John Cassidy writes:

Ever since Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower ten years ago, he has portrayed himself as a gilded avenger of the toiling masses. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last July, Vance famously remarked, “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street—we’ll commit to the working man.” The results of November’s election showed that the G.O.P. was, indeed, making progress in working-class areas. But, after Friday’s signing ceremony, what is left of Trump’s and Vance’s pledges?

A study from the Yale’s Budget Lab provides an answer to this question. It found that the Senate bill—which was not far off from the final version of the legislation that passed—would decrease the financial resources of households in the bottom twenty per cent of the income distribution by about seven hundred dollars a year and increase the resources of households in the top 0.1 per cent by more than a hundred thousand dollars annually. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the bill is a reverse-Robin Hood mechanism.

An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent watchdog, provides another way to parse the gap between the Trump-Vance rhetoric and reality. It shows that the costliest element of the legislation by far—totalling $4.6 trillion over ten years—is the extension of the President’s first-term tax cuts that were enacted while Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House. Those measures slashed the corporate-tax rate, lopped nearly three points off the top income-tax rate, and bestowed big favors on businesses that “pass through” their incomes to their owners for tax-filing purposes, such as the Trump Organization. Paying for Trump’s latest tax cuts and his pet spending allotments—which include an additional hundred and fifty billion dollars for military projects and about seventy-five billion to beef up ICE operations, including building more immigrant-detention centers and hiring more ICE agents—adds another trillion dollars or so to the tab, taking it to roughly $5.5 trillion. [Continue reading…]