The results are in: Corporate criminals are the big winners

Recently, the Miami Herald reported that “Marco Rubio believes America’s new tax code will be good for Overtown.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. Then I almost started crying. Rubio is no dummy, so he knows full well the new tax cut benefits rich individuals and corporations, not distressed communities. What he is is a cynic and a liar engaged in a career-long unholy class war to shift resources upward.

I have known Rubio was a scoundrel since he was in the Florida legislature and told some friends of mine advocating for health care to be extended to immigrant children that the GOP didn’t want “to create another entitlement.” A person who says a child in a rich country is not entitled to health care just because his parents can’t afford it is, for me, the definition of a scoundrel.

Oh, yes, like all Republicans he has an argument as to why cutting taxes for the Wall Street rich will help the Overtown poor. Rubio claims tax cuts will drive corporations to invest big in Overtown.

Don’t hold your breath. These trickle-down schemes have been tried many times before and failed. This time will be no different: endless bureaucratic hoops; corporations looking at the tax incentives and then looking at Overtown and deciding it’s not worth it. Another cycle of unfulfilled promises and frustration.

Another story in the Herald makes clear how Republican “tax reform” is not at all about economic bonanzas for places like Overtown and all about big gains in places like Wall Street: “Big banks saved $3.6 billion in taxes last quarter under new law.”

If those savings continue, the perpetrators of one of the worst financial disasters in history will reap more than $15 billion from the new tax code. In contrast, Overtown to date has not gained a quarter, and I bet dollars to donuts it will be the same after a year.

Trump, like Rubio, uses the rhetoric of populism. The reality is different: “The nation’s six biggest banks posted record, or near record, profits in the first quarter, and they can thank one person in particular: Donald Trump.” I would point out that they also should thank the whole Republican party, including Marco Rubio, for which the tax cut for the rich was a crowning achievement in its long top-down class war.

The list of the huge banks that got the $3.6 billion in tax breaks reads like a list of who did most in creating the Big Recession of 2008: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Crime in the streets doesn’t pay. Crime in the suites often does.

The same page carries two separate stories that add to the picture of a system riddled by corporate corruption and self-serving politics, over and beyond the tax cut. “Trump businesses made millions off GOP groups, report says,” describes how the Trump campaign and other GOP political groups paid $15.1 million since 2015 to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and other businesses.

The second story is headlined “Wells Fargo is fined $1 billion.” Why? “Starting in 2016, Wells has admitted to a number of abusive practices that duped consumers out of millions of dollars.” Now with the tax cut, Wells will hardly feel the fine. The rising tide of profits in banking lifts all ships, pirate vessels as well as just regular destroyers.

Republicans are great at three or four things. Finding the ways for cutting taxes for the well off. Scrutinizing government budgets to find money that can be squeezed out from programs for the middle class and the poor. Inventing stories to justify pounding the poor while coddling the rich.

Einstein discovered that time and space, matter and energy, are not separate, screwing with our heads. Republicans postulate their own paradoxes. Up is down and less is more. Reduce taxes on the rich and you will end up with more tax revenues. Cut taxes on the well-off and the poor and the middle class will benefit.

The problem with Republican theories is that the equations don’t add up and the results never correspond to theory, unlike Einstein’s. Tax cuts bring higher budget deficits, not surges in tax revenues or jobs. Tax cuts targeted for the rich benefit them and don’t trickle down to the rest.

The difference is that Einstein wanted to understand the universe. This is called science. Republicans just want to conjure up theories to argue why rich people are entitled to get more money through tax cuts and poor kids are not entitled to health care to save their lives. This is called sophistry.

Marco Rubio systematically practices sophistry as he did on the benefits of the tax cut for Overtown. The whole Republican tax cut, in turn, is rationalized by a more general version of the Overtown argument.

It is all hogwash. The results are in. The big winners of the tax cut are the likes of Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, not the Overtowns all over the nation. The corporate criminals have won again, thanks to Trump, Rubio and the Republicans.