The media spoke negatively - almost to smear campaign levels - about the tax cut from the very beginning. Is it any wonder?
>and that has held steady in the year since its passage [1]
According to your source, support has increased. It’s still not popular among a majority, but post media smear campaign (mostly) support has gone up from 29% to 39%, and disapproval down from 56% to 46%. That’s pretty big.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/trumps-tax-cut-didnt-reduce-... [2] https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/10/investing/stock-buybacks-re... [3] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/effect-tcja-ind...
Yes, nearly every single media outlet spoke negatively about the tax cut while spending very little time speaking positively about it.
Take this example, one of many:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/30/the-r...
Entitled “The richest Americans get a $33,000 tax break under the GOP tax law. The poorest get $40.” What it fails to mention is the fact that the richest Americans are already paying the brunt of taxes, while the poorest are already barely paying any - as it should be. However, the headline paints a very biased picture.
See also the Wiki article on the Tax Act, which speaks to the media “assailing” the Tax Act, and provides examples. See this article
http://www.crfb.org/press-releases/house-passes-historic-deb...
Entitled “House Passes Historic Debt Increase”, while it may technically be correct, it’s also misleading and very biased. No mention of the near-$500-$1k a year tax break the average middle class American receives under the Act? Or the increased employment numbers?
Regarding complaints of adding to the deficit, note that aside from Fox, most media outlets - that had previously reamed W for his, rightfully so - payed little attention to the fact that Obama increased the deficit almost twice what Obama did.
It’s the picking and choosing that bothers me. Border walls and stricter immigration policy was endorsed by Dems until somewhat recently... until Trump endorsed them, now they’re the worst ideas ever. Budget deficits are fine when they’re the result of policies the Dems like... but now they’re horrendous.
I agree that the Tax Cut should have included bigger breaks for the lower income brackets, but they absolutely are still getting a break, and unemployment numbers are at record highs.
Obama didn't increase the deficit. Congress did, congress controls the budget, the buck stops with them. Obama had a friendly Congress for precisely two years and they basically did nothing worth remembering other than the Affordable Care Act which will be rolled back and push us back to the pre-existing conditions, even higher cost healthcare the at predated it, because Congress won't allow Medicare to use competitive drug pricing.
The reason the debt went up is because we were in a recession, fighting wars, and cut taxes. Of course the debt went up. You always need to spend governmental money to pull a country out of a recession, the government is the only one with enough money to do so. Same thing prior to capitalism. Cities that flourish have strong governmental spending. What we need to do is actually raise taxes and pay for what we've already spent. There's no amount of cutting taxes that will make us reduce the debt. I personally prefer the balanced-budget requirements, i.e. you can't spend money unless you say exactly where it's going to come from beforehand. I also wish that there were more studies spent on efficacy of money spent against the purpose and this was published regularly by the CBO.
As for the border wall, it's a terrible idea. No one is against border security, however border walls are a relatively terrible idea in most places due to costs, land rights, water rights, etc. It would be far more effective to spend money on more agents and automated drones to assist border control. Add to that we don't have a wall at the border with Canada so the idea of only protecting the Southern border comes across as silly since most people who are here illegally simply overstay their visas. If someone really wants to get into the US, it's trivially easy through numerous locations.