good to be rich.

The average Platinum-Premiere American enjoyed is $7.1 million more income under Trump in 2018 than in 2016, the last year that Barack Obama was president. For the Ninety-Nine-Percenters, in contrast, average income rose just $3,360 with most of that gain among those making $200,000 to $500,000.

Not Widely Reported

One-Percenters Donald and Melania Trump in their Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

You haven’t heard these numbers on the nightly news or read them in your morning newspaper because no one announced them. I distilled them from an official government report known as IRS Table 1.4, a task I’ve repeated annually for a quarter-century.

At DCReport we don’t attend press conferences, we don’t rewrite press releases and we don’t depend on access to officials because other journalists do that just fine. Instead, we scour the public record for news that oozes, news that no one announced.

Last week I reported my preliminary analysis of Table 1.4, showing that 57% of American households were better off under Obama. That contradicted Trump’s naked claim, repeated uncritically and often in news reports, that he created the best economy ever until the coronavirus pandemic.

This week’s focus is on the big changes in how the American income pie is being divvied up.

More for the Top

The rich and super-rich are enjoying a bigger slice of the American income pie.

On the other hand, this is a truly awful time to be poor. Trump policies are narrowing the pockets of the poor, the third of Americans make less than $25,000. In 2018 their average income was just $12,600, a dollar a day less than in 2016.

Trump & Co. has numerous plans afoot to reduce incomes of the poor even more and take away government benefits, as we have been documenting at DCReport.

Less for the Bottom

The poor saw their slice of the national income pie shrink by 1 percentage point from 6.5% to 5.5%. In a mirror image of that change, the super-rich saw their share of income pie grow by the same 1 percentage point, from 4.5% to 5.7% of all income.

That means the richest 22,122 households now collectively enjoy more income than the poorest 50 million households.

What these huge disparities make clear is that the sum of all Trump policies not only makes the poor worse off, but their losses are transformed into the gains of the super-rich.

The economic growth that began in early 2010 when Obama was president continued under Trump, albeit at a slower pace as DCReport showed last year. Pre-pandemic Trump underperformed Reagan, Clinton, Carter and the last six years of Obama, who inherited the worst economy in almost a century.

The continuing upward trajectory for the economy meant that overall Americans made more money in 2018 than in 2016 even after adjusting for inflation of 4.1% over two years. Total income grew by almost $1 trillion to $11.6 trillion.

Half-Trillion for the One-Percenters

Almost half of the increase went to the 1%. They enjoyed $487 billion more money. The rest of America, a group 99 times larger, divvied up $511 billion.

The big winners, though, were the super-rich, the $10 million-plus crowd. That group consists of just one in every 7,000 taxpayers yet they captured every sixth dollar of increased national income, a total gain of $157 billion.

So, if you are among the 152 million American taxpayers in the 99% ask yourself whether Trump administration policies are good for you. Do you want a government of the rich, by the rich and overwhelmingly for the rich? Or would you prefer a government that benefits all Americans?

And see what you can do to make sure more Americans know about the big shifts in the way America’s income pie is being sliced up.

Featured image: One-Percenters Donald and Melania Trump with their son Barron in their Manhattan penthouse in 2010.

https://www.dcreport.org/2020/09/15/the-super-rich-you-know-people-like-the-tumps-are-raking-in-billions/

What Veterans Know About the Failure of Donald Trump's "Leadership"

 "........ Donald Trump didn't know how to convince others to do things they didn't want to do. All he understood was fear and money. Trump had spent his entire life dealing with people in two ways: He would try to intimidate and frighten them, and if that didn't work, he would buy them off. Two things which you and I probably look at as to be avoided, yes, like a plague — meeting with lawyers and accountants — Donald Trump did on practically a daily basis. This was the way Trump moved through the world. When he encountered a problem, he would get one of his lawyers to threaten lawsuits or file them, and when the lawsuits failed, he'd ask his accountants to figure out a way to move money that wasn't his — for example, money from his supposed charitable foundation — so he could buy his way out of trouble with a settlement.

"The revelations from Woodward's interviews with Trump don't tell us much that we didn't already know. Trump knew all about the dangers of the virus. Of course he did. Trump lied about what he knew. Ditto. Trump is contemptuous of 'his' generals, calling them 'a bunch of pussies.' We learned only days before he had called those who gave their lives in battle 'losers' and 'suckers,' so we knew that, too.

"What we haven't learned yet is why. If Trump knew way back in February that the coronavirus was as dangerous as the 1918 flu pandemic and was likely to cause severe damage to the economy, why didn't he do what he'd always done and buy his way out of it? Why didn't he propose a package of about $8 trillion to $10 trillion that would attack the virus with health care spending and protect the economy with a massive stimulus? It was a perfect setup: He could have convinced the supine Republicans to go along, the Democrats would have been all for it, he would be spending someone else's money, and he might well be coasting his way to re-election by now. But once he had made his case that the virus was just a 'hoax,' that it was 'like a flu,' and that the U.S. had 'pretty much shut it down,' he forfeited his chance to spend his way through the crisis.  

"Instead, what we got was more than 6.6 million cases of coronavirus, nearly 200,000 dead, and another Trumpian tsunami of lies and cheerleading. Open up! Send the kids back to school! Play ball! It's going to just disappear! Look at the stock market! Unemployment is down!

"The words 'magical thinking' come up all the time to describe Trump's approach to the biggest national disaster faced by this country in a hundred years. But it's worse than that. It's not just the lies and dissembling and projection onto others — Look at Biden in that silly mask! Trump's failures come from a deep, dark well of fear and cowardice and inadequacy. He doesn't believe in himself, so he has never believed in his ability to influence others.

"Donald Trump had no understanding of what I call the exercise of power in the absence of money. This is power at its most absolute, the power to motivate soldiers to risk their lives in combat, the power to motivate doctors and nurses to risk their lives treating patients with deadly communicable diseases, the power that motivates someone to give his or her life for another.

"You can't threaten soldiers with court martial to get them to charge an enemy that is shooting at them. You can't offer a doctor or a nurse a raise, or threaten to cut their pay, to get them to put on a gown and a mask and gloves and treat patients sick with diseases that could kill them as well as the patients. This is what Donald Trump has never understood: You can't force someone to do things they don't want to do. You have to get them to want it. 

"You do that by leading from the front, as they used to say in the Army. Leading by example. If it's necessary to convince people to wear masks in order to save lives, then you do something you don't want to do and wear one yourself. If people are losing their jobs, and you're asking them to live with less, then you get off the golf course and stop unnecessary crap like redesigning the Rose Garden. If hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans are dying from a virus that's not their fault, you write letters of condolence and figure out a way to attend some virtual funerals. You share their sacrifice. You show some respect.

"But that's not Donald Trump. He has no respect. He doesn't care about anyone but himself, and from his contempt for veterans and what he has told Bob Woodward about his haphazard handling of the pandemic, he isn't very good at that either. Even as a narcissist, he's a failure."

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. He can be followed on Facebook at The Rabbit Hole and on Twitter @LucianKTruscott.

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