In his State of the Union Address, President Biden made it clear that taxes and tax policy were his next big target for a middle-out makeover. However, we can’t talk about the future of taxes without discussing the potential expiration of Trump’s’ 2017 tax law. Samantha Jacoby, a senior tax analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, joins us today to help us understand the repercussions of Trump’s tax policies and the opportunities ahead. Trump’s tax law was marketed as a boon for every working American, promising an average annual benefit of $4,000. But Jacoby unveils the true economic reality behind the Trump tax law: the primary beneficiaries were the wealthiest individuals and corporations; they did not pay for themselves as promised; and despite the trillions of tax giveaways to people at the top, most Americans saw no tangible economic benefit.
Samantha Jacoby is a Senior Tax Analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Before joining the Center in 2018, she practiced tax law at two international law firms in New York and Washington, D.C. Previously, she worked as a policy and research analyst at the Solar Energy Industries Association, where she focused on the impact of tax incentives on the renewable energy industry.
Twitter: @jacsamoby
The 2017 Trump Tax Law Was Skewed to the Rich, Expensive, and Failed to Deliver on Its Promises https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-2017-trump-tax-law-was-skewed-to-the-rich-expensive-and-failed-to-deliver
IRS Funding thread by Samantha on Twitter https://x.com/jacsamoby/status/1752088112291807298?s=20
After Decades of Costly, Regressive, and Ineffective Tax Cuts, a New Course Is Needed Bipartisan Senate Action Passes Minimal Test for IRS Funding While Multiple House Republican Bills Fail https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/after-decades-of-costly-regressive-and-ineffective-tax-cuts-a-new-course-is
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Joe Biden:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out. Not the top down.
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer.
Joe Biden:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. Great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer:
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:
It’s tax season, Nick, and I like to get out ahead of it. I did my taxes recently. It took me, I don’t know, maybe an hour, because unlike you, my taxes are relatively simple these days. Standard deductions, so I’m not itemizing. W-2 because you employ me. I would’ve paid a little. It’s different. It used to be that we get a little bit of a refund, but I got a nice little tax credit from the, oh, was it the Inflation Reduction Act for, I installed a heat pump this year.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh, no kidding. There you go.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. So I got a couple thousand dollars back from that, which means I’ll get a little bit of a refund this year. How about you? How are your taxes going? You’ve got TurboTax pulled up.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. No, I don’t have a clue. I think we have to file and most of the states, because the entities-
Speaker 4:
Most of the states-
Nick Hanauer:
Have presences in all the states, and no, it’s a pile of paper that’s almost a foot thick by the time it’s done, and I don’t understand how it works. But what I do understand is that the Trump tax cuts substantially benefited me and most likely did not benefit you at all. And that’s the subject of the podcast today because we have one of the country’s most informed tax policy experts to chat with us. Samantha Jacoby is a senior tax analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy priorities.
Consequently, before she did that, she practiced tax a law to international tax firms in New York and Washington DC. So she knows her business. And I read, and I think we’ll put it in the show notes, her recent testimony to Congress on the Trump tax cuts that are expiring in 2024 and why we should either massively reform them or let them all expire.
Because what’s really clear, and I know you know this, that the 2017 Trump tax cuts, some of which are permanent, those are the big tax cuts for corporations, big corporations, and some of the tax cuts for rich people cost the country trillions of dollars in tax revenue-
Speaker 4:
Trillions.
Nick Hanauer:
Trillions. And provided none of the economic broad economic benefits that were claimed as you and I remember so vividly, Trump and Paul Ryan promising all Americans that the average American would get a $4,000 raise because of all of this, promising that these tax cuts would pay for themselves, promising massive increases in GDP growth, job growth, etc. And literally, none of the benefits materialized, but the deficits materialized and certainly the benefits to rich people materialized.
Speaker 4:
Well, that’s clearly we have to blame Social Security and Medicare for this.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4:
And have to take that pound of flesh. You’d still have to pay your deductible before when they take out your pound of flesh.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. But what many listeners may not know is that these tax cuts all expire in 20… They don’t all expire. The corporate tax cuts have been made permanent. But because many of the tax cuts expire in 2025, this requires Congress to reenact them and for the president to resign them at that point. So it is obviously going to be a point of massive negotiation, and that creates a big opportunity to right some of these wrongs and straighten some of this nonsense out. You would love to believe that Congress could be functional enough to reform the whole thing. That’s unlikely. But I do think-
Speaker 4:
Either way, Nick, assuming we still have a democracy in 2025, there’s going to be a public debate over this because there’s going to be a battle in Congress one way or the other. So it’s really great to have Samantha on to explain to us what is at stake here in the coming year.
Samantha Jacoby:
I’m Samantha Jacoby. I’m a senior tax legal analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and advocacy organization that focuses on ways to improve economic opportunity for particularly folks who have low incomes and I focus on tax very broadly, revenue side tax policies, as well as tax policies to boost income for low income people and families.
Speaker 4:
You’ve got two people here asking you questions. One of whom benefited greatly from the Trump tax cuts of 2017, and that’s not me. And then there’s me, who it didn’t really help much. I think maybe actually I’m in the area where it didn’t help at all. So explain what some of the major provisions were and what is set to expire soon.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. So I think it’s helpful to understand a little bit about how the 2017 tax law, it made permanent changes and it made changes were temporary. So the things that were made permanent, the things that the law’s authors prioritized were the law’s big corporate tax cuts. Those are all permanent changes. They won’t expire.
The things that were made temporary were the changes affecting households. So a few of the things that are set to expire in 2025, there’s a lot in there. I’ll just go through a few of the provisions. The law cut individual tax rates across the board, including the top tax rate that applies to people who have incomes over $600,000. And just by itself, that one change to the top rate from 39.6% to 37%, that would’ve given say a married couple with $2 million in income, a $36,000 tax cut. A couple of the other things that happened in that law, there’s the law created a new 20% deduction for owners of pass through businesses, like partnerships, that lets those owners deduct 20% of their business profits.
That means if you’re an owner in a partnership, you would pay a top rate of 29.6% on that income, that partnership income. But, if you’re an employee doing the exact same work, but you’re not an owner, you pay a top rate of 37% under the law. The law also cut the estate tax, doubled the amount a wealthy person can leave to their heirs without paying estate tax. So for the few estates that remain taxable after that change, that’s a $4.4 million tax cut per couple.
The law also made some changes to the alternative minimum tax or AMT, made far fewer households subject to that. Those are all changes that mostly affected higher income affluent households. There were some changes that affect lower and middle income households. I think those changes often offset each other. So some changes like increasing the standard deduction, increasing the child tax credit, those things benefited many families, but then other changes increased their taxes with the end result on net being modest tax cuts compared to very large tax cuts for those high income people.
Nick Hanauer:
Can you put some numbers on this a little bit? So in total, how much did it cost the country these cuts cost the country?
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. So the Congressional budget office, CBO, in 2018 estimated that over the ten-year budget window, that’s how budget estimators, they work on ten-year windows, over that ten-year window starting in 2018, the total law, including both the permanent corporate tax cuts and the individual tax cuts would cost $1.9 trillion over that 10 years. And then, if you take the expirations, let’s say they’re all extended, that’s going to be another on top of that original 1.9 trillion, 3.5 trillion over the next 10 years. That just important to note that 3.5 trillion I just mentioned, that will be on top of any cuts that were made permanent. The corporate tax cuts.
Speaker 4:
Wait, I’ve been told that tax cuts always pay for themselves. And Trump was promising that the average worker would get a $4,000 raise due to all of the growth we would see from that. Did that happen?
Samantha Jacoby:
So no, I think that that happens a lot. Proponents of this trickle-down economic theory have consistently argued that cutting taxes for corporations and high-income households will boost economic growth and pay for themselves. Tax cuts plainly don’t pay for themselves. I testified last year in front of the Senate Budget Committee and all of the witnesses, both the witnesses who were invited by Democratic senators and the witnesses invited by Republican senators, all of the witnesses agreed the 2017 tax cuts did not pay for themselves.
You mentioned that President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers said the corporate tax cut in particular would lead to a $4,000 boost in household income. That’s been studied. There’s really no evidence that cutting corporate taxes trickles down to workers in the form of wage increases. In fact, there’s a recent study that found that workers in the bottom 90th percentile, so somewhere around $115,000 in income or below, there was no wage increase, zero wage increase from the corporate rate cut. And you see the same thing with the pass-through deduction I mentioned before. Republican lawmakers said the deduction would create jobs boost investment. There’s no evidence for that either.
Nick Hanauer:
And as I recall, there was zero impact on economic growth of any kind. If you look at the numbers, there wasn’t more job creation, there wasn’t more GDP growth, there wasn’t more productivity growth. Nothing.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah, that’s what some early evidence found. I think the pandemic year sort of made that hard to study, but yeah, certainly that’s not really been seen.
Speaker 4:
Right. Again, just I’m so surprised that when you cut a corporation’s taxes, they don’t pass those savings onto their workers through higher wages. It’s man, I guess I know nothing about economics.
Nick Hanauer:
What were the most egregious provisions of the Trump tax cuts?
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. I mentioned the pass through deduction earlier. Just to go through that in a little bit more detail. That’s just a giveaway to high income people. It costs 50 billion dollars a year, and over half of that goes to millionaires. Because it’s a deduction, the highest value goes to those in the highest tax brackets. High income people tend to get more of their income from pass through businesses. They invest in different businesses, and so it doesn’t boost jobs, it doesn’t boost investment. That’s something that is expiring at the end of 2025 and should certainly be on the list of things to end.
The corporate tax cut, I think was another one. That one, like I mentioned, was made permanent. There’s nothing stopping policymakers from bringing it back on the table. The old rate was 35%, not necessarily… You don’t necessarily have to go back to that 35%, but 21% where it is today is far too low. You could imagine something somewhere in the middle, maybe 28% that would raise a lot of money that would raise around 1.3 trillion dollars over 10 years. So those are all things that policymakers should keep in mind as the law is set to expire next year.
Nick Hanauer:
So if you just… I’m trying to figure out how much the Trump tax cuts cost in revenue annually. Is it about 300 billion annually, 200 billion annually?
Samantha Jacoby:
Extending the… Yes, extending the 20-
Nick Hanauer:
If you just erase them. If you just erase them, how much more? How much more-
Speaker 4:
Including the permanent-
Nick Hanauer:
Including the permanent tax cuts, how much more revenue-
Speaker 4:
Does that make sense?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s the question I’m trying to answer.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. So the original law, 1.9 trillion, that’s sort of the revenue loss from the law over 10 years.
Nick Hanauer:
So plus or minus 200 billion a year.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. The expirations on top of that is about 300 billion a year.
Nick Hanauer:
300 billion, obviously, is a lot of money. You could pay for a lot of cool stuff with that. Let’s get to what we should do. If you were in charge, what do you think we should do?
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. So I think that the Trump tax cuts expiring next year. That presents a really big opportunity to revisit what was done, what we should be doing, and we’re going to be hearing a lot about tax in the next year or so. So I think the first thing to do is end the tax cuts from the Trump tax cut law that primarily benefit high income households. So just don’t renew those. The ones I mentioned. The top income tax rate should go back to what it was before 2018. The pass reduction should end. Let’s just set the estate tax back to where it was before 2018.
So those provisions. But then, don’t stop at that. You should revisit the corporate tax cut. Think through some other ways to raise progressive revenues that can be used to make investments in people and families. One big priority rate should be the child tax credit. In 2021, the Congress temporarily expanded the child tax credit and that led to the largest reduction in child poverty in history. So those are all things that policymakers should really be thinking about now.
Nick Hanauer:
And if we let all of those provisions expire, how much more tax revenue would it that create?
Samantha Jacoby:
The cost of extending all the expiring provisions from 2026 through 2035 is around three and a half trillion. So that’s three and a half trillion in revenue that we could be raising that we wouldn’t be raising if we extend all the Trump tax.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s about 350 billion a year. Okay, got it. Okay. So a lot of dough, obviously that’s free college for everybody, and so many things.
Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:15:55] the child tax credit, et cetera.
Samantha Jacoby:
We need more revenue, not less revenue. That’s a fact. We have an aging population. A fifth of our population is going to be over 65 in 2034. That means social security budget, medicare, Medicaid, those are all going to keep going up, and that’s not even to mention all the unmet needs. We need to invest money in addressing climate change, housing, child care. So we do need that revenue.
Speaker 4:
Well, let’s talk about another 150 billion dollars a year, which I find to be actually one of the most egregious parts of this, and that’s the $150 billion that Nick’s buddies, millionaires, and billionaires are evading right now due to lax enforcement from the IRS. The Republicans have actually blocked funding of the IRS to audit the wealthy. Was that part of the Trump tax cut or is that a separate provision?
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah, that’s a good point. That actually went… That happened… That started well before the 2017 tax law. The IRS budget was cut by 20% in inflation adjusted terms from 2010 to 2020. And so that matters. When Congress cuts the IRS budget, the IRS loses staff, audit rates go down and audit rates particularly go down for those very high income people and corporations. Just to put a couple of numbers out there, the audits of millionaires fell by 70% in that time period, and audits of large corporations fell by 50% in that time period.
There are fewer revenue agents now, those sophisticated auditors, that handle the complex returns of high income people. There are fewer of those revenue agents now than at any time since the early 1950s. And that’s despite our economy being vastly larger now and vastly more complex.
Speaker 4:
Right. And as Trump has proven, it could take years of investigation and depositions and courtroom battles to figure out somebody’s taxes.
Samantha Jacoby:
Exactly. You think about what it takes to audit a very high income person. They’ve got really complicated asset structures, layers of different entities. You have to track all of their complicated transactions. You have to have the best people, lots of staff, a lot of resources to do that kind of work. And so, when you see the kind of staff reductions that they’ve seen, rebuilding takes a lot of time and a lot of money that you can’t just hire everybody right away and put them out there and have them do audits. It takes years of training.
So the Inflation Reduction Act from a couple of years ago started this process. It allocated $80 billion over 10 years to the IRS. That was a really big investment that would let the IRS start taking those long-term steps, but it’s tenuous. Congress agreed to cut that $80 billion in funding by 20 billion in the last year over the debt limit agreement. So going forward, if we want to see the kind of increased revenue collections that we can see from IRS investment, just to take a step back, that’s increasing revenue without raising taxes. But to do that, policymakers have to prioritize making sure the IRS has enough funding on a permanent basis.
Speaker 4:
So when you cut taxes, that reduces revenue. When you cut the funding of the IRS, that also reduces revenue.
Samantha Jacoby:
Tax cut for tax evaders.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, but don’t worry, Nick, if Trump wins in November, I think you’ll be audited.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 4:
Or worse.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Is there an opportunity for substantive tax reform in 2025 as this stuff expires? Are there provisions for middle class people that should be a extended. Samantha, if it was you, would you just let it all expire?
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. I think there are certainly things in the law that benefit low income and middle income people. I mentioned the child tax credit. That’s a really big one. The standard deduction, I think, helps simplify many people’s returns. But what you can do, you can say, we’re going to let all these things for high income people expire, and we’re going to take a look at the things for people who have more modest incomes and pay for those things by increasing progressive revenues, by increasing the corporate tax rate somewhat, by looking at some of our policies on capital gains and maybe some international tax reforms to end profit shifting. Those are all things that raise progressive revenues and can help pay for any extensions for more low-income or middle-income families in addition to revenues to start investing in some of those things I mentioned before, climate change, and other policies that we really need.
Nick Hanauer:
Is there anything Congress could do unilaterally to stop this profit shifting overseas?
Samantha Jacoby:
What the 2017 law did is it sort of changed a little bit about how we tax the foreign income of multinationals. And I think what was in there was an interesting place to start, but needs to be made more robust. So I think that’s kind of the place to start. Take those provisions in the 2017 law. There’s for instance, a minimum tax on foreign income of US multinationals. That rate’s only 10.5%. That can be made somewhat higher. So certainly, there’s reforms that can be done and should be on the table in 2025.
Nick Hanauer:
Interesting. What’s your sense about the mood of Congress? I just wonder. You obviously are out talking to people. What’s your sense?
Samantha Jacoby:
One thing that’s kind of interesting that I don’t think we’ve always seen from Congress, I think it’s certainly tough to get anything passed in a bipartisan way, but what we’ve seen in the last couple of months, there’s a bipartisan tax bill that passed the house that would include some changes to the child tax credit, increases for families with low incomes. And on the other side of that, some changes for businesses, more generous depreciation deductions for businesses that make investments, for example.
So you have something for business and something for families and to pay for it. They’ve proposed changes to a COVID era provision that was intended to help businesses get through the pandemic, but has been plagued by fraudulent claims in recent months. So it is sort of an interesting dynamic, but the bill is paid for. That hasn’t always happened. So I think that’s a good precedent if we’re going to extend tax cuts, those things need to be paid for. And that bill I should mention, has only passed the house. It’s kind of stalled in the Senate currently, but we’re hopeful that it will move forward.
Nick Hanauer:
Is there any part of the Republican caucus that is constructive on this issue?
Samantha Jacoby:
I think we’re going to try really, really hard to get Republicans on board with some of the things that we are proposing. Certainly, in terms of the child tax credit, there are Republicans that have been constructive. And I think there have been a few Republicans who are seemingly not so crazy about the big corporate tax cuts as well. So those maybe could be areas of potential bipartisan cooperation.
Speaker 4:
But they’re the party of fiscal responsibility. That’s what everybody… That’s what voters seem to believe. They trust Republicans more on the economy and on the budget than on Democrats. So you’d think they’d want a fiscally responsible budget instead of an extra three and a half trillion dollars of deficit spending.
Samantha Jacoby:
That’s the hope.
Nick Hanauer:
Do you think that that tax cuts pay for themselves nonsense gets any purchase anymore? Do people still say that? Believe it. It’s so discredited. Are we going to hear a bunch of that? Of course, we will hear some of it, but does anybody still believe that?
Samantha Jacoby:
I think you probably still hear some of it, but I think you’re right. It’s been discredited pretty widely, and I think most mainstream economists, policy people on both sort of more conservative and more progressive sides, both sort of agree that generally tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. I think that’s been somewhat of a shift in the last few years.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s good.
Speaker 4:
Good. I don’t know. It’s hard to argue with a curve drawn on the back of a napkin, which is what has guided our tax policy for the past 40 years for some reason. I’m sorry. I’m just throwing in sarcastic comments.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. For our listeners who don’t know, that’s a Laffer Curve joke.
Speaker 4:
Yes. The appropriately named Laffer Curve. I realize this entire discussion, Samantha, I have not been helpful. All I’ve done is thrown in sarcastic comments because I find this whole conversation so frustrating. In fact, if I remember correctly, the CBO report on the Trump tax cuts said that it did not pay for itself. They passed that knowing it would create deficits, and that’s what the Republicans have done all along. I don’t think they’ve ever truly believed it. They just come in there, they passed these tax cuts, and it’s part of their gold Grover Norquist’s dream of shrinking government down to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yeah. That’s just what we’ve kind of seen with these trickle-down tax cuts. Giving windfall tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations doesn’t generate broadly shared economic benefits. As you said, they don’t pay for themselves. What it does is further enrich the people who don’t need more help, and it adds to federal deficits and debt. And then we end up with less tax revenue, which limits our ability to make those kinds of investments that we really need to broaden opportunity and contribute to shared prosperity in a real way.
Speaker 4:
And if I remember correctly, what we saw after these tax cuts were passed was on the corporate side, was an increase in stock buybacks.
Samantha Jacoby:
Yup. There was the highest number of stock buybacks ever right after the law was passed.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Surprise, surprise.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, Samantha, this has been fantastic. One final question. Why do you do this work?
Samantha Jacoby:
There are lots of reasons I do this work. I think it’s fun. I get to read and write all day and talk to people like you. But more fundamentally, I think how we choose to raise and spend revenue as a country is ultimately an expression of our values. We’re the richest country in the world. We shouldn’t have the level of child poverty that we do, and we know how to fix it. We can do it through the tax code. And so, I think ultimately that’s kind of why I’m doing this work and what I try to do every day.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Thank you for your service. I can’t imagine having to sit and testify before a congressional committee. It just seems like such a hopeless thing to do right now.
Samantha Jacoby:
Well, thank you very much for having me. This was great.
Nick Hanauer:
The question I asked Samantha at the end there about whether people still believe this nonsense about whether tax cuts delivering growth and tax cuts paying for themselves. It’s been so long since any of that was credible to me that I find it astonishing, so astonishing, and so frustrating that we’re still having these conversations. It will be interesting to see how those arguments are recycled in 2025 because there’s literally no basis for this anymore. It’s just such nonsense and lies. But even given that, the upcoming tax fight is going to be a tough one, because at the end of the day, the people who are advocating for these tax cuts don’t give a crap about whether they pay for themselves, don’t give a crap whether they increase growth. This is just a money grab, a short-term money grab for the very rich and for the politicians operating at the behest of the people who finance their political careers.
Speaker 4:
I think it’s worse than that, Nick. It’s worse than just a money grab. I think this is a win-win for that side, because on the one hand, it helps to enrich the rich. Most of these tax cuts benefit the wealthy, but also what it does is it impoverishes the government’s ability to provide that people want and need.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Speaker 4:
And so what that does is it destroys confidence in government and faith in the government and further erodes our democratic institutions and norms, which is what the other side has been trying to do for the past 40, 50 years. Remember, this is, and I said it… I mentioned that Grover Norquist quip about wanting to shrink government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub. That’s the goal of all this. I saw some study recently that showed that apart from the extraordinary one-time expenses of both the financial crash and COVID where the federal government had to spend trillions to keep the economy from collapsing and in COVID, oh my God, was it well spent?
It really worked in terms of the misery it helped prevent. But apart from those one-time, extraordinary expenses, the entire deficit, our entire deficit, is a consequence of the Bush and Trump tax cuts that without the Bush… If you just eliminated the Bush and Trump tax cuts, we would not be in deficit. Right now, we’d be raising more money than we were spending.
Nick Hanauer:
Incredible.
Speaker 4:
So when you hear the other side saying, oh, well, we need to do something about entitlements, those entitled people expecting the Social Security and Medicare that they’ve been taxed on for their entire lives, we got to cut that because, oh, it’s just too expensive. We can’t afford this after we’ve got 300 billion dollars a year in tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy. This is the goal is to essentially destroy our ability to govern. I have to say, Nick. I got into this 20 years ago as a state and local blogger, and I was always so incredibly frustrated by the impoverishment of the public debate on taxes, because we only tend to debate one side of the equation when we talk about every time the state would face a budget crisis, it was always, oh, we have to cut spending.
It’s always about the spending side, how irresponsible the spending is, how we’re spending too much on this or on that. And we never talk about the revenue side, but it’s a budget, right? There’s revenue and there’s spending, and here we are again. So I don’t know about you. You said you’re hopeful for 2025.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I’m hopeful that we’ll make some progress in 2025.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Well, first of all, we’re hopeful that the Democrats will be in charge in 2025, so we can actually have a debate. And God, I’m hoping the Democrats, that if they are in control and they have a chance to do something about this, that they steeled themselves to the usual trickle down attacks.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, and one of the reasons I’m optimistic is that this group is the best we’ve had in a generation to do that. Not one policymaker in the Biden administration believes any of that nonsense.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. I’m not worried about the Biden administration. I’m worried about the Democratic caucus. And one final thing we did not talk about in this Nick, which I think is really important, is how much these tax cuts, both the Bush and the Trump tax cuts, has exacerbated our crisis of economic inequality because it widens that gap and how dangerous that is for our nation, for our democracy. And it’s something that on the one hand, the Trumpists push for these tax cuts that exacerbate inequality, and then they go and they try to exploit the anger that that creates. And so, if we want a functional democracy, we need a more equitable economy. And you don’t get that from a tax system that is allowing that gap to grow.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing’s for sure, we’re not going to avoid the fight. We’re not going to avoid this conversation. It’s a coming.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Again, assuming we still have a Congress in 2020.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s true.
Speaker 4:
Who knows what will happen after this election. Again, if you want to read more from Samantha, we have provided a link to her congressional testimony in the show notes.
Announcer:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action. And Nick Hanauer, follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.