The Rube Goldberg Tax Plan

Hey, Republicans, here’s an idea: if you really want to raise wages for the middle class, why don’t you just raise wages for the middle class?

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan love to talk about how their new tax plan will help the middle class. Trump called it a “middle class miracle” and “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” when he rolled out the plan this week. And here’s Paul Ryan rocking that same message:

When you look at the transcript of what Ryan said, it’s kind of mind-boggling how on-message he is:

So, here’s what this is about: This is about delivering middle-class taxpayers tax relief. Ah, there are a lot of people in this country working paycheck to paycheck, a lot of people in this country, because of the slow-growth economy we had in the Obama, years never got a raise. Lotta economic anxiety. So this is really about that. This is about letting those hardworking taxpayers keep more of their money and giving them a tax break.

Like every time Ryan and Trump talk about policy, of course, this is a lie.Their plan raises taxes on the middle class and cuts taxes for the top one percent. Here’s a great simple explanation of how the middle class will wind up paying more, from Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum:

For example, for a single person making $50,000 under the current structure, your taxable income is $50,000 — $6,000 — $4,050 = $39,950. You pay 10 percent of that, or $3,995.

Under the Trump plan, your taxable income is $50,000 — $12,000 = $38,000. You pay 12 percent of that, or $4,560. In other words, more than you pay now.

So the tax plan is this: Trump and Ryan will raise taxes on the middle class in order to cut taxes for the top one percent. This is some serious reverse-Robin Hood bullshit.

But I’m not going to go too far into the nitty-gritty of their tax proposal here because a bunch of smart people are already doing that and, honestly, math isn’t my thing. What I want to talk about is the framing of this tax plan—the way that Trump and Ryan are selling it to the middle class.

Specifically, I can’t believe that Ryan is claiming this plan benefits people who are “working paycheck to paycheck,” and that those people deserve a “raise.” The fact that Republicans want to sell their tax cuts as a plan to raise wages for the middle class is frankly astonishing.

The aspect that Trump and Ryan can’t reasonably explain is why they think the only way they can raise wages is through cutting taxes for the wealthy. Everybody knows the old trickle-down idea—that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, they’ll shower jobs down on the masses like adoring gods—is baloney. (Look at Kansas and tell me how great tax cuts are for growth.) My question is this: Do they really expect us to believe this shit?

Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist who specialized in drawing cartoons of ridiculously elaborate devices to accomplish incredibly simple things. His device for getting rid of a mouse, for instance, involves a tiny painting of cheese, a rocket, an escalator, and a boxing glove. His fly swatter included a string of garlic, a fish, and a baseball bat. Maybe the most famous Rube Goldberg device is from the opening of the 1985 movie Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure:

I bring Rube Goldberg up because if we take Ryan and Trump’s claims at face value, this new tax plan is basically one of his machines. Taking money from the middle class and offering it up to the top one percent is the way to create jobs for the middle class? Removing money from the Americans who spend most of their paychecks in the local economy is the way to increase spending? There’s only one way to make sense of this plan, and it involves a boot on a stick, an angry crocodile, and a six-foot rubber band.

I’ve got a better idea: if you truly want to increase wages in the American middle class, why don’t you raise America’s wages?

The math here isn’t that hard. Taking money away from the vast majority of Americans and lifting it to the top one percent isn’t going to create growth—unless you mean the growth of offshore bank accounts and investments in corporations that hide their wealth from the IRS. In fact, if you want to spur growth, you need to make sure that more Americans have more money to spend, which will then create growth in the form of jobs and new businesses.

Of course, Republicans have opposed raising America’s wages for a very long time now. The Trump administration is actively trying to undo an Obama regulation that would raise the overtime threshold to a reasonable level—a policy which would immediately create jobs and raise wages for middle-class Americans. Obstinate Republicans like Ryan have kept the federal minimum wage at a ridiculously low $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009.

This is the third-longest America has gone without an increase in the minimum wage since a federal minimum wage was instituted in 1938. If this Congress doesn’t raise the minimum wage within the next year—a very likely possibility, given who’s in charge—we could well break the record for the longest period in American history without a federal minimum wage increase.

(Hell, Target’s even raising their own starting wage to $15—a sure sign that we’ve waited too long in this country to raise the wage. When a boss offers you a raise with little to no prompting, that’s usually a pretty good sign you’re undervaluing yourself.)

After nearly 40 years of endless repetition, I’m used to conservative politicians blathering on about trickle-down economics. But this phony concern for the wages of workers is so noxious it’s giving me indigestion just thinking about it.

If Paul Ryan and Donald Trump actually gave a damn about the wages of American workers, they could immediately increase wages for minimum-wage workers and pass sensible overtime rules for the middle class, thereby increasing growth. But they don’t raise those wages. They don’t want to raise those wages. And this attempt to sell their tax breaks as a convoluted scheme to raise wages by airlifting wealth from the bottom 99 percent to the top one percent is beyond insulting.