It was never about helping their VOTERS; the tax law was just about their DONORS. They needed the donor money commitments first to get them to today, when they can start to worry about what lies they tell their actual voters.
The donors aren’t stupid either. All the money they donated they just got back tenfold via the new tax laws.
Many utilities did actually cut rates after they got tax cuts. Of course, there’s more to the story. The savings were used for rate cuts because regulations governing the utilities require the savings to be passed through to rate levels.
And everyone else who got some small-potatoes (and temporary) tax cut will suffer a drop in government spending/services that more than offsets said cut.
And then the (consumer) tax cuts will expire… with no more corporate handouts…
They can’t raise or lower prices without going through some sort of process. My utility sends me letters about it all the time. Now the private companies without that kind of regulation, they’re just pocketing the money or giving it to shareholders.
The Seattle City Council is a bunch of incompetent morons who are now furiously backpeddling on the head tax they passed unanimously a month ago. It was an unpopular tax to begin with, but organizers have enough signatures to put it on the ballot this November. The same ballot that 7 of 9 city council members are on.
Yup, bribing politicians is just an investment for the mega rich and the rate of return makes the stock market look like a joke.
If only there was someone fighting to get money out of politics…
The most profitable price gouging entities in America that are bankrupting us by charging insane rates for drugs, are paying way less in % taxes than I am. The deficit next year is going to be so massive it may become a black hole which sucks Earth into an alternate dimension.
If it gets us out of this timeline, it might be worth it!
You’re just not giving this tax cut enough time to work its magic!
Takes some time for that trickle down to work. Give it another 80-90 years!
I think it’ll be less than that. At some point the richest 4 or 5 people in America will just have ALL the money, so at that point they’ll be ready to start trickling down.
Sure when the proletariat finally storms their palaces and cuts off a few heads /sortasarcasm
Yeah, it’s only sarcasm in the sense it won’t happen tomorrow.
But history is a great teacher. The robber barons of the late 19th century chose to learn lessons and reverse course, leading to the birth of the progressive movement and major social reforms. They wished to avoid an American Reign of Terror
Today’s crop of ultra wealthy seem not to be so civic minded, or barring that foresighted. Because if the trend of wealth concentration continues, heads will end on pikes.
And they will have earned it.
Such optimism. People will be too distracted by Netflix, Twitch, Instagram, etc. to bother rising up.
This isn’t 1984, it’s Brave New World.
I also think revolt will be difficult. Sheer numbers won’t do it. And the wealthy elite will have all kinds of tools at their disposal to attack the source of the revolt.
Yes, people like Carnegie turned to philanthropy, but I’d argue that it was enlightened self-interest (and sincere moral outrage at the living conditions of the urban working class) among the very small middle class of the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, combined with pressure from the labor movement, that gave us things like a two day weekend, workers comp, unemployment benefits, anti child-labor laws, etc.*
Those middle class people had much more day to day contact with the 90 percent who were just scraping by, and knew they were sitting on a powderkeg, and that if the poop hit the ventilator, they’d be a much more accessible target than the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, who had or could readily afford private security.
*which the New Deal built on later.