Where does New Hampshire get all of its not-so-great ideas?

Yahoo

15-04-2025

"With Republicans firmly established as the MAGA Party, I wonder where the highest marginal tax rate was set when that crowd last considered America to be 'Great.'' (Photo)
As Gov. Kelly Ayotte, President Donald Trump, and legislative and congressional Republicans continue to shape their marketing campaign for selling reductions in critical public services and programs as 'reasonable adjustments' to spending, it's important to keep up with your reading.
If you're a fan of dark comedy, you should check out an April 14 New York Times dispatch headlined 'Republicans Ponder the Unthinkable: Taxing the Rich.'
The premise of the necessarily short piece is that congressional Republicans are so shocked by the degree to which they've bamboozled the working class that they're 'quietly' — and antithetically — considering doing them a solid by increasing the tax rate on top individual earners (those above $609,351).
'For Republicans struggling with the roughly $4 trillion cost of continuing the 2017 cuts,' tax policy reporter Andrew Duehren writes, 'letting the top rate snap back to 39.6% (where it stood before Trump cut it to 37% during his first term) would be an easy way to reduce the cost of the bill.'
Rather quickly, the story crumbles under the weight of its unlikelihood, placing it in the same news category as one headlined, 'Powerball ticket buyer dreamily considers benefits of taking lump sum over annuity.' The lottery ticket won't hit and the GOP won't tax the wealthy, and so the pros-and-cons exercise is meaningless.
It shouldn't be meaningless, mind you, but it is. Even though the Tax Policy Institute calculates the return to 39.6% would save about $366 billion, the Times story notes, 'some Republicans quickly promised to try and kill any tax increases, and leadership was circumspect.'
With Republicans firmly established as the MAGA Party, I wonder where the highest marginal tax rate was set when that crowd last considered America to be 'Great.' Was it the 88% of the Greatest Generation years of 1942 and 1943, or the 94% of 1944 and 1945? Probably not. Could it be that when they say 'Great Again' they're actually referring to the years just before and during the Great Depression, when the rate was 25% (and a low of 24% in 1929, the year that brought us Black Thursday)? While I'm sure they love that rate, it's tough to put a positive spin on an era of global economic collapse, so no. But it's also clear as day they don't mean the mythologized golden years of 1951 to 1963, when the rate was steadily 91% (except for the two years, 1952 and 1953, when it was 92%).
'Great Again' has to refer to Trump's beloved 1980s — the Gordon Gekko 'Greed is Good' era. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the top rate was 70%, but by the time he left office after two terms, it was 28%.
How great has Reaganomics worked out for the American working class, you ask? Here's what a first-ripple 1992 study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, as reported by the Los Angeles Times on Aug. 28 of that year: ''In the vast majority of states, economic growth during the 1980s was not shared evenly among the rich, the poor, and the middle class,' the study concluded. 'Instead, the wealthy fared substantially better than other income groups.''
Nearly three decades after that study, a 2020 Pew Research Center report offered a longer view of the kind of economic growth that is 'not shared evenly among the rich, the poor, and the middle class': Since 1980, Pew researchers said, there has been an 'uninterrupted increase in inequality' in America.
And, this past October, the Congressional Budget Office reported that as of 2022, 'families in the top 10% of the distribution held 60% of all wealth, up from 56% in 1989.' Meanwhile, for the rest of the top half, that percentage fell from 37% to 34%, and the bottom 50% remained steady from 1989 to 2022 — at a shame-of-the-nation 6% (which, without factoring in future Social Security benefits, is actually 3%).
That's a lot of numbers, so here's the flashcard: The top 10% in America holds about two-thirds of all wealth and the bottom 50% holds just (and optimistically) one-twentieth. And, since the beginning of the GOP's beloved (and still unfolding) Reagan Revolution, the middle class share has been heading in the wrong direction.
If you listen to the Republican Party now — from Ayotte to Trump to legislative and congressional leaders — you won't hear about this nation's obscene acceleration of economic inequality since 1980. What you will hear, however, is an abundance of blame placed on those with the least — the undeserving Medicaid and SNAP recipients, the invading migrants, all of the people living with disabilities, various 'welfare' fraudsters — for allegedly hollowing out the middle class. That sure sounds like an unbelievable amount of macroeconomic influence for people holding 3 to 6% of national wealth, doesn't it?
Truly, statistically, commonsensically unbelievable.
Still, Republicans say they're slashing budgets not to punish the less fortunate, which is inarguably what they are doing in practice, but to eliminate 'waste, fraud, and abuse.' And they always say it in that singsongy order ('waste, fraud, and abuse') because it's meant to be an earworm marketing jingle rather than factual. You will also hear, from Ayotte, Trump, and Republican leadership, that any proposed Medicaid cuts will not affect 'vulnerable' people — and they always use the word 'vulnerable.' Why? Because since the November electoral victories they've been rewriting, all on their own, the definition of who is considered 'vulnerable' so they can more easily sell the punitive as a 'reasonable adjustment.'
I wonder: How many more decades of data do we need in order to see who has benefited — and who has not — from the Reagan-era policies exalted and expanded by the modern American right? And, when will it become clear to Granite State voters that New Hampshire Republicans are following — to the letter — a playbook that has resulted in historic levels of economic inequality and all its targeted suffering?
What I'm asking is, what will it take for the 90% who populate 'Other America' to realize they're getting played by the party of the 10%?