Skip to main content

Repeal Trump's Tax Scam

The Republican tax cut is now six months old. And, more and more, it’s being recognized as the scam that it is. You may recall that shortly after its passage there we reports that workers were getting paid bonuses because their companies were profiting from the tax cuts. Trickle down economics were working, we were told.

Well, it turns out that only four-percent of workers got a bonus or pay increase due to the tax cut, according to an analysis of data  by Americans for Tax Fairness.

At the same time that most of us weren’t getting a break from Donald Trump’s really big, really beautiful, tax cut America’s stock owners and senior corporate executive were reaping the benefits.

According to CNN Money S&P 500 companies poured $178 billion into Wall Street in the first three months after the tax break scam. That money was used not to create jobs but to buy back company shares.



“Total S&P 500 shareholder payouts -- buybacks plus dividends -- for the past 12 months could top $1 trillion for the first time ever,” CNN quoted Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices as saying.

Although employment is up in the U.S. some of the companies that are benefiting from the Trump tax scam are laying off American workers and taking the formerly American jobs over seas. Take Harley Davidson, for example.

Trump met with Harley-Davidson workers and executives at the White House in February 2017. He promised them a rosy picture of more jobs and corporate expansion as a result of the tax cut that he was proposing.

Shortly after Trump’s proposal was passed by Congress and signed by Trump, Harley-Davidson announced that it was closing its Kansas City plant and laying off 800 workers. Some of those high paying union jobs would be shifted to non-union workers in Pennsylvania. Others would go to a new Harley-Davidson’s plant in Thailand.

After announcing the plant closure Harley-Davidson made a $700 million stock buy back.

“Harley-Davidson is one of a string of companies to announce major share buybacks since the tax bill was passed in December. Apple in early May said it would buy back $100 billion of its shares. The tech conglomerate Cisco in February said it would put an additional $25 billion toward a stock buyback. Troubled megabank Wells Fargo in January announced about $22 billion in buybacks. Pepsi announced a $15 billion buyback, Amgen and AbbVie $10 billion, and Google’s parent company Alphabet $8.6 billion,” Emily Stewart wrote in Vox (vox.com) on May 22nd.

“Harley-Davidson isn’t the only company to shutter a US plant since the tax cuts were passed in December. The same day Kansas City workers found out their plant was closing, about 900 workers at an Electrolux plant in St. Cloud, Minnesota, found out the facility they were working in would be shutting down too. The Swedish home appliance company will consolidate its freezer production in South Carolina, where Joe Baratta, a representative for International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 623, told me starting wages are lower,” Stewart continued.



There is a movement afoot to repeal the Trump Tax Scam. It’s a long shot but we must think big. You can learn more about it, and sign a petition, by visiting Momsrising.org

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Senator Gazelka: Prepare for End Times

Review by John King “Marketplace Ministers are part of how the Lord will reach the peoples of the earth in these last days.” Author Paul Gazelka wrote this astonishing sentence near the conclusion of his 2003 book, Marketplace Ministers , but it is a good place to start here because it so neatly encapsulates the message of the book which is that business people, by spreading the Gospel, are in a unique position to prepare us, for the end of the world.   Gazelka, an insurance salesman in Baxter, Minnesota, devotes chapters one through four to the story of his religious calling and how he came to adopt the “marketplace” as his personal ministry.  He goes to some length, relying in part on the “Fivefold Path” from Ephesians to convince the reader that the marketplace is a legitimate pulpit to spread the Word.  The remainder of the book, using personal anecdotes and biblical passages, he explains how a marketplace ministry would function and what its usefulness w...
3 comments
Read more

Super-emitting frequent fliers responsible for 50% of aviation CO2

U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out. The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest...
4 comments
Read more

Step aside Republicans; Minnesotans want electric vehicles

Late last month Senator Paul Gazelka, the Republican leader of the Senate, told the Minnesota Reformer that the Republican controlled Senate would likely fire the acting Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Laura Bishop, if the Agency, at the behest of the Governor, went ahead with the Clean Car Rule. The rule would require automakers to increase the number of electric vehicles they deliver to Minnesota auto dealers. Gazelka told The Reformer that he’d had “a conversation” with Bishop about the rule. Bishop has not been confirmed by the Senate. Gazelka, and his Republican colleagues, claim that electric vehicles are too expensive and that the rule would be a burden to Minnesotans. Gazelka, and the rest of his Party are wrong. They aren’t paying attention to the economics of EV ownership and they are not paying attention to consumer preferences. Way back in September 2019, Consumer Reports reported on a study of Minnesotans they had done in collaboration with the...
2 comments
Read more