Democrats and left-leaning media can't face the facts

To The Daily Sun,

Well, preliminary numbers are in on how the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TC&JA) fared and once again the Democrats and left-leaning media got it wrong. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, CNN, MSNBC, ABC etc. for the last 18 months told the American public that the tax cuts benefited the rich and would hurt the middle class and working poor. Just the opposite has happened. Like so many other false claims, like Obamacare would save the average family $2,500/year, they again resorted to mathematical gymnastics to confuse the average voter.

I’ll start with the obvious facts which can be summed up in two lines. First, the American taxpayers paid $14 billion more in federal income taxes in 2018 than in 2017. (https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/trump-tax-cuts-federal-revenues-deficits.) Second, approximately 80 percent of all taxpayers paid less in federal income taxes in 2018 than 2017. With those two facts, a sixth-grader could figure out that, if 80 percent of taxpayers paid less in taxes, then the remaining 20 percent had to cover what they didn’t pay, plus the $14 billion increase.

I could end this letter now, but I’m not, because it irritates me how the Democrats and the left-leaning media play the American public for fools.

I wrote a letter back in Dec 2017 explaining how the TC&JA would shift more of the income tax burden from low-wage-earners to high-wage-earners. Here it is again. (https://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/people-who-claim-the-rich-are-getting-all-the-tax/article_4169b1dd-da2f-5fc6-9443-13175192eeeb.html.) That letter pointed out how the Tax Policy Center (TCP) knowingly co-mingled “payroll” taxes with “income” taxes to make the tax reduction look small for low-income wage-earners and at the same time had little effect on top wage-earners. The second deceitful thing they did was to ignore the state and local tax (SALT) limits which has little if any effect on low-income earners and makes it appear that the top earners were getting a tax break that they weren’t.

I submitted this letter in Aug 2018: (https://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/show-me-where-my-numbers-on-the-tax-cuts-are/article_64b92ab4-9f10-11e8-a5ec-03d8dfe1cf7f.html and this one in Feb 2019: https://www.laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/smaller-refund-is-not-the-same-as-paying-more-in/article_298b2f00-347f-11e9-a252-9790f6ddc415.html.) All of those letters had facts and numbers. The only thing lacking were rebuttals by those on the left.

I’m convinced the reason is because the Democrats have to perpetuate the false narrative that president Trump is lining the pockets of the rich, which is critical to his defeat in the 2020 election. It amazes me how the media can convince someone that received an extra $50 per week in their paycheck for 52 weeks ($2,600) that they didn’t get a tax cut because their tax refund was $1,000 less than the previous year. It’s a complete failure of our education system.

The article in the first link above didn’t give a detailed breakdown of how much more the rich paid, but I did a rough calculation and came up with about $200 billion. With the total “income” tax collected in 2018 of $1,700 billion, that comes to an 11.7 percent (200/1700=.117) shift to the top wage-earners. This is why facts matter.

Love him or hate him, President Trump worked with the Republican Congress before the midterms and fulfilled his promise to give the middle class a tax break. Now the Democratic Congress and the left-leaning media are lying to the American voters and vowing to repeal those tax cuts. I’ve written letters to senators Hassen, Shaheen and Warren, and none even bothered to reply, so the deception continues.

If anyone on the left has information proving me wrong, please submit a letter and provide a link to your source data. I would look forward to picking apart faulty source data. I think the more likely response I’ll get is to be ignored yet again.

I’ll close with the point of this letter. The left rants about the “lies” President Trump tells and fails to look inward. How many people have saved $2,500/year after Obamacare was enacted? How many times did the Democrats and left-leaning media accuse Trump of colluding with Russia? How many times did they say the TC&JA was a tax break for the rich? And how many times did they say Trump would lose miserably? All have hard facts that prove they were all false, yet they can’t bring themselves to face the facts. They are now stuck in the third stage of grief after the 2016 election (https://www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html), which is anger. They need to move on to the fourth stage which includes reflection and eventually on to the seventh which is acceptance and hope. Good luck!

Bruce Jenket

Moultonborough