On Monday, a well-known leftist writer lauded “progressives” for deceiving the American people in order to convince them that the tax cuts implemented by the Trump administration had in reality raised their taxes.
Matthew Yglesias, who co-founded the news website Vox, for which he writes and edits, previously worked at The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. On Monday, in response to the news that a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed only 17% of Americans believed that their 2018 taxes will be cut as a result of the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and that a huge majority of Americans don’t think they got a tax cut from the bill, Yglesias tweeted:
Nobody likes to give themselves credit for this kind of messaging success, but progressive groups did a really good job of convincing people that Trump raised their taxes when the facts say a clear majority got a tax cut.
CNBC reported, “Pew Research polling last month found that the tax cut remains underwater politically, with 36% of Americans expressing approval and 49% disapproval. In reality, 8 in 10 Americans stood to receive tax cuts in 2018 under the law, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.”
The Tax Foundation noted, “The new tax code lowered tax rates, doubled the standard deduction, doubled the child tax credit and expanded eligibility, and limited the alternative minimum tax. It also limited several deductions, such as for state and local taxes paid and mortgage interest … Approximately 80 percent of filers had their taxes cut by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, while only 5 percent saw their taxes increase.”
As The Washington Free Beacon pointed out, at the time the 2017 bill was passed, Democrats did their best to disparage it:
At the time, Democratic Party messaging insisted the bill was a catastrophe for the middle class. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) said “the middle class got the crumbs from the table.” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) claimed the proposal “socks it to the middle class.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said “[e]ighty-six million middle-class families will see a tax increase.” In February, Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) called the tax change “a middle-class tax hike.”
The White House reported last week that as a result of the 2017 bill, “For the first time in more than a decade, the economy reached 3 percent growth over the 4 quarters of 2018. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018 … In 2018, companies repatriated over half a trillion dollars held overseas.”
Oddly enough, just two days before Yglesias tweeted his glee at the success of “progressives” in bamboozling the American people, he admitted on Twitter that he himself had gotten a tax cut from the GOP’s bill, writing, “It happened to me: Got a tax cut on net thanks to Trump but for various reasons instead of a small refund I now owe the IRS $1,200 and I’m mad.”
Yglesias’ chortling over the success of the campaign by “progressives” was ripped on Twitter: