Yeah, I could have said “Ramesh Ponnuru is a disingenuous dipshit”, or “Ramesh Ponnuru is a Jesuitical jive-ass” (because he’s Catholic), but I like to keep it classy. My latest bitch-fest regarding Mr. Ponnuru is occasioned by a recent post of his in Bloomberg, Trump Tax Cut Was Neither Bane Nor Boon, which I was first inclined to pass over, because, well, because I bitch about Mr. Ponnuru a lot, so I thought I’d cut him some slack, because, after all, he did write a column advocating Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, even though he also “respects” (my word) disingenuous dipshits like John Yoo who construct grotesquely dishonest theories to “justify” Trump’s uniquely nauseous trashing of our Constitution, which conservatives pretend to love. So, anyway, why not let a pretty standard piece of Ponnuruesque phony even-handedness slide? It’s not like the guy is ever going to stop.
Yeah, well, my indulgence lasted a whole six days, until Ramesh followed up with another Bloomberg piece Journalists Should Stop Cleaning Up After Biden, complaining that “It’s not the press’s job to make excuses for a candidate’s mistakes, but that’s a benefit the Democrat is too often receiving.”
First of all, in today’s political climate, there are plenty of biased journalists out there who tell their story their way. The old ideal of objectivity—which only really existed from 1945 to the rise of talk radio in the 1990s—has gone the way of the hoop skirt, whose loss I still mourn. In addition, there are plenty of journalists, like, you know, Ramesh Ponnuru, who are only too glad to emphasize Uncle Joe’s many inconsistencies, just as there are many to defend President Trump’s “inaccuracies” as Ramesh calls them, by which he means, of course, “lies”. If Ramesh wants to write a column headed “The Many Lies of Joe Biden”, well, fine. Just don’t whine about “the press”.
So, anyway, that pissed me off so much that I went back to the earlier column, which, as I say, is a ridiculous exercise in phony even-handedness, Ramesh posing himself as a by the book, balls and strikes umpire, when he is, you should pardon the expression, lying his goddamn ass off to cover for goddamn Trump and his goddamn rich man’s tax cut!
Where to begin? Here’s what Ramesh says:
The Democrats’ chief charge has always been that it was a huge giveaway to the rich. “All of it went to folks at the top and corporations,” Biden said in 2019. Tax experts have been less hyperbolic but made a similar point. The Tax Policy Center, for example, estimated that more than 20% of the bill’s tax cuts went to the highest-earning 1% of Americans.
That statistic looks less shocking, however, when you consider that these top earners pay a large share of federal taxes, both because they make a large share of the nation’s income and because federal taxes are progressive. The law left them paying roughly the same share of all federal taxes as before. The Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that households making more than $1 million in 2021 would have paid 19.2% of all federal taxes if the law hadn’t passed, but will pay 19.6% since it did.
Yeah, but there’s no reason to give rich folks a tax cut at all, and it’s perfectly feasible to write a tax bill that would do that. Furthermore, the bill included at least three provisions that gave tax “relief” to only the rich—a reduction in the marginal tax rates affecting all upper-income groups, an adjustment upwards of the applicability of the “alternative minimum tax”, which reduces the amount by which taxpayers can reduce their taxable income, and a doubling of the estate tax exemption, allowing individuals to inherit up to $11.2 million tax free ($22.4 million for couples). Yet there’s no reason to exempt inheritance income at all, because it’s income!
Furthermore furthermore, Ramesh ignores the fact that the income and even the estate tax reductions were merely decorations on the cake. The real point of the bill was to reduce the corporate income tax, increasing corporate profits and supposedly allowing corporations to expand operations, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs, which (again supposedly) would create so much economic growth that tax revenues would increase, as Republican Senator/whore Susan Collins, among others, so passionately argued.
Well, that didn't happen, Ramesh concedes (this is the "even-handed" part), but he doesn't mention what really happened, as anyone with half a brain could and did foresee: corporate big shots around the country rushed to increase their income, pushing income inequality to new heights.
In late 2019, the top 10% controlled about 63.8% of U.S. household wealth, up from around 55.4% back in 1989, according to data provided by the Federal Reserve. According to the IRS, the top 1%, about 1.4 million tax return filers, controlled about $35.4 trillion in assets, compared to the $36.9 trillion controlled by the more than 70 million filers at the 50th percentile. The adjusted gross income cut-off for the top 1% was about $515,000, compared to about $42,000 for those at the 50th.
Well, if you're still with me, and still counting, we’re up to three “furthermores”, because after the Republicans got finished handing out massive tax breaks to the corporate rich—the whole idea being that the corporate income tax “distorts” and discourages investment—they asked themselves, “what have we done for the non-corporate rich?”—those who, like—cough, cough—Donald Trump, operate what are called “pass-through” enterprises.
There was no “theoretical” justification at all for giving tax cuts to these organizations, since their investment practices were not "distorted" by the corporate income tax. It was just a case of what one might call “free-floating non-corporate greed”. And, since greed is what Donald Trump, and the Republican Party, are all about, another set of hand-outs to the undeserving rich were handed out, in an orgy of special interest provisions literally written by the lobbyists themselves. Here’s what Republican consultant turned never-Trumper Rick Wilson said about the tax bill in his mea culpa Everything Trump Touches Dies (including, I guess, Ramesh Ponnuru’s sense of honor):
The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.
A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?”
Ramesh knows all of this, of course, or almost all of it. He just pretends he doesn’t, so he can lie to his readers. Abraham Lincoln famously complained about efforts of the “Know-Nothings” to deny the ballot to Irish and Germans, “and soon all foreign-born. If that day ever comes, I would prefer to emigrate to another country, to Russia, for example, where tyranny can be taken pure and simple, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” But I guess that “base alloy” is mother’s milk to Ramesh Ponnuru.
Afterwords
It’s especially, I guess, “rich” that Ramesh unleashes this download of cock-a-hoop crap on Bloomberg readers, who presumably are likely to be more financially literate than average, in a display of utter contempt for his audience. I guess he figures no one can be as smart as he is. Hey, Ramesh, why not cut to the chase and start hawking your new book How To Beat The Dow?
Brookings offers a detailed view of the Trump tax package here. Thomas Edsall provided a nice “real time” take You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill. For more information of the possibilities for “gaming” the new provisions, which of course Ramesh “forgot” about entirely, see The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches Under the 2017 Tax Legislation, courtesy the Minnesota Law Review.
