Writing at Fox Business, the director of tax policy at Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) on Monday declared the “Middle Class was anything but left behind by Trump tax reform,” giving Democrats all the more reason to continue attempting to distract the American public by hounding the Trump administration, particularly Attorney General William Barr.
Barr made the unforgiveable mistake of not providing a “smoking gun” with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference with the 2016 election. House Democrats, who had been promising for months that the key to impeachment was at hand are now wearing egg on their faces.
They’ve been telling people that the economy is not good for everyone and that the tax breaks passed during the last Congress only benefitted the wealthy.
But now comes ATR’s Alex Hendrie with a wet towel for whining Democrats. His message is blunt: “There is a clear disconnect between the rhetoric of the Democrats and the gains being felt in the Trump economy because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).”
That’s perhaps the second-to-last thing Democrats want voters to hear heading into 2020. The very last thing they may want to hear is that between now and November 2020, the president has a third vacancy to fill on the U.S. Supreme Court, with a pro-Second Amendment justice who might be a woman with impeccable credentials that cannot be smeared by the likes of Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein.
Hendrie’s essay also rained a little on Joe Biden’s campaign.
“Former Vice President and 2020 hopeful Joe Biden recently claimed only the wealthy received a tax cut from the GOP tax reform,” he wrote, “a claim that received ‘Four Pinocchios’ from the Washington Post fact checker.” (Four Pinocchios is tantamount to being called a world-class prevaricator.)
Worse still for Congressional Democrats, Hendrie offered some statistics to support his argument.
“Average hourly earnings have grown 3.2 percent over the past year and GDP grew by 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019,” Hendrie noted. “Unemployment has been at or below 4 percent for the past 14 months, and the economy has added an average of 218,000 jobs per month over the past year.
“And this positive economic news extends to key demographics: unemployment for adult women is at 3.1 percent, a 66-year low, unemployment for Hispanics is at 4.2 percent – the lowest rate since this data was first collected in 1973, and veteran unemployment is at just 2.3 percent – a 19 year low,” he added.
To keep America distracted, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have been raising a ruckus over Barr, even to the point of talking about arresting him. They held him in contempt for failure to comply with a subpoena for the unredacted Mueller report, which many experts argue would be a violation of federal law if Barr complied.
By no great surprise, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) reportedly is warm to the idea, as is Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
Since before Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Democrats—and particularly those on the far left—have been chanting “impeachment” like a papal doctrine. It’s either keep the public distracted or risk the possibility that average taxpayers will figure out that TCJA has been pretty good to them lately.
According to Hendrie’s analysis, “Now that tax season has concluded, the data show that the average refund was down just $55 from $2,780 to $2,725. In reality, taxpayers made this gap up each two-week paycheck, with the average taxpayer seeing an average of $50 more according to data released by H&R Block.”
That’s a different story than was being told by House Democrats who have claimed the “middle class” was left behind while the wealthy got wealthier.
The same Capitol Hill Democrats, and their state legislative tax-and-tax-some-more soulmates, are typically on the front edge of every gun control crusade that comes along.
Somewhere in all of this is a conclusion Democrats do not want the voting public to reach.
