What’s Been Better For The Economy — Trump’s Tax Cuts, Or His Impeachment?
Two years ago this month, President Donald Trump, along with Republicans in the Congress, passed a tax package that gave huge sums of breaks to the richest Americans and wealthiest companies.
The idea behind the tax proposal Trump signed into law was that the companies that received such tax cuts would invest heavily in themselves, resulting in better jobs and higher wages for American workers.
NPR called the law the “signature legislative accomplishment of President Trump’s first term.” Trump made appeals directly to the people, though most Americans were against the bill’s ideals, according to polling at the time.
“Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America,” Trump said in 2017. “The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best.”
But the tax cuts didn’t do much to help workers. Wages have not increased, and companies just held onto the tax cuts as added profits rather than investing in themselves, New York Magazine reported. Sixty cents of every dollar created by the new law went to the top 20 percent of the wealthiest Americans.
Two years after the GOP passed a sweeping tax cut, a new analysis finds more than 60% of the tax savings went to Americans in the top 20% of incomes — and the cuts "have not come anywhere close to paying for themselves." https://t.co/cI0OqGNlKd
— NPR (@NPR) December 21, 2019
The stock market is Trump’s favorite talking point when discussing the economy. It’s important to note, the stock market doesn’t play a huge role in American peoples’ lives — but even if we go along with the metric the president likes to tout, we see that not much has improved there as well.
Except for after impeachment started.
From December 2017 (when the bill was signed into law, ready to be implemented the following month) to September 24, 2019, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 1,854.5 points. Over the course of 639 days, that’s about 2.90 points increased per day, on average.
Compare that to when the impeachment process began to its vote last week in the House. From September 24 until last Thursday, the Dow Jones went up 1,518 points. Over 86 days, that averages to an average of around 17.65 points per day.
Suffice it to say, the Trump tax cuts didn’t do much to invigorate the economy, especially to the extent that the president and Republicans said they would. Impeaching the president, however, in spite of warnings Trump foretold of, didn’t have a negative impact at all on the economy, and we saw substantial gains during that time in Trump’s favored stock market-metric.
It would require more study, and correlation does not always equal causation. But one could be forgiven for assuming that impeachment is better for the Trump economy than were his actual tax cuts for the rich.