President Donald Trump just loves to keep picking fights — you’d think that if he really wanted to win re-election in 2020, he’d at least make somewhat of a show of trying to build bridges. This week on CNN, New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo responded bluntly to Trump dragging him on Twitter, completely and utterly dismissing the president’s argument as illegitimate. Trump had claimed on Twitter that New York state authorities weren’t looking out for the financial well-being of their citizens to the point of having failed to fight a cap on federal tax deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) that Trump himself implemented, although they did exactly that.
Cuomo responded mockingly:
‘I also have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a little button nose… Again, the president is divorced from facts. You can run him the tape of the shows I’ve done.. talking about SALT, and for him to now say, well, New York should have fought harder to stop SALT — he was the one who proposed it! Why would you have assaulted the state of New York with a tax reform policy that raised our taxes?’
Watch:
In New York — as in two dozen other states across the country — the changes Trump enacted to federal SALT deductions meant that taxes effectively went up, since those states had higher local taxes in the first place. In other words, the remedy that Trump dreamed up for people supposedly suffering under a burden of high taxes was to increase the taxes. What could go wrong!
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the tax reform legislation he signed into law in late 2017, the president enacted a massive tax break for corporations, sending corporate taxes collected by the feds plummeting to a low not seen in decades. Picking up the slack was put on the backs of people in places like New York, which Trump is now blaming local authorities for. The move was another revival of the zombie of “trickle down economics,” with the Trump team repeatedly suggesting the tax cut would pay for itself in the form of economic growth. It has not exactly done so, although the economy at large has maintained a robust growth rate, hitting some 3.2% in the first quarter of 2019, which beat dismal expectations spurred by issues like the lengthy government shutdown Trump sparked. Still, the federal debt and deficit have only continued to climb.
Cuomo feels as though the whole situation has a straightforward explanation, telling the CNN host of Trump:
‘It’s all politics all the time with him. There is no policy. There is no good government.’
Trump believes that he can ride continued economic success to a victory in 2020, re-upping the line on Twitter recently that earned him laughs at the United Nations General Assembly that:
‘[M]ine is perhaps the most successful first 2 year presidency in history.’
Many Americans don’t seem to think so, to put it lightly. Majorities have been found to support moves like increased taxes on the wealthy, which Trump would be likely never support, so many Americans seem preparing to choose a dramatically different path in the 2020 elections.
Featured Image via screenshot
