All for One and ...One for One
The Curious Case of the Puddling Wealth
…in which we shine our lighthouse beacons on a persistent lie, encounter a little French, enjoy a bite of a movie and finally shout-sing a Pink Floyd song that at least some of us will understand is satiric.
Here’s the lie we need to light up: “I promise, if you elect me I will lower everyone’s taxes and we will all be better off.”
That promise has been the cornerstone of Republican success at the ballot box for 45 years, since Ronald Reagan chopped income tax rates and (for a handful of years) chopped capital gains taxes.
That political strategy was and is a cynical lie, alas. Today, Republicans continue to lean on that lie and are trying to ignore $4 trillion in debt that will accrue to thee and me over the next 10 years as a result.
I will explain! First, let’s all clink our swords together over our heads and shout the motto of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Ready?
“All for one and one for all!”
That’s how we Americanos and Anglos learned it, thanks to French-English translations and Hollywood glitz.
In French as Dumas penned Les Trois Mosquetaires back in 1844, the motto was “Un pour tous, tous pour un” so what we English-language fans really should have learned is “One for all, all for one.” Same supportive meaning either way, and same lovely mirror structure, but with the sequence reversed.
I may have just given you the impression I understand French, but in truth I only know a couple of sentences in French, one of which is “Je ne parle pas français.”
Whether we parle a lot of français or not, Dumas’s sword-slinging heroes are teaching us that any one of us protects the interests of all of us, and all of us protect any one of us.
The GOP has spent 45 years warping America’s personal income tax structure with a different motto: “All for the one percent, and the one percent for …the one percent.”
(Sacre bleu! We encounter a paywall. Some Thoughtful Enough posts are free for everyone here on Substack, and others, like this one, are reserved initially for paid subscribers. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription? Or wait a month and this’ll convert to a free post. -JG)
From the beginning, many people saw the lie, the logical fallacy, in the GOP’s “elect me and I’ll lower your taxes and we will all be better off.” Its origins in the Reagan campaign involved a too-simple interpretation of a napkin with a doodled Laffer Curve. Blind faith reliance followed, despite catcalls of voodoo economics, and a hollow promise of trickle-down economics, and a successor’s solemn oath in the form of “read my lips.”
Somehow, slashing tax rates was supposed to lead to more, not less, federal income as the whole economy shrugged off a far-too-restrictive yoke and roared into a productive future. That was the promise. It never proved true.
Slashing taxes did the much more logical thing: It reduced the amount of money flowing into federal coffers.
Spending did not slacken, so deficits grew enormous and the national debt bloated continually. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, the national debt doubled — his eight years added as much of a debt burden as the preceding two centuries had accumulated.
When electing George W. Bush to the White House in 2000, and when electing Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 (the original and the sequel), the GOP went back to the same page in its tax hymnal and sang, “…I will lower everyone’s taxes and we will all be better off.”
The GOP’s cuts inevitably give most of the benefit to the wealthiest one percent among us. The “…and we will all be better off” is the lie, because it relies on voters believing en masse that we all benefit in a similar fashion. (If you are beginning to twitch with traumatic memories of high school language class, relax. That’s the last of the French for this post.)
Have we all benefited in similar fashion? Well, no. In reality, poor Americans get a mere nibble, and middle class Americans get a bite or an amuse-bouche (Zut alors! French again!) and the very rich get not just the rest of the roast, they get the rest of the restaurant.
Educated people understand the difference between first-order effects of an action and second- or third-order effects, what the British call “knock-on effects.” First-order effects are assured. Second-order effects are possible but might not come to pass. Third-order effects are iffy,
The first-order effect of chopping taxes on high incomes is that rich people become richer people. The second-order effect the GOP has been promising us is that the now-richer rich folks will use their extra money in ways that lift the rest of us. The third-order effect envisioned in the GOP promise is an economy suddenly so much more robust that, despite lower tax rates, the total income for the government would increase. Possible? Okay. Almost anything is possible. Plausible? Hmm. But we’ve tried it again and again. What the very wealthy actually do is: Keep the extra money.
As long ago as 1989, when George H.W. Bush took office, the absence of those knock-on effects was clear. Since then, continued use of the promise politically has been just a lie. And yet, decades later, Republicans continue to call themselves “…the party of fiscal responsibility.”
There’s a Federal Reserve chart showing how much wealth is held by segments of U.S. society from the poor half up to the very richest tenth of a percent. The current chart starts in 1989, as income inequality was accelerating after Reagan’s Laffer Curve leap.
I call your attention not to the raw numbers in the Federal Reserve chart, but to the changing ratios, the shifting proportions of wealth across the columns in the chart. Let’s simplify the math and suppose we have just 1,000 Americans and assume the poor half, 500 of us, have one dollar of net worth to split somehow, so we huddle together five of us to a penny.
In 1989, for every dollar held by the 500 poor Americans, the 400 people making up the middle class shared $10.26, a group of 90 rich people had $10.94 and the one ultrarich dude at the top had $2.46 all to himself.
In 2024, for every dollar held by the 500 poor, the 400 middle class have $12.10, the 90 rich folks have $14.54 and now the richest of our hypothetical 1,000 Americans has $5.52.
See the change? And inflation is not the reason; inflation affects the dollar over time, but not the ratios across columns in the same year.
Meanwhile, we’re not giving the government enough tax revenue to cover its expenses, so we all continue to borrow money to pump trillions into the investment accounts of our wealthy citizens. The current national debt is $106,000 per person. Back in 1989, even after two Reagan terms had doubled the national debt, the red ink was “only” $11,400 per American.
The Republicans’ continuing lie about cutting taxes on wealthy people’s high incomes and investment instruments is harmful. Trillions and trillions of dollars from our collective productivity are coagulating in the arteries of the fattest of the fat cats.
If tax breaks are too darn slow, the ultrarich now suggest vanity cryptocurrencies, the currency equivalent of crack cocaine or financial artery foie gras. (Merde! Maybe that was the last of the French today.)
Educated people have been aware of the lie for decades now. But educated people are not the thick part of the bell curve.
Our current president, who famously said in his 2016 campaign, “I love the poorly educated!” …seems to be a fan of Pink Floyd. He’s setting fire to the Department of Education. “We don’t need no education! Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”
When Pink Floyd put that lyric in the album The Wall just before Americans elected Reagan for the first time, there was satire at work. Not today in America. It’s government policy. Keep ‘em stooopid.
Let’s rethink this. Let’s favor the bottom 90 percent.
Shine your light on the lie, dear lighthouses. This post was a bit on the long side, I know. Thank you for reading. Okay, sing along…